UHS Sponsors Speeches On Two Health Issues

Adolescent girls must overcome societal pressures to hide self-knowledge in order to preserve their identity, said a world-famous expert on gender differences at a Harvard University Health Services symposium yesterday afternoon.

When girls use their voices to express truths, "that voice gets called stupid...and rude," said Carol Gilligan, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Development. She told the crowd of more than 200 people in Science Center A that she named her talk "Staying in Touch: Women's Psychological Health and Development," because she wondered "what would it mean for men and women to stay in touch with that girl?"

During girls' adolescence, Gilligan said, there is "a fear to know what one knows."

Citing several examples from her interviews with adolescent girls at elementary and senior high schools, Gilligan noted that the girls "were in some odd relationship with their own knowledge."

Girls are encouraged to take themselves out of relationships, she said, and to give up their own knowledge of themselves. Gilligan suggested that Harvard University Health Services might have a future role in strengthening resistance in women and helping them "to recover lost voices," she said.

Another speaker, George E. Vaillant '55, Professor of Psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School, spoke about how self-care can prolong life. Vaillant is the director of the "Grant" Study of Adult Development, which has kept tabs on a group of male Harvard graduates of the same age.

Vaillant used slides to show various risk factors included in the Grant Study. From 1940-1942, 204 graduates were studied. By 1968-1970, 188 of those graduates were still living. In 1985, 171 were still living. When the graduates were 40-years-old, virtually all of the men had remained in the study; when the men were 65-years-old, only 74 of them were chronically ill or dead, and 22 of the men were in "excellent" health.

Those graduates still living at age 65 were found to have had "warm" childhoods, long-lived ancestors, and no alcohol or tranquilizer abuse.

Longevity can be attributed to maintaining a healthy lifestyle in general, Vaillant said.

"It isn't flossing your teeth, it isn't controlling your weight, it isn't all those cold hours spent jogging...it's practicing self care," he said.

Gilligan said that there are no studies on women comparable to the study on men.