Book Review: Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit
Posted in Academic Pursuits on 05/17/2010 12:25 am by Ronnica
You may have noticed that quite a few quotes from Wendy Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good have shown up in my Sunday quote lists. That’s the thing about a good non-fiction book…there are so many quotable things.
I read Shalit’s book at the recommendation of my SIL. Shalit’s first book A Return to Modesty was the subject of a lot of controversy (who knew modesty was a controversial subject?), and this 2007 book contains a lot of the same themes.
Actually, not having read her first book, I’m not sure what the difference between the two books is. Girls Gone Mild is primarily about the immodesty found in and supported by our culture. She makes a decent argument for modesty (something that I support) from a secular viewpoint. Basically, she debunks the idea that taking off your clothes is the ultimate show of confidence. No arguments here.
But I’m not sure she goes about it in the best way. She spends what I believe to be too much time merely detailing all the examples of outrageous immodesty, like ridiculously explicit sexual advice to tweens and teenagers.
Most of her research took place in 2006, a year after I graduated from college. While I have seen and am not surprised by a lot of her examples, some that she purports are representative of college culture in America sound nothing like what I saw on my college campus only a year earlier. Sure hooking up was big at OU, but co-ed bathrooms and roommates were strictly forbidden and for the most part followed (I lived in the dorms all 4 years). I think making a huge deal out of minor examples actually weakens her case.
While I would have enjoyed Girls Gone Mild more if she focused more on her thesis and didn’t spend so much time in the evidence, I really enjoyed the interviews she did with the women and girls who have become public figures primarily because of their support of modesty.
The paperback version of this book goes by the name The Good Girl Revolution (which I do think might be a better title). I’d recommend checking out Wendy Shalit’s writings. If you’ve read anything by her before, what did you think?
