When Colby's Lyn Mikel Brown and Harvard's Carol Gilligan published Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development in 1992, they were surprised at the ensuing discussion. Instead of focusing on the strong voices Brown and Gilligan found among the girls at the Laurel School in Ohio, readers homed in on the girls who negotiated adolescence by falling silent. Books such as Reviving Ophelia followed, presenting a relentlessly gloomy picture of adolescent girls in verbal shut-down.     In the preface to her new book, Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998), Brown acknowledges that the earlier volume described a turning point at which some girls begin to experience "the loss of voice, the narrowing of desires and expectations, the capitulation to conventional notions of femininity."     But, she says, some girls "actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity, particularly at the edge of adolescence." This finding is at the center of Raising Their Voices, accompanied by an examination of the role class as opposed to race plays in girls' views of themselves and their futures.     Brown, associate professor of education and human development and women's studies at Colby, studied two small groups of Maine girls, one rural and working class or working poor, the other professional class and living in a small city. All of the girls were white, and all attended junior high school. Brown, herself white and a product of a rural Maine "middle-class family with a working-class core," writes that part of her motivation for placing her study in Maine and for choosing the two groups was that, too often, discussions of girls' development are predicated on the idea "that to be white is to be middle class and privileged and that to be poor or working class is to be of color." (Indeed, even the working-class girls in the study pegged Brown as a white-collar academic, despite her strong affinity with them.)     Brown carefully documents the differences between the two groups. The "Mansfield" girls (working poor, working class) tended to express anger and aggression more easily than their "Acadia" (middle and professional class) counterparts. Mansfield girls frequently expressed admiration for their mothers' toughness and resilience in the face of economic uncertainty, abusive relationships and/or class limitations. They valued loyalty among friends and they expressed their feelings, including anger, more readily than their wealthier counterparts. They also, tellingly, longed for financial and social success but assumed they would not get them. Asked what one thing she could see happening to her in the future that she wished were different, "Rachel" says, "Of course I would want a lot of money, but that's not going to be possible, so I would want enough money. That's what I want in the future, but I don't think I'm gonna have it. I really don't." Why not? she is asked. Because of your education? Because of the economy? Because you're a woman? "Because I'm kind of stupid . . . basically," she says.     Thirteen-year-old "Robin," who lives in Acadia, is representative of the choices faced by the girls there. Throughout her life, she believes, she has received broadcasts from the culture at large about what nice, middle-class girls should be like: that airhead gum-chewers with high-pitched voices and a knack for clinging to boys are preferred; that skateboarders (like herself) who wear oversize shirts, baggy shorts and mismatched sneakers need not apply; and that if you must read books, keep them to yourself. Acadia is a small city with a college, a handful of moribund industries and a struggling downtown, and Robin is a daughter of the professional class. Her future comes in a rainbow spectrum: higher education, career, family, all or none of the above. But in order to seize her choices Robin must define herself. At this juncture she and her peers can only describe what they are not--not popular, not airheads, not burnouts, not cut-ups, not the kind of kids who win attention easily. The situation drives them mad, yet "despite their awareness of different standards, expectations and treatment, these white middle-class girls generally espouse a strong belief in the American Dream," Brown writes. "By and large they trust their teachers and other authorities to be fair, to judge them on their merits; they firmly believe that hard work and perseverance . . . will eventually yield a happy and prosperous life."     So, Brown says, it's not surprising that the Acadia girls are most upset and confused when facts dispute image, such as when the lout in the back of the room gets all of the teacher's time and attention. "The girls constantly struggle," she says, "with a tension between what they are told, and indeed practice religiously, and what they see and hear in the public world of their school."     The two groups appear to share common experiences when it comes to expressing anger. For all girls anger is unacceptable. But their motivations for suppressing fury are very different.     In Acadia, anger, though deeply felt, is not to be loosed on friends, family or teachers. Mansfield girls feel freer to show anger in public, even at school, although that behavior tends to land them in trouble. Seeing school not as a pathway to the future but as a phenomenon of the here and now, Mansfield girls are less invested in earning teachers' approval. But where it counts--in their relationships with one another and with their families--Mansfield girls keep their cool.     One subtle and disturbing point Brown makes about both groups of girls is that they are standard-bearers for the stereotypes that infuriate them. A girl like Robin--smart, feisty, confused, the kind you admire but might want to throttle sometimes--leans toward accepting her social group's definition of girl behavior and sets herself apart from it. Robin wants to be seen as a "person," not as a "girl." She buys into the notion that to be Robin is to be an un-girl. According to Brown, Robin "and a small cadre of her close female friends seem to be making their own contradictory and fragmented way," but for now Robin is something of a misogynist.     "Girls' ventriloquation of the dominant culture's denigration of femininity and female relationships threatens to disconnect them from other girls," Brown writes.     In its lively and poignant record of girls' emotions on the cusp of womanhood, Raising Their Voices makes it clear that, whether they say so or not, girls feel and contend with a full range of emotions. Not shut down but often underground, girls seem to exist in a state of tension between knowing and believing. That girls feel anger and recognize the contradictions inherent in their lives is, as Brown says, too important a consideration to be shunted aside. But there also is persistent shame in the knowledge that some girls--of different classes and for a variety of reasons--not only feel powerless to change the status quo but take it to heart.