Reviving Ophelia

Mary Pipher was born in 1947. She spent her youth in the 1960s and lived through times of massive societal change and upheaval. Pipher obtained a degree in clinical psychology and went on to spend the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s working with adolescent girls and their families in a therapy setting in Nebraska, United States. She also specialized in trauma and “the effects of culture on mental health” (362). Pipher continues writing and conducting focus groups to assess the current mindset of adolescent girls. Pipher worked with girls from every walk of life and possible circumstance and did her best to provide them with a source of empathy and the guidance they needed to overcome the obstacles they faced in their adolescence. In the 1990s, Pipher was alarmed at the rates of divorce, delinquency, teenage rebellion, and sexual violence. It inspired her to write Reviving Ophelia to shed light on the problems teenage girls were facing at the time and to help those who could not access therapy or other support.

Pipher’s combination of knowledge of adolescence, culture, and trauma served as the baseline for the book, and her experiences directly worked to demonstrate the arguments she was making against Western culture’s treatment and attitude toward girls. She is well-known for this approach to treatment and has earned the title of “cultural therapist” among her peers (362).

Pipher utilizes experiences from her own youth growing up in the 1960s to compare with girls’ experiences in the 1990s and 2010s. She shares several anecdotes, including some about her relationship with her mother, her father, and what attitudes toward sex were like at the time. She insists that, while girls did struggle in many ways in her generation, such as by a lack of gender equality, their world was a much safer place. Pipher cites the increase in sexual violence and hard drug use that permeated the 1990s and the pornography consumption and loneliness of the 2000s and beyond. Pipher’s 30 years working in therapy provide her with endless snapshots to compare against her own experiences and to compare between the 1990s and 2000s. She also talks about her experiences as a parent raising her daughter, Sara. Pipher explains that she and Sara were both members of “brink generations” (15), with Mary being born just after World War II and Sara being born just after the Vietnam War. Pipher theorizes that being born on the brink of a new era poses unique challenges for girls.