I think there’s something to be said for the whole adaptability thing too.
Mrs. Powell, Educator
Girls in the 6th grade class at St. Bernadette Catholic School experienced challenges common to girls around the world, including adversities based on their gender identity and expression, race, social class, sexual orientation, and other areas of social identity. While girls are certainly impacted by these experiences, they are not defined by them. Girls navigate these forms of oppression and find pathways to wellness, strength, healing and resilience. In this chapter, we describe the development of the construct of resilience within the psychological literature and examine how it has been applied within school settings. We delineate some limitations of this construct, particularly the emphasis on individualism. As McRobbie (2020) describes, “Because they are so widely in circulation, we find ourselves taking up these vocabularies [of resilience] and using them, even as we doubt or refute them” (p. 63). We simultaneously recognize that girls often experience educational spaces as adverse and oppressive, and that girls can be resilient in the face of this. Toward that, we offer ways of conceptualizing resilience to focus on processes over outcomes dictated by dominant groups as indicating “success”.
What is Resilience?
Within the psychology literature, resilience is often described as “a process or phenomenon reflecting positive child adjustment despite conditions of risk” (Luthar, Lyman, and Crossman, 2014, p. 125). Early resilience work (Garmezy, 1974; Rutter, 1979) identified children who were adapting well despite having parents with severe forms of psychopathology. Werner’s work looking at a birth cohort in Kauai described protective factors that helped “at-risk” children achieve positive outcomes (Werner, 1989). During the 1980s and 1990s, these researchers helped to identify sources of resilience, including factors internal to the child and external factors in the family and community. In addition to broadening the scope of sources of resilience, researchers also recognized that resilience is dynamic in terms of changing over time and domain-specific. This means that children can seem “fine” in terms of their external behaviors but might still be struggling internally (Luthar et al., 2014).
Adversity and (positive) adaptation are the two constructs often identified to measure resilience. Rutter (1979) demonstrated that multiple layers of risk (community violence, parental psychopathology, poverty) contributed to significantly increased risk for negative outcomes versus experience of singular risk factors. Positive adaptation can look and be described differently according to the child’s developmental stage and the degree of risk, trauma, and adversity. Resilience to a major trauma can be defined as absence of psychopathology, and resilience within a toddler looks different (relationship with caregiver) than resilience within an adolescent (school and social competence). “If studies are truly to be informative to interventions, they must move beyond simply identifying variables linked with competence toward understanding the specific underlying mechanisms” (Luthar et al., 2014, p. 128). One struggle with how resilience research has been presented and understood has to do with confusion about constructs of resilience vs. ego resilience. The latter focuses on trait-based personality factors that do not take into account the systems, relationships, and processes that help to promote or prohibit resilience. While researchers have summarized the influential role that parents, peers, educators, mentors, and community (neighborhoods, churches) can play in promoting resilience or intensifying vulnerability (Luthar et al., 2014), there is little mention of the larger role that more distal systems (political systems, media messages, and stereotypes and biases related to social identities) play in risk and resilience.
Explicitly considering definitions of resilience from a variety of disciplines, Southwick et al. (2014) point out that while defining resilience—the ability to withstand, overcome, and become stronger after adversity—is important and useful, it does not accurately capture the complexity of resilience. The interactions among a variety of biopsychosocial factors (including culture and the environment) provide a much more thorough understanding of resilience. Yehuda defines resilience as continuing to move forward, in an integrated way, after experiencing trauma or adversity regardless of whether a mental health diagnosis is included (Southwick et al., 2014). Masten describes the evolution in her thinking of resilience as she has worked with families, communities, and colleagues from different disciplines. She supports a definition that depicts resilience in a more systemic fashion: “the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the viability, the function, or the development of that system” (Southwick et al., p. 4). Recently, Masten and Motti-Stefanidi (2020) wrote about the importance of understanding resilience as being integrated into the multisystemic spheres that make up children’s lives, including families, schools, and communities.
