Fonda Calls for More Studies of Teen Girls' Issues

Actor, activist and aerobics guru Jane Fonda challenged Harvard to study the victimization and empowerment of teenage girls in a speech at the Graduate School of Education last night.

Fonda's speech at the Education School's Askwith Forum, entitled "Girls!," incorporated personal experiences as well as her work abroad and in the U.S. with teenage girls.

"I am interested in girls for a lot of reasons," Fonda said. "I was one once."

She told a mostly female audience of several hundred alumni and graduate students that society must seriously address the concerns of adolescent girls, who she called one of the world's greatest untapped resources.

Fonda, a two-time Academy Award winning actor who is widely known for a series of exercise videos, has worked as an advocate and leader in the environmental and feminist movements. She also founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.

She specifically asked Harvard leaders to begin a study of adolescent girls and offered to work for such a program.

"Carol Gilligan knows how, and I will help you raise the money," she said.

Gilligan, the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Gender Studies at the Education School who has done extensive research on girls' lives, was one of the actor's principal reasons for speaking at Harvard, Fonda said.

Fonda deferred several questions to Gilligan after her speech.

Fonda, who was present at the Cairo Conference on Population as a representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, described the positive ripple effects educational programs for girls in Egypt had on their entire community.

The audience applauded when Fonda called a young girl, Latoya Hankey, onstage to answer a question about the effects of pop stars such as the Spice Girls and Brittany Spears.

Fonda said she was not familiar with the singers but that Hankey was.

Hankey spoke about how the singers create an ideal that girls feel they cannot live up to, giving them negative self-images.

Fonda peppered the speech with personal stories. She cited Gilligan's theory that women retain weak voices to remain in a submissive position and then recalled how she was shocked by her own soft voice looking back at past movies.

She said that while watching her movies chronologically, she noticed how her voice became progressively stronger over time as she "grew as a woman."

Fonda also talked about how she lost a part in Elia Kazan's movie "Splendor in the Grass," a role that instead went to Natalie Wood.

When the renowned director asked her whether she had ambition, Fonda blurted out "no" and said she remembered seeing the disappointment in Kazan's eyes.

At the beginning of the event, Education School officials praised the outgoing chair of the school's Visiting Committee, Timothy E. Wirth '61.

Dean Jerome T. Murphy announced a $2.5 million professorship, the Timothy Wirth Professorship in Learning Technologies, in his honor.

Murphy, who introduced Wirth, also boasted that the Education School surpassing its capital campaign goals by 80 percent, bringing in $112 million when it had set out to get $60 million.