Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814751075 ISBN 13: 9780814751077

Publisher: NYU Press, 1996

Synopsis

Sociologists have tried to analyze adolescents as long as the discipline has existed. However, most studies have focused on suburban youth, ignoring a large segment of the population, the urban adolescent.

Urban Girls tries to reverse this trend. The researchers included in this ambitious project realize there is more to adolescence than the suburban experience. The city has unique effects on the people who live there, and they on it. Drawing on experts from across the country, Urban Girls investigates what it is like to be young in an American city. This book also explores the minority experience in America. It is wonderful to see studies of Black and Latina youth that do not automatically label them as future convicts, drug dealers, or with other negative stereotypes.
--The American Reporter

Traditional psychology textbooks have ignored the normative development of urban girls and the unique situations they face on a daily basis. Lumped together with their suburban, mostly white and middle class counterparts, their voices are frequently subsumed within the larger study of adolescent development. Urban Girls is the first book to directly focus on the development of urban poor and working class adolescent girls.

Including both quantitative and qualitative essays, and including contributions from psychologists, sociologists, and public health scholars, this volume explores the lives of a diverse group of girls from varying ethnic and class backgrounds. Topics covered include the identity development of Caribbean-American girls, the role of truth telling in the psychological development of African-American girls, relationships between mothers and daughters of different races and ethnicities, friendships, sexuality, health risks, career development, and other subjects of importance to human development. Filling a gap in the literature of human development, Urban Girls is sure to be of use to psychologists, sociologists, and social workers.

About this title

Review:

"Patricia McDaniel provides an insightful look at the historical construction of shyness in Western society. This book is an important contribution to the literature on the sociology of emotions and the sociology of gender."
-"Contemporary Sociology",

"Patricia A. McDaniel brings shyness out of the closet in this carefully-researched and well-written social history. In documenting how shyness served social functions in the past, she explains why it has been transformed into a personal failing today. As Americans have become increasingly outgoing, gregarious and assertive, and as friendliness has become increasingly marketable, shyness has become a disease--one the pharmaceutical companies and clinicians are eager to treat with best-selling drugs like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts is the first book to examine shyness in all its historical and sociological complexity. Highly recommended."
-Scott Coltrane, University of California, Riverside

"This book's significance lies in its treatment of an emotional state and in its use of documents that have heretofore received little attention from historians."
-"The Jourrnal of American History ",

"In this thoroughy researched study, McDaniel pretty much provides anything any academic might ever want to kow about shyness in society."
-"Library Journal ",

About the Author:

Bonnie J. Leadbeater is Professor of Psychology at the University of Victoria and co-author, with Niobe Way, of Urban Girls and of Growing up Fast. She is also co-editor of Investing in Children, Youth, Families and Communities: Strengths-Based Research and Policy, Resilience in Children, Families, and Communities: Linking Context to Intervention and Policy, and Ethical Issues in Community-Based Research with Children and Youth.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0814751075
• ISBN 13: 9780814751077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 398
• Editor: Leadbeater Bonnie J., Way Niobe