Sexism & Sensibility

Sexism & Sensibility

Introduction

The moment seemed innocuous enough at the time. I was eight or nine, baking brownies alongside my mother. The envelope was lying next to the double boiler, addressed to her in perfect, flowing cursive handwriting. I picked it up, smearing it with chocolate, and asked the obvious question: Why did it say “Mrs. [My Father’s First and Last Name]”? I knew enough to know Mrs. meant it was for my mother. But why was she referred to by my dad’s name and not her own? I wasn’t a precocious feminist pointing fingers, but my sense of justice had been violated. My mother told me matter-of-factly, even proudly, this was simply how it was done once a woman gets married. It seemed clear and uncomplicated to her. But I couldn’t let it go: Why was my amazing mother, gourmet chef extraordinaire, and a woman raising four small children while completing college, content to be tucked away behind her husband’s name? As the only girl in a family of four kids, I needed to know. When I pressed, though, her words, tone, and body language made it clear this was something I wasn’t supposed to ask.

This wasn’t the only time I encountered something that seemed unfair, yet the grown-ups around me avoided discussing it, leaving me bewildered. In my synagogue, the seats for boys and men flowed down the center, while those for girls and women were situated on the sides, making clear our place in a man’s world was on the periphery. The rabbi and other important people onstage were all men. In the texts, “he” and “man” stood for both sexes, and stories of women were largely absent. If I raised the issue, I was told things were done this way because of tradition, which I now understand to be code for “stop questioning.”

The same ethos pervaded my education: My brilliant high school English teacher, a Black woman, put thick red slashes through the “her” portion of “his/her” that I’d used in an essay. She explained, “To avoid confusion, use ‘his’ instead of ‘his/her,’ ” and then added, notably, “It’s not sexism, it’s accepted practice.”

Tradition. Accepted practice. To avoid confusion. But nothing was more confusing to me than having authority figures, especially those authority figures, tell me in ways large and small it was okay to erase girls from the conversation. It would take a long time to understand that “sexism” and “accepted practice” are categories that can and do routinely overlap and that a person’s discomfort with that overlap is often dismissed as oversensitivity.

Sex and gender would be part of my studies at Harvard and Northwestern as I trained for a PhD in clinical psychology and launched a career rooted in an understanding of how gender bias, social justice, and mental health intersect. But my own therapy is where I came to understand how those early experiences of having my innate sense of justice invalidated had affected me. Growing up, I’d often felt that if I peeked my head out, someone would whack it down. At some point I’d picked up the mallet and begun doing it to myself. I kept the most genuine parts of myself underground because a lifetime of training told me it wasn’t only unsafe to emerge but unfair. Unfair because I’d be claiming space not meant for me and because the women before me hadn’t had that opportunity.

I would come to feel a mix of betrayal and wistfulness about those early experiences. I met peers with similar experiences, and together we wondered: Why hadn’t the grown-up women in our lives shared our curiosity and anger? Or at least acknowledged we had a right to feel those things? It took until graduate school for someone to name my experience, and I felt the storm clouds part. In a paper for my developmental psychology class, I mentioned how I was often accused in my family of being too sensitive and dramatic, rather than being acknowledged, as I see it now, as highly attuned to my environment. The professor scribbled in the margin, “That’s what people say to talk girls out of their feelings!” When your feelings are denied or disbelieved, especially as a child, it’s an existential threat. My anger sharpened but eventually dissipated as I realized many women of that era had even fewer resources than I did to help them identify sexism. And don’t all parents comfort children by telling them not to worry about things that scare them? For some situations, it’s a reasonable strategy: that shot will only pinch; Grandma died, but I’m not going anywhere. But for others—and maybe especially big systemic problems like sexism and racism—it can be patronizing, and even destructive. Today, as a seasoned psychologist and a parent of both a son and a daughter, I have a lot more empathy for those grown-ups who swept gender issues under the rug.

As parents we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to nurturing and shaping our children’s innate sense of justice while still preparing them to live in the world as it truly exists. We’re faced with a hundred little choices about what to share, what to explain, what to ignore in the name of expediency every day. Even if my mother had felt indignant about the erasure of her name on that envelope, she still had to make a choice about whether and how to share that with a little girl. Would affirming things were unfair upset me? Would it make me less prepared to function well in a world that expected girls and women to accept such things without question and punished them for stepping out of line? Which battles are worth fighting, and when do we instead quietly encourage our children to be flexible, respect tradition and accepted practice, and avoid confusion?

All parents make these calls, but mothers of daughters have an extra task as we untangle our own early experiences from the situations our girls now face. We must sort out our perceptions and memories so as not to pass on the disbelief, denial, or accusations of hysteria we encountered. We tread a difficult line between preparing our daughters for the world and instilling fear. We don’t want to unfairly color the way they see the world, but not knowing what to expect could be worse. It’s vital they trust their instincts, whether that curdled feeling in their stomach comes from a teacher’s snide comment in class or from being approached by a carful of teenage boys. They need to know what to do when they feel their hearts racing but their feet are glued to the pavement. It’s our job to teach them to navigate bodily autonomy in a world where their bodies often don’t feel like their own and aren’t safe, to stand their ground when they need to, and to move on with grace and without guilt when they can’t. My greatest wish for my daughter is that she knows what it feels like to trust herself, and to make sure she doesn’t feel “less than” even if she’s sometimes treated that way. I want that for all of our daughters.

As a psychologist, I advocate for the kind of personal responsibility that comes from understanding feelings and how those feelings affect behavior. But I also see patients who feel responsible for things outside their control: girls whose anxiety, depression, or daily struggles are caused or exacerbated not by what they do but by the way they’re treated because they’re girls. I hope this book will help you help your daughter distinguish between what is and what isn’t within a girl’s control, what is and what isn’t her responsibility, and what is and what isn’t her fault—and what she can do when she faces sexist experiences that leave her feeling diminished.

Even the youngest children have a fundamental sense of fairness: research studying babies as young as twelve months old has found infants notice when resources are distributed unequally. By the time girls are forming a sense of self in the world, they can tell the playing field isn’t level, but that’s rarely made explicit for them. Worse, the world around them actively encourages them to dull their own “fairness detectors,” as so many adults do for the same reason one might unplug a carbon monoxide alarm that keeps chirping after the authorities have issued assurances the air is safe to breathe. Time and again girls in my psychology practice tell me their attempts to report gender-based harassment are met by well-meaning adults who minimize the incident, admonish them, or invoke platitudes such as “He probably has a crush on you.” This persistent dismissal by adults of situations that appear unjust to girls seems like a tacit endorsement of bad behavior, leaving them feeling abandoned, mistaken, or crazy. Girls need to hear what they’re feeling is real and that they don’t have to silently suffer through it.