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Event
Rachel Simmons, "Odd Girl Out:The Hidden Aggression in Girls"
Mills-Peninsula Health Services and Bay Area Parent Magazine present a fundraising event organized by S.P.O.R.T. to benefit the San Mateo/Foster City Middle School After School Sports Program.
A lecture and book signing by Rachel Simmons, author of The New York Times bestseller "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls".
Simmons grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC and is a graduate of Vassar College, where
she double majored in Women's Studies and Political Science. Following graduation she worked for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as an Urban Fellow. Recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship in 1997, she worked for New York's Senior Senator Charles E. Schumer as deputy finance director for his US Senate campaign in 1998, and after the election attended Oxford University, where she began studying female aggression.
Although Simmons is certainly not the first to write about schoolgirl cruelty, she treats the subject in a thorough and illuminating manner. Over the course of a year, she spoke to 300 girls from 10 schools across the U.S., some with middle-class white student populations, others with students of various races and from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The girls ranged in age from 9 to 15. One of the reasons her book is so revealing is because of Simmons' strengths as an interviewer. As she explains, her method of discussion involved moving from where the girls led and emphasizing their voices rather than her own. Instead of telling them not to bully and to be nice, like most adults would do, she assumed that many of them could be mean. In this way she was able to draw out not only the victims of bullying but also the aggressors.
Simmons contends that incidents of bullying could be avoided if girls were encouraged to acknowledge their aggression. She believes this would empower them to negotiate conflicts and to define relationships in "new and healthier ways." Parents, she says, should show their daughters that conflict-free relationships don't exist. Instead of thinking conflict ends relationships, girls would then learn that they can't survive without it and would not let fear control them. "I believe our task now," writes Simmons in her book, "is to give every girl, every parent, and every teacher a shared, public language to address girls' conflicts and relationships."
Odd Girl Out is both an expose and instruction manual for treating girls' aggression. As such, it treats its subject with both clinical objectivity and experiential empathy. Simmons relies heavily on her interviews with girls and other research, but she intersperses enough of her own personal anecdotes to make the book striking for both its intellectual and emotional accuracy.
Through countless interviews, Simmons constructs a sometimes-disheartening narrative of contemporary female relationships in America. On one hand, Simmons says, the influence of feminism has raised the blo
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LocationBayside Performing Arts Center
2025 Kehoe Avenue
San Mateo, CA 94402
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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