Standing up to bullies

Here’s a story from childhood that I want to release, along with my list of “faults” or “my sins against God and man.” This is about some bullying I experienced, which research tells us lasting impacts on our life. (The “girl bullying” kind is subtle but very real.)

Writing is one way to let this go. It makes the experience into a story, something that happened to someone else. I can empathize with the teen in the story but not see her as me. For that matter, I can see all of the people in the narrative as characters, each playing their part in something much larger than ourselves, a sociological drama not of our making. I can give the story a beginning, middle and end. I can see how I’ve carried it into adult life, and how it has affected me more than I realized by shaping my responses to other group experiences. Solidifying them into the same story. Until I named the story and transformed the lessons learned.

***

I was thirteen years old, in seventh grade. In middle school, kids from around my mostly white, working-class New England town met up for the first time. Our neighborhoods demarcated subtle class and race/ethnic classifications, from “the projects” to more settled lower-middle-class single-family-home neighborhoods. We were 12 or 13 years old. What did we really know then of the way class, gender, gender and power work in the world? But we began living it, as we jockeyed for our positions within the social ecology of the school.

I fell in with a group of friends that included four girls from my neighborhood and a few from across town. Most of us were from large Catholic families like my own, but either Irish or Italian. (It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized most of the nation is NOT Irish or Italian, nor Roman Catholic. I learned that my experiences were not “normal” by reading reactions when I told people I had seven siblings.)

There were three girls in our group that didn’t quite fit this locally-normative family constellation. These seemed exotic to me. One was an only child! Of “English” heritage! Another was Jewish! A third, whom I’ll call Jade, was from what I now understand was an Armenian background, though the family had dropped the “ian” in their name. (I’ll save more reflections on ways I learned about race/ethnicity for another essay.)

We were friends because we were in the “honors” classes. I’m not sure how this sorting was done. Something happened behind the scenes: the start of a whole series of sorting mechanisms in life. We mostly took up the identities that were handed to us. And we did some sorting among ourselves. We knew who were the jocks, the burnouts, the nerds.*

One day in between classes I went to my locker to retrieve the books I needed for the next class. Fumbling with the combination, I tugged open the lock, opened the door, and watched a folded wad of paper float through the air and settle to the floor. Picking it up and unfolding its creased edges I found a crude drawing of a girl, labeled with circles and arrows: “greasy hair,” “pimples,” and “nerdy clothes.” The drawing was labeled “Margie.” It was signed: “Your friends.” I stared at the pages, sucking wind.

My memory of that year is fuzzy, but I recorded some of it in my diary, which assures me that I’m not making it up. It seems that Jade was the ringleader, turning the others against me. Jade lived in my neighborhood and we had known each other since kindergarten.

April 24, 1973

How can people be so cruel? Like Jade. She’s been teasing and insulting me left and right. She probably doesn’t realize how much it hurts. In the classes we’re in together, every time I make a comment she sneers or something. She giggles, talks about how ugly I am, draws ugly pictures of me, and says she can’t capture the ugliness. She says she doesn’t know how I could be so ugly when my sister is so pretty. And the other girls go along with her. Michelle told me she doesn’t like the way Jade acts, but when she’s with her, she acts the same way. Quietly, to the side, she tells me that she’s kidding, but she doesn’t know how much it hurts.

For the rest of that school year, I feared opening my locker, not knowing what I would find. I shoved new notes and drawings into my pocket, then ripped them into tiny pieces after school. In the corner of my eye I sometimes saw Jade watching from around the corner, laughing at my fallen face. In the cafeteria she would sit with my former friends, their huddled backs and hushed giggles announcing my exclusion.

It was the group exclusion that hurt the most. That’s how exclusion works: one person plays the strong leader part, and others fall in line. They don’t dare to counter the leader’s power. (Sound familiar on the contemporary political scene?)

My diary backs this up:

Diary: May 14, 1973

Now all the kids at school hate me. Well, it’s mostly Jade, but now the other kids are going along with her.

That same year, I took the “home economics” courses that were required of all girls the time. I learned to make chocolate chip cookies and other “good housekeeping” basics. We sewed aprons! I guess these were presumed to be fundamental attire for our future lives. In these classes students from the “honors” track mixed with the kids I knew as the “tough” girls from the other side of town. (Sewing was one place where our gendered identities overruled any distinctions in intelligence - or social class - we might try to claim.)

The “tough” girls – who I also saw as “cool,” and popular - would stand at the doorway of the sewing room, sticking out their legs to trip me as I walked in. They would huddle in the corner and plot new ways to torture me without being seen by the teacher. One day I walked in, sat down at a sewing machine to stitch my apron, and recoiled in surprise and pain. There were sewing pins tucked around the edges of the bolts that held the chair together, their sharp tips pointed into the air.

I can understand now that this was a form of gendered class warfare, a raging against the unfairness in the trajectories of life we were just beginning to forge. But I didn’t have a sociological analysis then. I felt like I was being singled out for special punishment. I also felt like I deserved it. I agreed with their assessment of me: I was nerdy, and ugly, and not cool at all. I internalized my peers’ assessment of me like a badge of shame.

