Developing a Young Women's Self-Image and Self-Esteem
As Latin American women, we are heirs of a culture of silence....
What hurts is the discovery of the measure of our silence. How deep it runs.
How many of us are indeed caught, unreconciled between two languages,
two political poles, and suffer the insecurities of that straddling.”
Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-Carmona
I am visible -- see this Indian face -- yet I am invisible.
I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot.
But I exist, we exist.
They'd like to think I have melted in the pot.
But I haven't. We haven't.
I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul,
I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo.
I change myself, I change the world.
Gloria Anzaldua
“In spite of the changes in women’s roles in society, in spite of the changes in their own mothers’ lives, many of today’s girls fall into traditional patterns of low self-image, self-doubt, and self-censorship of their creative and intellectual potential.” (Orenstein, xvi) A national survey on gender and self-esteem in adolescents conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which polled 3,000 boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends, (xv) showed that, although both boys and girls “experience confusion and a faltering sense of self at adolescence, girls’ self-regard drops further than boys’ and never catches up.” (xvi) For a young girl, the passage into adolescence “is marked by a loss of confidence in herself and her abilities,” as well as a “scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy.” ...
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...ch at a time,” (274) so that everyone is heard and included.
Works Cited
Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. Edited by Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-Carmona. New York : Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.
Gorski, Dr. Paul. “Multicultural Pavilion: Quotations and Proverbs” Multicultural Pavilion: Resources and Dialogues for Educators, Students, & Activists. Curry School of Education, University of Virginia. 25 June 2000.
Orenstein, Peggy. SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, in association with the American Association of University Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.
“School Practices to Promote the Achievement of Hispanic Students.” ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education Digest. Number 153, March 2000. ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education. 18 June 2000. http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/digests/dig153.html.
This book is trying to show the struggle that many young girls experience and the reasons to why the adolescence years to prove to be such a period of, underachievement, anger, and pain in the lives of girls who can be bright and talented girls. A few of Mary Piphers points that she stresses throughout the book are, girls today are much more distressed, anxious, and uncomfortable than before. The society in which they are coming of age is more dangerous, sexualized, and media saturated, the culture is indeed a girl poisoning one.
It is a tragic truth: About 10,000 lives are lost in the United States because of drunk driving each year. Alcohol is wildly known as one of the main reasons of causing social security issue. Small amount can make people feel relaxed, but bigger amount could make them loss their coordination, get feeling of confusion and disorientation, and significantly slowed their reaction time. On average, one person dies every hour because of alcoholic traffic accident in United State. Therefore, the NTSB put out a recommendation last May that the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) level for drivers should be lowered from the current level of .08% to .05%. But for several reasons, we shouldn’t lower the criterion on blood alcohol content.
As you can see, drunk driving can cause many tragedies on a family or just the nation in general. Many people think that if we lower the Body Alcohol Content than there wouldn’t be as many people getting injured or killed a year. The question “Should tougher DUI laws be enacted?” is yet to be answered, but maybe in there next few years we will get an
The book I chose for this assignment is Reviving Ophelia. This was a very interesting book. Mary Pipher, PhD. discusses the roles that society plays in shaping the self esteem of teenage and preteen age girls. The author contends that our society today is very look-obsessed and media driven. Through magazines, television, fashion, and retail the "idea" girl is formed and anyone who doesn't fit this idea is not perfect in the culture that girls live in today. Weight issues have caused conditions of anorexia and bulimia putting young girls in jeopardy of declining health. Dr. Pipher chronicles the life of adolescent girls from their carefree days of being energetic, assertive, and tomboyish to their losing themselves at the onset of puberty. Most girls lose their previous selves to fit into a norm of society, being more passive, depressed, and self-critical. The main point of this book is to help uncover the true self of adolescent girls and to give them techniques to help them combat the views of society. This quote from the book summarizes all that the author was addressing when writing this book. "Most girls choose to be socially accepted and split into two selves, one that is authentic and one that is culturally scripted. In public they become who they are suppose to be."
Peggy Orenstein successfully investigates deeper into girls' self-esteem issues and their academic significance. The AAUW survey identifies the self-esteem issue facing adolescent girls and its' affects as a whole, however, Orenstein targets the problem beginning at adolescence and brings to light a "hidden curriculum" of schools that only facilitates these issues. She is providing a much needed path of action that enables educators to make changes in their classroom or school to help address these issues of self-esteem. Teachers may not be able to control the world their students face when they leave the room, but they can provide a positive internal environment; one in which boys and girls are valued and encouraged equally.
