Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes | 
| Authors: Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $5.75
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 23232
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0312370059
Dewey Decimal Number: 305
EAN: 9780312370053
ASIN: 0312370059
Publication Date: May 15, 2007
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Product Description
Winner of the Books for a Better Life Award Every parent who cares about empowering her daughter should own a copy."
- Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls “...a must-read for parents and teachers who want to steer girls away from marketing schemes that distort female power and authority and toward true self-acceptance and authentic empowerment.”
-- Polly Young Eisendrath, author of Women and Desire and The Resilient Spirit The image of girls and girlhood that is being packaged and sold to your daughter isn’t pretty in pink. It is stereotypical, demeaning, limiting, and alarming. Girls are besieged by images in the media that encourage accessorizing over academics; sex appeal over sports; fashion over friendship.
Packaging Girlhood exposes these stereotypes and gives you guidance on how to talk with your daughters about these negative images and provides you with tools and information on how to help your girls make more positive choices. “A tour de force of excellent scholarship put in a very readable context and chockfull of practical suggestions for parents for change!”
-- William S. Pollack, Ph.D., author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood
“Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown have that rare gift of translating cutting-edge research and analysis into strategies and information that every parent (and every girl) can use in daily life.”
-- Joe Kelly, president of Dads and Daughters (DADs)
“With compassion, insight, and humor [Lamb and Brown] unravel and demystify the messages girls confront throughout their development, and they offer adults useful tools to help girls resist their powerful pull.”
-- Lynn M. Phillips, Ph.D., Department of Communications, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown's sharp analysis and patiently pragmatic advice is just what we need to sustain our daughter's quests for healthy identities.”
-Michael Kimmel, author Manhood in America, Professor, SUNY Stony Brook Sharon Lamb, author of The Secret Lives of Girls, is professor of Psychology at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. Her research on girls’ and teens’ development is widely cited. Additionally, she listens to their struggles and strengths in her private practice.
Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of Education at Colby College in Maine, is the author of three books on girls’ development, including Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (with Carol Gilligan). She creates programs for girls at her nonprofit Hardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hghw.org).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 A MUST READ!!! September 30, 2008
Great book! As a Life Coach for women/girls of all ages in recovery from an Eating Disorder or suffereing with body images issues, I highly reccommend this book to parents and kids to read together!! I do coach hover the phone as well! www.innerserenitylifecoaching.com
 Sloppy writing, poorly organized, lacking insight September 17, 2008
With a daughter who's all pink all the time, I picked this book up eagerly, expecting quality research, tight arguments and sound recommendations. Instead this book reads as if it was written in a terrible rush, after shallow research. Full of pointless non-rhetorical questions and excessive exclamation points, it skims the surface of girl-culture without asking any deep questions -- shopping is bad, books are bad, videos are bad, choices for girls clothes are bad. Many of the arguments suffer from the "two kinds of people" weakness. There are pink girly girls and tomboys. The former are bad because they limit girlhood, the later are bad because they criticize feminine traits. There aren't enough female villains (I agree). Female villains are either ugly or over sexualized (well that about covers it). Movies where the main character is a girl with a close girl friend reinforce the idea that boys and girls live in different worlds. Movies where the main character is a girl with a male best friend encourage the idea that girls are catty and not to be trusted. Points are repeated, statements aren't backed up. The basic recommendation that you should watch what your kids are watching and teach them to criticize it is a good one, but there is no effective method for doing this -- instead the authors list the same "parent nagging" questions over and over "Why is the boy driving instead of the girl?" "Why do you think they put (insert girl star here) on the box?". I need a guide to help me sort out how to help my little princess to her fullest potential, but this isn't the book.
 Could've been a great book, but where was the editor? July 21, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am in the midst of studying pop culture for girls and reading a slew of books about girls, as my daughter will be heading to middle school in a year and I want to understand what her world is really like. As I've been raising her, I've also been a girl scout leader, school volunteer, children's religion teacher, etc. Over my daughter's first ten years of girlhood, I have been exasperated and angry at the endless images by media and pop culture and marketers that constantly tell girls that they are only acceptable, respectable, interesting, valued and admired if they are thin, they buy every slutty fashion trend, and they are able to attract the sexual desire of boys and men. I think girls are made into sex objects in our culture now more than ever.
The authors of this book jumped around a lot, contradicted themselves frequently, and made many factual errors in their presentation. I think it could have been a great book, but it fell short for these reasons. The book had enough errors to make me skeptical when I read information about books and pop culture and products with which I was not previously familiar.
