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To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. Jane Austen (1775-1817) - in her novel Northanger Abbey

Keira Knightley on playing Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice : “The reason her character has lasted as one of the favorite female roles in English literature is that any woman who reads the book sees herself as Elizabeth Bennet. I was terrified of taking the role... Every woman wants to be her, because she’s intelligent, she’s got great wit, she’s extremely passionate.” [quote from Jane Austen Society of North America jasna.org]

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Pretending to be less capable, less intelligent is a ploy that has probably been used by many gifted women. When she began directing in the forties, Ida Lupino [left] sometimes claimed not to know the best way to line up a shot [etc], explaining "Men hate bossy women. Sometimes I pretend to know less than I do." ... A specialist in psychological issues facing gifted people, Dr. Linda Silverman notes in one of her books ("Counseling the Gifted and Talented"): "Because of their enhanced ability to perceive social cues and their early conditioning about the critical importance of social acceptance, gifted girls are much more adept than gifted boys at imitation. "They fit in by pretending to be less capable than they really are, disappearing into the crowd." from article Gifted Women: Identity and Expression - by Douglas Eby

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.. .. The double bind: if women said nice things, they were being female, therefore weak, and therefore bad writers. If they didn't say nice things they weren't proper women. Much better not to say anything at all.  Any woman who began writing when I did, and managed to continue, did so by ignoring, as a writer, all her socialization about pleasing other people by being nice, and every theory then available about how she wrote or ought to write. The alternative was silence. /// Looking back on the women's movement in the early and mid- seventies, I remember a grand fermentation of ideas, an exuberance in writing, a joy in uncovering taboos and in breaking them...  // But some people got hurt. Some men felt confused or excluded... Some women felt excluded or despised or bullied or marginalized or trashed.  // It seemed that some emotions were okay to express -- for instance, negative emotions about men. Others were not okay -- for instance, negative emotions about Woman. Mothers were an exception. It was okay to trash your mother.  That aside, if you couldn't say something nice about Woman, you weren't supposed to say anything at all. But even saying that is saying something not nice. Right? So sit down and shut up.  ///

.. .. The fear that dare not speak its name, for some women these days, is a fear of other women. But you aren't supposed to talk about that: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.  There are many strong voices; there are many kinds of strong voices. Surely there should be room for all.  Does it make sense to silence women in the name of Woman?  We can't afford this silencing, or this fear. ~ ~ ~ Margaret Atwood from her article : If you can't say something nice,  don't say anything at all Saturday Night mag., January 6, 2001 photo at right : detail of a Calvin Klein ad from  "10 Most Hated Ads" list on Media Watch site ....books by Margaret Atwood include : Negotiating With the Dead : A Writer on Writing Oryx and Crake

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Hiding abilities, or denying, disparaging or choosing not to develop abilities in order to survive socially, is a common experience of gifted women, at least at some stage in their lives.  Other challenges reported by various research studies and listed by Kathleen Noble [right] in her article "Living Out the Promise of High Potential: Perceptions of 100 Gifted Women" (Advanced Development Journal, January, 1989) include gifted women receiving ambivalent messages from the educational system about developing their potential... from section 9 "Hiding Out to Have a Social Life" of q & a - responses by Douglas Eby to questions

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.. .. Hiding Abilities, Doubting Abilities, and Feeling Different Buescher and his associates (1987) studied gifted adolescent boys and girls and found that while 15% of boys hide their ability in school, 65% of girls consistently hide their talents.  Reis (1998) found that gifted girls do not want to be considered different from their friends and same-age peers. Indeed, a tendency exists for many females, regardless of age, to try to minimize their differences.  For many gifted girls, however, the problem becomes more difficult as they become women and their talents and gifts set them apart from their peers and friends.

If the school environment is one in which academics take a back seat to athletics or other activities, the issue may be exacerbated.  Learning why females mask or hide their ability is often critical to addressing the problem, and finding environments in which success is celebrated and individual differences are respected is crucial.  In addition to hiding abilities, some gifted and talented women begin to doubt that they really have abilities.  In a study about female graduates who attended a school for gifted students in New York City from 1920 through the 1970s (Walker, Reis, & Leonard, 1992), three out of four women did not believe in their superior intelligence. If women do not recognize their potential, they usually will not fulfill it. from article Internal barriers, personal issues,  and decisions faced by gifted and talented females  -  by Sally M. Reis, Ph.D. [photo]

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*some related pages:.......self-limiting: page 1........self-esteem / self concept.......nurturing talent.......

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