When Wind and I first started doing research for Daughters of the Moon, Sisters of the Sun we asked a group of women we highly respected to be our advisors, and interviewed each one for the book. One of the first interviews I did was with Carol Gilligan. Her book, Meetings at the Crossroads , (meetings between women and girls at the crossroads of adolescence) had just come out and I wanted to know what she knew about working with girls. I remember sitting with Carol in my cabin in the forest, talking about our lives, our divorces, relationships. I discovered a woman much like myself, a mother (of three sons), an ordinary person who cared about people and life. It seemed important to re-interview Carol, and see what had changed in her thinking over the ten years since we'd done the interview. What surprised me most was how much listening to Carol reaffirmed my very reason for creating The Daughters Sisters Project in the first place - because girls and boys need safe spaces to express themselves fully and stay connected, not only for their own healthy development but for the sake of life on this planet.

Fall, 2004

Linda: What motivated you to get involved in Daughters Sisters Project?

Carol: After researching and writing about the strengths in girls, and the importance of girls and women joining together at the time of girls' adolescence to encourage them to develop these strengths further and prevent them from a lot of troubles, I wanted to see this kind of work done everywhere. Every place I went, whenever I created a resonance and amplified the voices of girls, it made a huge impact on women and men. I remember fathers coming up to me saying, I don't ever want her to lose her voice. That was a very encouraging response, but my question then was, how to prevent it from happening -- how to move from the fathers' heart felt response to social change. I really felt how alive, and powerful, transformational and healing this work was for adults as well as for children. When you asked me to become an advisor, I was very happy to do so. I think Daughters Sisters Project (and now the Teen Talking Circle Project) is doing very important work.

L: Since you first came to one of our Girls Groups, in 1995, how do you think things have changed for girls?

C: I think girls have gotten a long stronger. I think all our work has really had an affect. We now have a framework for what was happening to girls. We've been able to see it, map it, and name the problem --that if you lose voice, you lose relationship. We've witnessed, as I know you have in your circles, how encouraging girls to stay connected with their bodies, connected with their thoughts, with what they know in their hearts, what they know in their bones, has had a huge effect on making them, and girls as a group, a lot stronger and more resilient. I also think there's been a strong reaction, though, against the girls' work we've been doing, precisely because it has been so transformative.

One reaction has been, "What about boys?"   My response to that question is that the research and effective work we've done with girls, including the kinds of programs that Daughters Sisters has been doing, lays the groundwork for doing similar things with boys, as you're doing with BrothersSons, but I also think we need to begin much earlier, around 5 or 6, when boys begin to hide their emotions to fit into the world.

Also, I think the whole school of thought lately about mean girls and cliques is curious. There isn't an audience I speak with to whom this is news. I think promoting this idea is an attempt to undo the attention and focus on girls' strengths, which was really starting to transform everybody's lives; girls, boys, women, and men. Doing work with girls has contributed to a huge social movement, a major reformation of society. Whenever this happens, you get a backlash.

L: I've heard it said that the women's movement is dead.

C: I totally disagree. The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness. Think about the work force; it's completely different. Think about people's present lives; about marriage and families --huge social change has happened in a very short time, and this has affected people's lives in every way; politically, economically and personally. When this happens people get scared, so then there's a huge counter movement to stop it. In some sense the women's movement has been driven under ground. Many people feel uncomfortable today, standing up and saying, "I'm a feminist."   To me, that's really extraordinary. The word feminism has been linked with Nazism - I think that's bizarre. You have to think that if so much effort is directed towards stopping this, somebody's actively trying to discredit these movements, because they are in fact movements for very real change in people's lives, and change is very threatening.

In my latest book, I write about the women's movement, as a movement to realize the visions of a true democracy. Feminism is a movement to end the long-standing tensions, or antagonism, between democracy and patriarchy. Ultimately, I think the goal of feminism is to end patriarchy. We're talking about changing something that's been going on for thousands of years, so it's not going to happen easily or in one fell swoop. If the women's movement is dead, then there wouldn't be all this concern about women's votes, or stopping Take Our Daughters To Work Day, calling it unfair to boys. Whenever we start talking about doing something for girls, everyone starts worrying about boys, as if there is some kind of zero sum game going on, when we know that for years there was almost no funding going to girls programs.

L: What about a men's movement. Do you see one?

C: My husband, James Gilligan, is very much in the men's movement. This movement is about showing the cost to men of perpetuating a patriarchal message, and it is absolutely huge. When we talk about how many women are the victims of male violence, you have to look at the reality that there are even more men who are victims of male violence. When you start actually looking at this, you see it's in nobody's interest to continue patriarchal ways of thinking or behaving.