For example, they slam American Girl. This company makes dolls and book characters that have real girl bodies, are not sexualized, overcome challenges, think for themselves, learn, grow, and are believable as strong, complex, smart, capable individuals. Yet the authors of this book whine about the fact that the company is also selling dolls and books to girls. Hello? Of course they sell stuff - that's why they are profitable. Have they read an American Girl series or two? Well I have read them all with my daughter over the past several years and my only disappointment has been that I did not have these books when I was a girl. Because of these historical novels that have young girls as central character, my daughter and her ten year old friends know more about American history than I knew when I graduated high school!
First the authors of Packaging Girlhood tell us that in the American Girl Molly series, Molly's mother is dead. Then they talk about the mother not being central in Molly's life until the end of the story, as a peacemaker. Excuse me, I thought you said she was dead? Had they actually read the Molly series, they would have known that during WWII, Molly's mother went to work full time in a Rosie the Riveter- type job to support the family and Molly was expected to be more independent. The authors complain about the AG characters being pretty. Girls do not identify with Molly because she is pretty (which she isn't especially) but because she is resourceful and brave and a good friend and smart. What is the problem?
One of the authors' complaints is that Samantha Parkington's (1904) female role model is a young woman idealized for being pretty, not for being accomplished. In fact, the young woman role model character was a suffragist, working toward winning the right of women to vote, and she had a positive and supportive influence on Samantha. The authors go on and on about the messages in the American Girl books are unercut because the girls are pretty. So what? Samantha stands up to a boy bully, teaches an immigrant to read and she speaks out about the realities of child labor in the factories. The authors of Packaging Girlhood are annoyed that she may have been pretty? I guess they forgot to read this series, also.
By the way, Addy claimed her freedom through the help of the Underground Railroad, not the "Freedom Trail."
Another quick example is that the authors refer to Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie as seventies shows and then draw conclusions. Sorry, but these shows were popular in the sixties, before the womens liberation movement of the late sixties and into the seventies. The world and the lives of American women changed drastically between the early sixties and the seventies, so this was not a small error. They complain that Samantha Stevens wanted to keep her husband happy and wasn't a powerful character. Yikes, have they ever seen the show? The men are portrayed as buffoons and Samanatha makes her own choices and is the most powerful and intelligent character in the story line. I guess the authors are just annoyed that Samantha Stevens, a woman in the early sixties, chose to be a housewife.
I think the authors also missed the point of the movie, Mean Girls. Or, perhaps they skipped that and then wrote criticism of it like they did with the American Girl series of books.
This book needed a lot more work before it went to press. Because of that, the other research and conclusions were not entirely credible. With more effort in doing the research before casting judgments, this book would have been more beneficial. I have found Queen Bees & Wannabees and Odd Girl Out to be more credible and enlightening, though this book made some very interesting points about the barrage of harmful marketing schemes aimed at girls.
rescue your daughter April 2, 2008
This book was a revelation for me. I appreciate all the effort and research the authors did to help parents sort out the motives of modern marketers and the media when it comes to girls. I am definitely more aware of the destructive messages that are bombarding today's girls and teens. Why do toddler jeans come with little purses? Why do so many products for teens pit one type of girl against another? Why are girls either labeled one of the boys or for the boys? Why do they have to label a section of clothes in the girls department "active"? And why do they then put fake teams (e.g. jumping bunny cheer squad) on these "active" shirts? These are all questions I never asked before reading this book.
I also appreciate their guidance on how to talk to daughters about difficult subjects in a non-confrontational way. I plan on using their advice to navigate the world for girls while my daughter is still very young. And I hope my daughter develops the same analytical skills as she grows up.
Some extremely old fashioned women who need a better hobby.... March 2, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
The topic of this book is, without a doubt, an excellent one, but unfortunately the content failed to prove anything other than the fact that the authors aren't in touch with modern girls. It seems as though they want the world to be the way it used to be back in the 50's when they grew up. What they did not consider it that it is 2008, NOT 1958. Also, when writing a book, they should've considered conducting significant research to back up their theories rather than assume that, for example, the clothing industry is corrupt because they went into one or two stores that were selling shirts that said "Princess" on them.
To give you some examples of the absurdity this book contains, I can tell you that the authors have basically said that girls should not wear pink, should not play hand held Nintendo systems because they are named Game"boys", and should not watch Shrek because the female Fiona character was not given a spot on the M&M bags or given a gummy character in the fruit snacks that were sold to help promote the movie. Get real.
If you are going to read a book on raising children or the real problems that the youth of America face, I'd suggest ANYTHING over this one.
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