Virginia Beane Rutter - Celebrating Girls: Nurturing and Empowering Our Daughters

This book is a true celebration of the feminine spirit. Women will find in these inspired pages guidance to help their daughters and granddaughters develop a sense of deep pride in being female. The nurturing rituals of everyday life that Virginia Beane Rutter has suggested not only enrich the minds and the souls of girls in different stages of development, they also bring together the women engaged in these celebrations, strengthening their feminine values.

Isabel Allende

Copyright 1996 by Virginia Beane Rutter

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

For information, contact Conari Press, 2550 Ninth St.,

Suite 101, Berkeley, CA 94710.

Conari Press books are distributed by Publishers Group West

Charlotte Johnson Frisbie's A Study of the Navajo Girl's Puberty Ceremony from Kinaalda 1967, Wesleyan University Press by permission University Press of New England.

From The Dead and The Living by Sharon Olds. Copyright 1983 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Cover and interior design: Suzanne Albertson

Cover photo: Jennifer Braham, Berkeley, California

Author photo: Photography by Vera, Mill Valley, California

Special thanks to cover models: Cristine A. Tennant, Meagan Alderson, Anna Darby, Natalia Casella, and Alice Walton.

ISBN: 1-57432-053-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rutter, Virginia Beane.

Celebrating Girls : nurturing and empowering our daughters /Virginia Beane Rutter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and resource guide.

ISBN 1-57432-053-2

1. Girls. 2. Mothers and Daughters. 3. Self-esteem in children. 4. Femininity (Psychology) 5. Rites and ceremonies. I. Title

HQ777.R87 1996

96-7851

306.8743dc20

CIP

Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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for Melina Centomani Rutter

When my daughter makes bread, a cloud of flour

hangs in the air like pollen. She sifts and

sifts again, the salt and sugar

close as the grain of her skin. She heats the

water to body temperature

with the sausage lard, fragrant as her scalp

the day before hair-wash, and works them together on a

floured board. Her broad palms

bend the paste toward her and the heel of her hand

presses it away, until the dough

begins to snap, glossy and elastic as the

torso bending over it,

this ten-year-old girl, random specks of

yeast in her flesh beginning to heat,

her volume doubling every month now, but still

raw and hard. She slaps the dough and it

crackles under her palm, sleek and

ferocious and still leashed, like her body, no

breasts rising like bubbles of air toward the

surface of the loaf. She greases the pan, she is

shaped, glazed, and at any moment goes

into the oven, to turn to that porous

warm substance, and then under the

knife to be sliced for the having, the tasting, and the

giving of life.

Sharon Olds

Thank you, thank you to the mothers and daughters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, and big sisters, who offered their stories for celebrating girls all over the world: Alice Abarbanel, Jennifer Barker, Jessica Barker, Rebecca Barker, Jan Berry-Kadrie, Pam Bleier, Andrea Blum, Eda Cole, Meinrad Craighead, Dorothy Cribbs, Jennifer Cribbs, Justine Beane Cunningham, Jessica Curiale, JoAnne Dellaverson, Maureen Denicke, Jyoti Elias, Anjuli Elias, Sue Nathanson Elkind, Annie Hagbom, Eva Leveton, Anandi Matteson, Holly Powell, Jeannette Sears, Natalie Sears, Nancy Spring, Sarah Swanger, Dorothy Taber, Lynn Taber-Borcherdt, Frances Zavala Tobriner, Nancy Tracy, Sara Van Acker, Judith Ward, Linda Cutts Weintraub, Sarah Weintraub, Catherine White, Barbara Young, and all the other women and girls behind the scenes who have contributed to my knowledge of girls.

My agent, Barbara Moulton, deserves particular tribute for taking on this project as a labor of love and seeing it through to publication. Thanks also to Mary Jane Ryan of Conari Press who, with her vision and enthusiasm, suggested widening the scope of Celebrating Girls and energetically edited the manuscript.

My boundless gratitude to my mother, Justine Beane Cunningham, and friends Jan Berry-Kadrie and Lynn Taber-Borcherdtthe three graces who renewed my flagging spirit at key moments in the writing and offered editorial comments as needed. And to Isabel Allende who generously blessed the book with her fine endorsement.

Celebrating Girls could never have been written without my wonderful daughter, to whom it is dedicated. And, finally, my love to my son, Naftali, and to my husband, Peterthe men in my lifewhose solid support, as always, sustained me.

T HE WORD CELEBRATE comes from the ancient Greek word melpomeaning to sing, to dance, to praise! I offer this book in praise of girls, to help nurture and empower them. It addresses the question of what we can do to enhance our daughters' feminine self-worth.

Thanks to groundbreaking books such as In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan and Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, we are all aware of the severe pressures and dangers that diminish girls' self-esteem as they approach adolescence. Girls who are free-thinking and expressive, who speak their minds and their hearts, suddenly begin to lose their voices and become silent. They reject their individuality for a cultural norm about the way girls should look (thin) and behave (good). As Peggy Orenstein concluded in Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, girls still view their gender as a liability. By sixth grade, it is clear that both girls and boys have learned to equate maleness with opportunity and femininity with constraint. In short, girls begin early in life to stop believing in themselves.

As concerned mothers, we read all this depressing news and wonder if there is anything we can do about it. I believe the answer is a decided yes: Mothers and other adult women in girls' lives can raise girls with vital, intact feminine spirits through cherishing care and healthy challenges celebrated in meaningful ways. Anything that we do to enhance the self-esteem of a girl in our lives will have positive consequences toward increasing the self-esteem of other girls and women. As Gloria Steinem once said, Women's history is about human beings, women and men, and for all days. But even one month of looking at the world as if women mattered can change the rest of your life.

Affirming femininity can be done as a natural extension of the normal things we do every day with and for our daughters. Nurturing and empowering our daughters begins with celebrating their female bodies from birth. The earliest intimaciesbathing, hairwashing, and haircombingare opportunities to give a young girl the valued sense of herself that she needs to counteract the negative messages she will receive her whole life about being female. These elements from everyday life that are part of most girls' initiation ceremonies in other cultures have disappeared from ours. Our task is to invest our daughters' everyday care with purpose, intention, and awareness of their feminine value, and then to create celebrations to mark the passages in their lives. Broadly speaking, I use the word