Social Impact Authors: How & Why Dr Marni Sommer of ‘A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods’ Is Helping To Change Our World
An Interview With Edward Sylvan
…“A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods,” the goal is to reach young people who may not have enough information or support to answer questions around their changing bodies and to help empower them about puberty and feel more confident about all the new emotional, physical and social changes they may be experiencing as they are growing up. We are hoping that people across the USA enjoy our new book and that families and educators make the book available for the girls in their lives. We are also focused on making the book available to youth-focused non-profit organizations and libraries across the country so that they can integrate it into their girl-focused health education programming.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Marni Sommer.
Marni Sommer, DrPH, MSN, RN, is a Professor at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and co-author of the new book, A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods. Her areas of expertise include conducting participatory research with adolescents, understanding, and promoting healthy transitions to adulthood, the intersection of public health and education, gender and sexual health, and the implementation and evaluation of adolescent-focused interventions. Dr. Sommer’s current research focuses on the intersections of gender, health and education for girls and boys transitioning into adulthood around the world. Dr. Sommer has been working in global health for twenty-four years. Her research with girls in Tanzania formed the basis of the original book project. She continues to conduct research and advocacy on puberty, periods, and education globally. She founded Grow and Know, Inc. in 2010, a small non-profit that develops and publishes puberty books around the world.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I was born in Atlanta, Georgia although only lived there a few months as my family was living in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) where my father was working on smallpox eradication. My family moved to Baltimore, Maryland until I was four, then over to Indonesia and England for a number of years where my father was doing more public health research. We returned to Baltimore for the remaining years of my childhood until I left for college, In Baltimore, I attended The Bryn Mawr School, one of the first college-preparatory schools for girls founded in the USA, which I think instilled in me a profound sense of possibility.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
I always loved to read! The books that most deeply impacted my work today on developing puberty books for girls and boys around the world were those by Judy Blume. I so appreciated the honesty and realness of her narratives. Also, I enjoyed the private space in which to learn that a book affords you so that you can read, reflect, think about what you are hearing, and not worry about someone pressing you for a reaction or asking you questions about how you feel. That in turn made me want to develop puberty books for girls — and now boys — in countries around the world that may not have easy access to books about their changing bodies. As her books, such as “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” are mostly text-based, I wanted to create a genre of young adult books that included facts, adolescent girls’ (and boys’) own written stories about their puberty experiences and add in lots of illustrations to make them fun.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?
Oh, there are so many mistakes that get made in the course of a career! I think it was perhaps all the funny dynamics that arose around the first time I developed a puberty book, back in 2009 in Tanzania. I hired a wonderful local illustrator and making sure we had accurate illustrations — meaning girls who were physically maturing — took a little modifying. I think he was a bit uncomfortable — as the father of two sons and no daughters — illustrating maturing girls. When we did the first girl’s book there, the 10–11-year-old girls who we tested the book, all said to us, “but where are their breasts? They don’t seem to be growing up!” A few years later when we worked on our first boy’s puberty book there, I went back to the same terrific illustrator, and this time, let’s just say the depictions of boys growing up may have been a little too detailed — more so than my textbooks back in nursing school! But we eventually got it right.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
In many parts of the world, puberty content — books or videos — doesn’t really exist. Even if some content is available, it doesn’t usually include adolescent girls’ own stories about their growing-up experiences, such as what happened the first time they got their period. And so, our books try to fill that gap, providing puberty content where none exists and also making sure it’s meaningful to girls, with the stories of real older adolescent girls from their country sharing their personal experiences and advice. The main aim of the puberty books that we develop is to help girls and boys around the world. We develop new books for each country because we believe that it is critical that each book reflect the stories and realities of each specific context. Now with our new book here in the USA, “A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods,” the goal is to reach young people who may not have enough information or support to answer questions around their changing bodies and to help empower them about puberty and feel more confident about all the new emotional, physical and social changes they may be experiencing as they are growing up. We are hoping that people across the USA enjoy our new book and that families and educators make the book available for the girls in their lives. We are also focused on making the book available to youth-focused non-profit organizations and libraries across the country so that they can integrate it into their girl-focused health education programming.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
