Just Girls

I’ve been reading the book “Just Girls”, and honestly, I have no idea how I really feel about it.

It starts out with young girls who are in 6th and 7th grade who are in two completely different social groups. One group, the “social queens”, are considered to be popular, group oriented, and are showing that they don’t really have a mind of their own. While on the other side of the spectrum, there are the “tough cookies”, the one’s who are preseved as unpopular, smart, responsible, and have varied opinions about subjects on their own. Regardless of the fact that these two groups are extremely different, they both share one thing in common; they want to be successful in their own means.

With the social queens, they were all centered around all things, well, social. It was constantly talking about who has the best outfit, which teen magazines you read, who you passed notes to in class, and who you liked and didn’t like in school. They also had a seeming lack of care for schooling, in which it was considered “uncool” to actually do your school work and be considered smart.

On the other hand, the tough cookies were all centered around school, reading classic novels, family, and responsibility. They had no real care for what people thought of them, and their interests revolved around their future that they had goals for. They did talk about friends, but it was said that some of them had lost touch with friends because being in different classrooms had seperated them. For this, friends weren’t as big of a priority for these girls.

In this book, I think it made me understand a bit about things that went on in my own life during middle school years, and made me understand why I pull from both the tough cookies and social queens in my own accord. I mean, regardless of what people might say about what they want to be in life, I feel like everyone wants to be liked, and yet, successfull. I believe that is true for many of us, because like the social queens and tough cookies, we too are “just girls.”