What I would like to see is something done around the age of 5. That's when boys who are emotionally open start to suppress their feelings, and begin to fail. It will take the involvement of parents as well as schools, but I think it can be done because that's the age where so many boys are having so much trouble, and are put on drugs. I don't have an easy answer; I'd have to spend the kind of time with boys that I have with girls, but to me it's a crucial piece of the work that needs to be done.

In Birth of Pleasure , I write about the fathers group that I studied. These were men I met when they brought their 4-year-old sons to school each morning. I asked them if they'd talk with me. We were only going to meet one time, but we ended up meeting for months, and it was one of the most moving experiences. When they talked about their sons it was so clear that these men's hearts were opening up something in themselves that they felt they had lost, and felt they had to lose, but it was what they valued most in their sons. They would talk about their spunk, their real joy, their being out there in emotionally present ways.

L: What advice do you have for new facilitators?

C: Listen and be present, and realize that this is something we all know inside how to do. And encourage young people to invite their judgmental, critical voice out - to let it speak and listen to it - to ask, "Whose voice is this? Do I agree with it?"   It's important to understand where these voices are coming from; and why girls, for example, are so obsessed with their body image, and young people with the internalized critical voice that says, "You're stupid or wrong, or crazy or bad," or the one that says "You don't know."

Facilitators need to remind young people that if they silence their voice, their   "relationships" are not really relationships in any deep sense of the word. Ask them to question if it's worth it to give up an inner I, for an outward I. Girls are under a lot of pressure still to do this. And the ones who resist it are often shamed and excluded in the same way that little boys are when they don't conform to the cultural codes of "manhood."

As facilitators we have to ask what's the pressure, analyze where is it coming from, and see that it is part of girls' initiation into patriarchal culture. These are powerful forces, and so doing it in group settings, as you have been, giving girls a place where they have a voice and have relationships, not having to chose between the two, is very healing.

L: What kind of work are you doing today?

C: I did my "Strengthening Healthy Resistance and Courage" work with 11-year girls and now I'm doing it with 3 rd year law students. They're in a stronger position within this society but still going through the same issues about body image, inclusion, voice, and relationship. What we're seeing in class is the same -- that as young women begin to find that they know what they know and say it, and be in relationship with other people, their eating disorders and panic attacks are stopping. I've been very struck at how so many major symptoms they're having are cured by this path. It's so powerful. So, it's interesting, we're really talking about the process of initiation into the patriarchal culture for girls, and how you can strength girls to resist that initiation.

L: How do you see that we can change things institutionally?

C: Slowly! I see it as part of a grass roots movement, going into all communities. I see it spreading through important projects like yours, which is so encouraging. It's in the projects that have sprung up and been successful, and then in turn shared their knowledge and what they discovered. I think that's how it's spreading and I think that's how it should spread.

I see this handbook as being very important. People working in isolation need something that helps them get started: a map, that helps them feel that they're not alone, and what they're doing makes sense. It's certainly my experience that I couldn't have done the work I did with girls, if I hadn't been doing the work in collaboration with a group of women.

When we did our two retreats with educators, the "Women Teaching Girls Project," and the "Exploring Gender and Knowledge Project," Judy Dorney used a process described in Maria Harris's book, Women and Teaching , which was very effective. Essentially it consists of five steps: Silence, Remembering, Mourning, Artistry, and Birthing. This was very helpful, because it gave us a path to follow. We talked about good and bad silence and we talked about remembering (the girls who were in the retreat were very helpful to the women in that way), and then we talked about mourning the losses that we experienced, so as not to repeat them or impose them on the next generation, and then about artistry, the creative act of inventing something new, and finally, we talked about giving birth, which is celebratory. This is essentially what this handbook is. You've set out a model, which people can modify to fit their own situations.

Carol Gilligan, author and teacher wrote the landmark book, In A Different Voice (1982), which is described by Harvard University Press as "the little book that started a revolution." Following In A Different Voice, she studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited 5 books with her students on women, girls and psychology. Time Magazine calls her one of the 25 most influential Americans. Following her research on girls' development, she studied boys and their parents in relationship.

She was a member of the Harvard faculty for over 30 years and in 1997 became Harvard's first professor of Gender Studies, occupying the Patricia Albjerg Graham chair. Carol has been an advisor to the Daughters Sisters Project since 1993.