Although I love all the stories that we picked to include in “A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods,” I particularly like the real-life experience of the adolescent girl (in story #6 of the book) who wrote about getting her period at a young age — which I think can be particularly hard for girls as they may feel different than their peers. She shared that she didn’t know what was happening and when she saw blood, she thought she was dying. Her parents reassured her not to worry, and her mom explained how it meant that she was becoming a young woman, and it was all very normal. But there are so many interesting stories! It was super hard to choose just eight to include in the book, from the range of stories we collected. Actually, in case there is interest, we created a website where all the stories can be found that we hope to continue growing over the coming years, so we can capture even more experiences that girls have across the country when they get their first period.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
Sure! I think that my “aha moment” came in the mid-1990s when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Eritrea, a small country in East Africa. I was teaching English in a small village with over 400 students, and we were told that many girls would leave school around puberty to get married. While I didn’t doubt the truth of that statement, I did start to wonder how my female students were managing their periods. Many of the students would walk over an hour from their smaller villages to get to the school where I was teaching. There were certainly no bathrooms along the way, and once at school, there were no toilets for the students there either. They would sit in clusters of 3–4 students at each desk, a classroom of over 90 students, and as the classes were so large, the teachers would rotate rooms rather than the students. I couldn’t imagine how I would manage my period in such circumstances, although certainly the girls never complained or even spoke of it. The government encouraged us to work with the girl students, to help them to feel more empowered and stay in school beyond puberty. I wondered to myself, what do girls (and boys) learn about puberty and when? And is there a gap here needing to be filled? It would be another decade before I had the chance to really dive into doing participatory research on puberty and periods and begin to develop books. And even longer until I realized there was a gap right here in the USA for many girls growing up today.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Absolutely, and they are not hard to do! Focusing on the issue here in the USA given our new publication, one, education systems across the country can make sure that friendly, confidence building and quality content about puberty is being shared in school, particularly in late elementary and early middle school when many of the changes are happening. Two, as a society we can normalize and encourage conversations about puberty, helping parents and caregivers to feel more comfortable talking to the kids in their lives about what is happening to their bodies, and helping them to feel supported. And three, communities can make sure that a book like ours or other puberty content, is accessible for the young people growing up around them, be it in community centers, local libraries, or other gathering spots.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
The five that come to mind most easily include one, lessons turn up in the most interesting places if you stay open. I’ve had conversations on planes, in hair salons, with taxi drivers, and standing in line at the store that have informed my work on puberty and periods. Just a week ago I was mailing off copies of our new book, and I had the most interesting conversation with a postal worker, learning how uncomfortable she still feels — as a grandmother — talking about the subject with her granddaughter. So, I gave her a copy of the book! Two, trust your passion. When I decided that I wanted to explore the issue of menstruation and education almost two decades ago, I had more people tell me it made no sense than people who encouraged me. But I thought it was important, so I persevered, and now there are so many who have come to appreciate why education about periods — and puberty — is important to address. Three, mistakes and moments that feel like the wrong path, can be just as critical to your learning as the steps that feel right. Take the illustrations mistake I learned early on in Tanzania. It brought great insight and humor to my exchanges with illustrators in all the subsequent countries where we developed books. Four, have patience and allow things to unfold. I have found that each step along my journey has often led to pathways I couldn’t have imagined, such as what I learned from my two years in the Peace Corps becoming central to my current career, over 20 years later. And five, evolve with the times. We have a wonderful model for the books that we’ve done in low resource countries around the world, but my team at Columbia University, younger and hipper than I am, became convinced that a graphic novel format was the best approach for our new book targeting American girls. They were absolutely right, and we were fortunate to have a fantastic illustrator, Emily Scheffler, who turned the adolescent girls’ written stories into short graphic novels.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
When I was leaving for the peace corps in 1995, my father sent me a letter — that was back in the day before everyone emailed or texted! I pasted it on my wall in my old bedroom at home as a reminder. It was a quote he had often heard repeated by a senior professor at the university where he worked, and it contained a quote by Horace Mann: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” While I am not sure developing puberty books counts as such, it has been a guiding light to me over these many years, a reminder that when you are fortunate to be given a lot, you should do your best to give back.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Oh yes, I’d love to have breakfast or lunch with Oprah! She spoke so inspiringly at one of my high school graduations back in Baltimore, Maryland back when she was a TV news anchor. I’ve been impressed with her over these many years from her book clubs, to her reach into America’s families and living rooms with guidance and ideas for life and its challenges and joys.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can follow in two places! They can find our new USA book and animated puberty videos here, and can find all our global books at Grow and Know. Follow us on Twitter @Grow_and_Know and Facebook @GrowAndKnowUSA. To our larger portfolio of work on periods and puberty, please check out our GATE team website at Columbia University.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Dr Marni Sommer of ‘A Girl’s Guide to Puberty and Periods’ Is… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.