In today’s world a DUIs can be classified as being under the influence on many different substances. The main and most deadly substance is actually the most legal. With more and more people dying every day this nation needs to open its eyes on the dangers of drunken driving and begin taking major steps to help prevent this awful trend come to a stop. Drunk driving is when a person consumes alcohol and tries to operate their vehicle while ossified. Today the legal limit is 0.08, but many people believed that it should be lowered or unacceptable to consume any alcohol while operating motor vehicles. Studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that 40% of traffic deaths in United States were a result of DUIs. Many suggestions were made to avoid the change of the legal BAC level such as decreasing the amount of underage drinkers, writing more laws to keep heavy drinkers off the road, or adding...
Media can influence people’s behaviors, thoughts, and development of self-criticism towards themselves and others. Thus, media’s depiction of female heroines affects girls’ self-esteem from ages five to thirteen. The terms: Associative Self-Esteem, Mirror Stage, Aural Self-Esteem, and Body Dissatisfaction, are key elements that built a girl’s self-esteem and are found to be affected by the influence that heroines have on girls. Superheroines’ femininity has been created with false stereotypes that defines their behavior and constructs a specific body image; thus, these stereotypes drive girls to self-judge their own persona according to heroines that are portrayed in media. Elizabeth Marhsall and Özlem Sensoy, authors of "The
Adolescents is a time of significant life transitions in which young adults learn to cope with changes that are brought about by physical and emotional maturation (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). During this time girls begin to become more aware of themselves as females, and learn to identify society’s signals to conform appropriately for their gender (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). The highschool girls that are present in this writers program are starting to unders...
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. "The Myth of the Latina Woman." Bullock, Richard, Maureen Daly Goggin and Francine Weinburg. The Norton Field Guide to Writing. Ed. Marilyn Moller. 3rd. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013. 806-812. Print.
... of the pain and suffering for fashion purposes. It is unethical to have an animal born into a world of fear; they deserve to live free as they are supposed to. Humanistic theory states that every person has good in them; supporting fur farms by wearing real animal fur helps go against this theory. However, if people would stop wearing fur, it would help animals from having an insensible death. “In 1987, 4.12 million minks were slaughtered on fur farms but, in 1999, about half the amount of minks were killed for their skins which is a tremendous change” (OCPA). As seen by these statistics, the fur industry is already beginning to decline in their usage of animal skin. This is a good way to go and people need to let the fur industry officially shut down for good. It will save millions of animals’ lives every year and will also help restore the goodness in humankind.
The world population is living, working, and vacationing along the coasts. They are contributing to an unprecedented tide of plastic waste. Pollution is defined as the process that alters a substance or molecule on planet earth, the pollution is caused by the physical contact of an organic decaying particle with a clean particle in the same spot, at the time the two particles join together is when occurs pollution in which the environment is greatly altered. Too many, plastic is a modern day miracle, versatile, inexpensive and durable (Rochman 2014). To others, it is a scourge, a non-degradable pollutant that threatens to choke the global environment. Plastic pollution has led to the deaths of many animals, natural resources, and people (Rochman 2014). It is time to change America’s thinking and to learn from past mistakes.
Adolescence is a time in a person’s development when many changes are occurring. Transitions in an adolescent’s development that take place include physical maturation, shifting educational environments, an increased association with peers, and developed cognitive abilities (Barber & Chadwick, 1992). Barber and Chadwick (1992) report that these developments allow the adolescent to consider their value and position in society. They further report that an adolescent’s self-esteem “can be a useful marker of the success with which he or she is proceeding through this important period” (Barber & Chadwick, 1992, p.128).
A female’s self esteem peeks at the age of nine.(McGraw) At that age girls tend to have not a care in the world and live an easy life. However that is also about the same time that females start to become more influenced by media and their peers. The young girls get sucked into the need of looking like a cover girl model rather than a human being. In society today being “pretty” is classified by wearing twenty pounds of makeup, having a flat stomach, a thigh gap, and many other ludicrous things that make people look like Barbie dolls. At this point many girls’ self esteems begin to plunder.
Adolescents is a time of significant life transitions in which young adults learn to cope with changes that are brought about by physical and emotional maturation (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). During this time girls begin to become more aware of themselves as females, and learn to identify society’s signals to conform appropriately to their gender (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). The high school girls that are present in this writers program are starting to understand that they can use their bodies to get attention from boys therefore making them value their individual beauty. Some girls have identified that the “boys” that they like do not value them for their brains, but for their beauty and therefore this is where high school becomes a popularity contest, and academically their grades begin to suffer.
There are several factors that research really has not gone much into, although mentioned in a few articles, that influence the development of an adolescent’s self-esteem. Research has confirmed that socioeconomic status of an adolescent, indeed, has a large role in the impact on their self-esteem. But what other factors can effect the development of one’s self-esteem during adolescence? Research has found factors to include: gender, race and ethnicity, social class of one’s family, educational status/achievement, parenting style and involvement, and age. The correlation of these factors and self-esteem of adolescents is what makes researchers interested to find answers in their relationships.