Programs to Promote Resilience
Similar to the way resilience was initially understood from an individual perspective, many efforts to promote resilience have also targeted individuals. A concrete example is the REAL Girls program developed by Mann (2015). “REAL Girls was designed to help struggling middle school girls develop resiliency—particularly academic self-efficacy, school connectedness, and identity—and achieve successful outcomes in school and life” (p. 117). Though the intentions of this work are clearly valuable and important, the program for developing resilience rests squarely on the shoulders of the girls; however, this neither brings awareness to, nor contributes to the dismantling of the barriers to resilience that currently (and historically) exist in the systems girls inhabit. Further, although programs like REAL Girls acknowledge the systems which contribute to girls’ stress, discrimination, and harassment, the attempts to promote resilience are exclusively located within individual girls. To be fair, the researcher who developed the program was drawing from and committed to work that promotes characteristics of resilience in girls; the work intentionally focused on internal characteristics of individuals. And the program does seem to offer a great deal of support, including mentoring, discussions of challenges girls face, coping strategies, and examples of adaptive coping and flourishing in the face of adversity. Effectiveness research indicates that the program is successful in promoting the positive outcomes it was designed to impact.
In contrast, based on the model of community resilience (resilience in the face of disaster-based trauma), the GIRRL Power program used Participatory Action Research to support adolescent girls in identifying risk-reduction strategies in their South African community. This community faced multiple levels of health and safety risks to which adolescent girls were found to be particularly vulnerable (Forbes-Genade and Van Niekerk, 2019). The phases of the program included training, reflection, and action for community stakeholders as well as the participants (the girls themselves). The action plan created by the girls involved a community awareness component in addition to community action activities, including collaboration with the public safety department and peer-led activities. It is important to note the role the girls played in the process--their collaboration with community leaders and the recognition of the girls’ voices were crucial elements to the success of this program.
Oppression as Adversity
Throughout this book, we examine particular ways misogyny, sexism, and intersecting forms of oppression (racism, classism, and homophobia in particular) function within schools to create adversities to which girls (and educators who work with girls) respond. We situate our work within the body of research seeking to understand girls’ and women’s experiences of misogyny and sexism. Lott (1995) defines sexism as “the oppression or inhibition of women through a vast network of everyday practices, attitudes, assumptions, behaviors and institutional rules” which can manifest through events on a continuum of severity, including interpersonal discrimination, harassment, and sexual violence (p. 113). Numerous scholars have categorized experiences of interpersonal sexism as often fitting into one of three categories: 1) expectations related to traditional gender role stereotypes, 2) sexual objectification, and 3) demeaning or derogatory comments and behaviors (Brinkman and Rickard, 2009; Kaiser and Miller, 2004; Swim et al., 2001).
Manne (2020) argues that sexism and misogyny are related constructs but offers important distinctions between them. She describes misogyny as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy, in which girls and women disproportionately face hostile treatment designed to enforce gender norms and expectations. Girls and women can experience misogyny even without an apparent perpetrator or when the actor thinks he or she does not hold sexist beliefs. Misogynistic hostility can include anything that serves to punish or deter girls and women from actual or perceived challenges to patriarchal expectations and norms (Manne, 2017). This hostility can manifest in the form of ridiculing, shaming, sexualizing or desexualizing girls and women, silencing, and many other types of dismissive behaviors—many of which we document throughout this book.
In our interviews with educators and youth, we asked about girls’ experiences of oppression related to their gender identity, social class, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Girls and educators described occurrences of interpersonal sexism, sexism embedded in school climates in the form of policies and procedures, and ways that sexism in the broader culture impacts girls’ experiences within schools. Our data reflect how girls experience oppression across what Collins (2002) describes as a matrix of domination. Four interrelated domains of power impact people’s lived experiences related to their social identities. These domains include the structural (institutional structures), disciplinary (organizational practices), hegemonic (cultural beliefs and stereotypes), and interpersonal.
Girls' Experiences of Sexism
Girls and young women are subjected to a number of different types of sexism, including blatant, covert, and subtle forms of sexism, which all have harmful impacts on their mental health (Benokraitis, 1997; Dovidio, Glick, and Budman, 2005; Leaper and Brown, 2008). Research suggests that a decrease in self-esteem among adolescent girls can be directly linked to experiences of sexism (Benokraitis, 1997; Kaiser and Miller, 2004). Young women are often treated like they have less worth than their male counterparts, and after some time they might begin to believe it. They also face many constraints and limitations which prevent them from developing a belief that they can exert control over their world. Both of these outcomes of sexism have direct effects on young w...
