Response: Just Girls

When I read the first chapter of Margaret Finder’s book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High, I couldn’t help but relate the reading to my own experience and make connections that I would have never made without this reading. What stood out to me most was the reading’s resonating theme: that who we are and who we turn out to be is a direct representation of the literary experiences we have in during our adolescent years. Margaret Finder states that “literacy was a means of self-representation...the girls used literacy to control, moderate, and measure their growth into adulthood” (23). This is to say that girls use literacy to help shape their identities and help fit the female role that has already been designed for them by our society.

One example that comes to mind is own action of keeping a diary from the age of about eleven years old. Somehow (and I attribute this the teenage programs I watched on television) I had developed the idea that all girls had a diary in which they wrote their most intimate secrets, poured out their frustrations and expressed their undying love for six grade boys. I went as far as begging my father to purchase a diary for me at a local store, and then proceeded to write in it every night before going to bed. This diary became clear method of helping me cope with the changes I was experiencing as I entered my adolescence years. This diary became a top-secret book that I would sleep with under my pillow in fear that my older brother would expose the issues I was experiencing to my parents. It also became the center of many of our fights as he who would do anything he could to get a hold my diary, read my private thoughts and then use the information to blackmail me. This great concern of keeping my diary hush-hush was quickly forgotten about the minute I went to school. It was then that the diary took a whole new position. I used the diary to attract the friendship of other girls who saw the act of keeping a diary as sense of freedom and maturity. And although my friends has little interest in writing in the classroom, this did not apply when it came to writing in my diary, to which they gladly contributed. Though I didn’t see it that way then, the diary became sort of like our own written conversation where we would respond to each others writing. I remember going as far as writing poems and drawing images that went with my poetry. In one particular time, my friend Lila and I began writing a story whose main character was based on our own lives. Being the owner of this book gave me a sense of power among my peers that I believed I used to develop the perception my friends had of me . This is something that Finders talks about when she states that “early adolescent girls turned to literacy as a tangible form of power” (24). But this was a very different perception from the one my parents had of me, who could not come to terms with the changes I was enduring as I entered my teenage years.