Diary: April 16, 1972

I’m homely, have pimples and braces and also I’m smart, I can’t help it.

I went home crying every day. That’s when I wrote that list of “faults.” It included admonitions to myself:

“Never let your hair get greasy, so Jade and them kids will have no grounds to tease you about that.”

“Wear nice clothes, keep good care of your skin and wear nice clothes for the same reason.”

There were attempts to cheer myself up:

“Don’t let their insults bother you. Smile, laugh and forget ‘em.”

“You know that you’re not as ugly as certain people say you are – be sure of yourself and don’t let their insults bother you.”

I exhorted myself to take a Christian turn-the-other-cheek approach:

“Don’t hate the kids that hate you!”

“Carry my own crosses; keep them to myself.”

I counseled myself not to “talk too much,” express raw feelings, or “make a scene.”

And then there was this one: “Smile at everybody - be happy but subdued.”

Yikes! I am only now realizing how much that advice to myself has driven my life. Telling myself to be happy - or at least to act happy….but subdued! (And I wonder: how many women live their lives this way?)

The next year things just changed and I never understood why. Suddenly I was included again in group activities. Jade and I always kept some distance, but for the next four years, our group had regular sleepovers and all-night girl talk sessions. We talked about all kinds of things, but not what had happened the year before. I honestly don’t know what happened to make that change. I never really processed it. I think that’s why I’m writing now; the confusion of that time still haunts me.

And it has reverberated across my life.

It’s left me a little distrustful of groups – especially groups of women. I’ve participated in women’s groups that are declared to be “safe spaces” where you are encouraged to just “show up” and “come as you are.” But I’m not sure. What if I talk too much? What if I’m not “happy but subdued?” Could the group turn on me?

For sure, I’ve been part of many communities, both formal and informal: of activists, artists, and academics. I’ve worked on many teams. I have plenty of friends, including some that have really stood the test of time: my “Girls Night Out” group of college women friends has been meeting monthly for the last forty years!

But I’ve also had experiences that reverberated with middle school, and I’ve witnessed many more. These were always groups of women. One took up a dominant voice and planted little seeds of poison that served to marginalize another group member. That person was excluded, and the others went along. It was always a bit covert. The one playing the dominant role felt justified in their stance. The “victim” might particpate in their own exclusion, because it was easier than facing more overt exclusion.

Research on “girl bullying” backs this up. Rachel Simmons, in Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls notes that in their longing to belong, girls often find a scapegoat to exclude. Sometimes this is subtle; sometimes it is more overt. Usually one person leads the charge, but others align themselves with the leader or pretend not to notice. They’re too scared to speak up, perhaps because they see what happens if you do; YOU run the risk of being the one to be marginalized. (Note: Simmons’ updated edition of this 2011 book takes on bullying in the age of social media, where all of this takes on new dimensions.)

The importance of speaking up

But my diary doesn’t just record my pain. It reminds me of the importance of those who stand up to bullies.

On one spring day in seventh grade I reported that “one of the eighth graders stood up for me.” Peggy O’Rourke (not her real name**) had told the other kids to lay off. It clearly meant a lot to me, and perhaps that was what prompted the shift to my re-inclusion.

When I read that passage in 2019, I looked “Peggy” (Patty) up on Facebook and thanked her for that act of courage.

Peggy told me that her mother had died just a few weeks before. She read my message on Mother’s Day. She took it as a gift from her mother.

This is the power that acts of standing in solidarity with others can have. Speaking up to bullies. Not just going along with the crowd. Changing the course of events.

Lessons for the current political scene? I’ll let you draw your own.

As for me, I’m ready to release this story. Not to let it define my life any longer. Never again to participate in my own exclusion (as I have done in at least two later-life experiences, I’m sure). To follow the best of my own advice (remember my true friends, smile and forget the others, believe in myself).

But also to learn: to be the Peggy O’Rourke who speaks up when it matters, who doesn’t go along with the crowd.

*See Penelope Eckert’s fascinating ethnography about social categories and identities in high school, Jocks and Burnouts. There’s a huge literature in educational anthropology that shows schools’ complicity in these social sorting processes, including Paul Willis’ classic Learning to Labor: How Working-class Kids get Working Class Jobs, Jean Anyon’s work on hidden curricula in school work, Barrie Thorne’s theorizing of the social construction of gender in elementary school classrooms and playgrounds; CJ Pascoe’s work on masculinity and sexuality; research by Gilbert Conchas, Laura Chávez Moreno, Doug Foley, Laurie Olsen, and Angela Valenzuela showing sorting by immigration status, race and language, Amanda Lewis’ research on the makings of race on the elementary schoolyard, Signithia Fordham’s explorations of dilemmas of race and success for Black high school students; Stacey Lee and Vivian Louie’s research with Asian American “model minority” students. Apologies to the many researchers I’ve missed.

**I shared this piece with “Peggy” who told me I really could just use her name. As an ethnographer, I’ve been trained not to use identifying markers for anyone I write about. But here’s a huge shout out to the real Peggy: Patty Corcoran.