Book Review

Reviewed by Susan Frissell

Mack, Maureen D., Ph.D. Finding Center: Strategies to Build Strong Girls and Women. New Horizon Press, 2007. 222 pages.

With a focus on young women's issues, Mack's book Finding Center gives particular attention to adolescent girls and how they might "build and maintain strong core values." The author is a professor of Women's Studies and teacher of education at the University of Wisconsin, with many years of experience teaching the topic.

Based on research with teachers and students, Finding Center takes a look at the decline of self-confidence and health ratings in high school girls. One in seven girls registered low self-confidence, contrasted to rising self-confidence in boys of the same age group.

Mack aims to help adolescent girls and their mothers together to build positive "I can do it" attitudes, while putting a stop to the "I need a man" attitude.

Finding Center covers such subjects as the effects of the mother/daughter relationship; i.e., female role models and perception of mother as a positive role model. Mack also looks at the effects of alcohol use on the family, sexuality, various types of schooling models and teens who get off track and distracted from their original goals.

At the end of each chapter, Mack includes lists of what make for a self-actualized girl/woman. "When mothers are the lead teachers," one is headed, this is what it should look like and she lists several examples. Providing real-life scenarios of self-actualized behaviors through the telling of actual stories, Mack makes her point that girls growing up today can learn to overcome what current researchers have heard from girls and young women during personal interviews: The four main struggles are the silencing of girls and women, schooling, sexual harassment and violence, and believing in themselves.

Mack relates the story of author May Sarton and her lifelong search for herself. It is for May and all females who still search for themselves that Mack has compiled all this research into a very useful book. Finding Center can be utilized as a class text, as a group read and discussion format and/or for mothers hoping to raise self-actualized daughters in today's conflicted world.

A tireless researcher, Mack has written a thorough study of young women and their struggles to find themselves in a world that is often less than cooperative or even helpful or encouraging. Her style of writing is engaging and will hold the reader's interest. Finding Center is full of useful information for educators, counselors and the like.