When Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice in 1982, she created what might be called the Woman-as-Victim Industry. Arguing that the moral reasoning of men and women differs dramatically--that men operate according to "an ethics of justice" and women operate according to "an ethics of care"--Gilligan suggested that women's morality was at once more nurturing and more self-limiting. Because women's nurturing morality typically privileges a concern for others and a desire not to cause pain, women often avoid conflict, suppress emotions, and silence themselves. Although Gilligan's findings were based on research that she refused to publish and that others have not been able to replicate, the book nonetheless became a major cultural force. Over the last twenty years, it has galvanized campus feminism (think: women's studies programs, campus women's centers, sexual harassment policies, speech codes), it has inspired scads of pop psychology books about the pain of being a woman in a patriarchal culture (think: The Beauty Myth and Reviving Ophelia), it has inspired studies (think: the AAUW's 1991 report "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America"), it has garnered massive financial support (think: Jane Fonda's $12.5 million gift to Harvard for the founding of a center on gender inequity in education), it has justified law (think: the 1994 Gender Equity Act in Education), it has led to "backlash" (think: the hostile reception of Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys), and it has also led to lots of subsequent work by Gilligan on the agonies of female adolescence and the educational disadvantages of girls (newsflash: Gilligan's latest, The Birth of Pleasure, is coming soon to a bookstore near you). Not enough money can be thrown at the idea that girls are traumatized by adolescence; nor can the damage this traumatic time does to women's self-esteem be emphasized enough.

Maybe that's why The New York Times is running a promotional puff piece on Gilligan right now. In recent weeks, several books and articles have appeared that suggest there is more to the problem of girls' self-esteem than meets the feminist eye. Phyllis Chesler's Woman's Inhumanity to Woman documents the nastiness that frequently permeates women's relationships with other women, Margaret Talbot's February 24 NYT piece "Girls Just Want To Be Mean" discusses in lengthy detail new research into the cruelty of girls, who it turns out are just as aggressive as boys are, but far more subtle and far more malicious. Where boys throw punches, girls gossip, backstab, exclude, and betray. On the pop psychology front, the workings of girl-on-girl aggression are described in Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, Rachel Simmons' Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and Emily White's Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut. Taken together, these accounts don't report anything new; instead, they simply speak up about something many, many women know from personal experience to be all too true. But in doing so, they are also, implicitly and inevitably, speaking out against the prevailing concept of adolescent girls as wounded, weakened beings, a concept we owe ultimately to Gilligan.

And so The New York Times, ever a staunch fan of Gilligan's work, runs a little reminder that the truth about girls still lies with Gilligan. Girls may have closed the "gender gap" in education, and schools all across the country may be setting up programs to manage the damage girls do to one another (Talbot's article gives a good summary of these efforts), but we should always remember and never forget the crippling reality of female adolescence. When asked what she made of the phenomenon of the Alpha Girl, the mean queen bee who determines, often arbitrarily, always brutally, other girls' status, Gilligan replied that this is "the opposite of assertiveness .... this is a girl who has lost her voice. What you realize when you read about this is that it's all about some external standard. There's no voice coming from within." The Times article ends on that note, as if Gilligan's easy dismissal of the new work on female aggression made perfect sense, as if there were no problem with redescribing girl bullies as girl victims, as if a theoretical absence of self-esteem excuses real misbehavior. Gilligan, it is clear, is the last, best word on girls, no matter what.

But why? What I can't understand is why so many people can't seem to see that the narrative of girls' poor self-esteem is just that: a narrative. Gilligan never gave us stats to back up her original claims, and there are plenty of stats today to show that if anybody is in trouble in the self-esteem department, it's boys. But still we cling to the concept of the fragile, downtrodden girl, despite the ample evidence of our own lives that it is puberty, not patriarchy, that makes the teenage years so hard, and that girls do unto girls at least as much harm as boys, if not more. It's hard to see why the concept would be so desirable to so many women, and why more women would not leap at the opportunity provided by Christina Hoff Sommers and others to reject the idea that they are singularly unequipped to cope with life or succeed in the world. Unless such women are somehow flattered by the image of themselves as inadequate; unless they find in their victimhood an opportunity not to become fully accountable adults. Some women will pay a lot for the privileges of scientifically-certified oppression--just look at Jane Fonda.