Claiming Space: Thoughts on Girls, Teaching, and Horses

She’s wearing pink today. She always wears pink. Her shoelaces are pink. Her big puffy jacket is pink. Pink butterflies are embroidered on her jeans. Her hair tie is bright pink. She stands in the middle of the horse arena and the instructor asks her to “claim her space,” to push the horse’s head out of her way without touching the horse, with just energy, powerful energy.

But it’s hard to claim your space when pushed around by a thousand pound horse. You feel intimidated. You feel uncertain. You feel small. It's even harder to claim your space when you're just 10 years old and a girl and you suffer from panic attacks and pathologically shyness, and are taking medications for anxiety. It’s hard to claim space when you’re dressed in the softness of your pink.

Everything you've experienced up until this point has been about fear -- fear of the future, fear of social interactions, fear of making a mistake, fear of just about everyone except your immediate family. And now, standing in the middle of a large arena, the wind whipping the rain sideways onto the metal roof, the sky dark and violent with an ensuing storm, you are asked to claim your space, to move the head of a large gelding out of your way, demand that he respect you as if you were as big as he was. As if you were an adult. As if you were someone who wasn't afraid, wasn't worried all the time, wasn't able to breathe in stressful situations.

As if you were a boy.




For the past three years, I have been teaching at a private girls’ school. For the first 18 years of my career, I taught in co-ed public schools. When people find out I’ve made such a transition, they ask me two questions. “What’s the difference between public and private school?” and “Is it easier to teach boys or girls?”

I am always stumped by their questions. The answers are complicated and only recently have I begun to really think about the differences, the similarities. This is perhaps because I am as exhausted as a private school teacher as I was as a public school teacher. I am just as overwhelmed as a teacher of only girls as I was as a teacher of both boys and girls. Everyone wants there to be a dramatic difference and there isn’t really.

It’s about energy. I exert the same amount, but what I get back in return is slightly greater, slightly more meaningful at a private school, particularly at this private girls’ school whose mission is to create the next generation of “Women World Leaders.”

No one really understands my energy explanation. They think it has to do with the chaotic state of public education, the large class sizes, and state testing requirements. But that’s not really it. I work just as hard with 16 students as I did with 125. I come home at the end of a long day just as tired, emotionally and physically, just as committed to creating a meaningful educational experience for my private students as I did for my public students. The expectations are just as high, if not higher, but when I sit down to talk with my girls or their families, or even my colleagues, energy comes back to me. It isn’t sucked out day after day. At the end of a long day, I am exhausted, but rejuvenated if only a little; emotionally fatigued, but appreciated as well.

I’m not certain if the energy shift is really the difference between a private school and a public one, or more a shift from co-ed to all-girls education. My energy just feels more in line with the energy of my students. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s better. There isn’t a disconnect and when there is, I’m better able to realign myself to the rhythm of girls alone than to boys and girls together.




“Energy,” Peggy tells me, “is not either or. It is both masculine and feminine. The balance of that energy depends on many factors. My job is to find an equal balance. The horses help me do that.” At first blush, Peggy Gilmer looks like one of the grandmothers of my students. In her late 50’s or early 60’s, her face is round and kind and calm. She smiles on one corner of her mouth. Slowly, the other side follows. Her glasses are fashionable, but slightly askew. Her hands move while she talks. They float, accentuating her words, her passion for the work she does.

With a degree in psychology and another in systems analysis, Peggy is an Executive Coach, a consultant who works with high-powered CEO’s to help shape influential world businesses like Boeing, NOAA, and Citibank. “Rewiring People and Organizations” claims the banner on her website. Peggy has agreed to work with my class of 5th graders, all girls in what we’re calling “Leadership Training,” but it is much more than that.

Much more.




Stacy stands in the ring, her shoulders hunched. She has been my student for three months and I have only heard her say two words –“thank you” – and they were whispered. In response to direct questions, she curls into herself. Her lips clamp together like a clam shell. She nods her answers or just retreats into a small ball of nothingness – avoiding, afraid.

These are the kinds of students with which I struggle. I worry they will be dominated throughout their lives, that the bullies of the world will see “victim” written across their backs and attack. As a teacher, I find it easier to work with loud girls, brash and tough girls. The girlie-girls make me nervous and the quiet, shy girlie-girls make me very nervous. I don’t know how to access them, to build a relationship of trust, or help them grow into “women world leaders.”

Stacy is such a student. She is afraid of the world and walks through it as if the air bruises her. It is only through her school work that I see glimpses of who she is under all that fear.

Stacy loves horses. She draws them on her notebook and inside the margins of her assignments. Horses running, horses leaping over fences, horses standing like deities in the wind. The other students marvel over her artistic skills. “Look at the mane,” one student gasps, “It’s like the horse is actually moving.” They point out attributes of her drawings they wish they could emulate – the curve of the muscles, the shape of the long head, the strength of the shoulders. Stacy stands by her drawing, her head bowed, her arms and legs desperately trying to create one line, one invisible stroke of nonexistence.

But when we arrive at Peggy’s farm, Stacy is the first to walk up to the horses, her hand extended. When Peggy invites Stacy into the ring, the horses shift their attention and walk, in unison over to her. Suddenly, Stacy’s shoulders straighten, her head lifts, and with her arm extended, she reaches out to the mares moving patiently toward her.

“I have never seen the horses react this way,” Peggy whispers to me. “This girl is very powerful.”

I have never thought of Stacy as powerful. Shy, unassuming, and fragile, yes, but never as a child who possesses any authority. Clearly, though there is a well of strength hiding behind the folded lips and bowed head. The horses feel it, and as Stacy walks slowly toward the feistiest of mares all of us watching feel it, too. Without being told to claim her space, Stacy has done just that. For the rest of the session with Peggy and the horses, Stacy transforms into a girl I never knew existed – confident, brave, and commanding.




“Males and females are wired differently.” Weeks later Peggy sits across from me at her dining room table. Her house is modest, though during our conversation she receives a phone call from the vice president of Boeing who is on her way to Japan for a big presentation. Peggy offers her advice on the upcoming appearance, stressing key points again and again. While they talk, I look around at the small dining room, clean, but cluttered with important papers, horse placemats, and Peggy’s working gloves. I have asked to meet with her and carry on our conversation about leadership, about claiming space, and of particular interest to me, education.
“Males are wired for protection and dominance. They know how to claim and keep space. Women are wired for care and nurturing of the community. It sounds sexist, but it’s simple biology and each – the male and female – are valid and necessary for survival of the society.”

Peggy isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. I’ve seen it throughout my career. I joke with my colleagues that some days I wish I worked at a boys’ school where disputes were handled with a physical fight and then everyone makes up and all is fine. In a girls’ school, fights are all underneath the surface. There are no punches. There’s never any blood. There’s gossip and ally-building and hurt feelings and anguish for months, perhaps years. Girls work the friendships, surrounding themselves with loyalty, sneaking off into corners to bad-mouth another group of girls or, their favorite target, the loaner, the wall-flower, the girl who stands alone.

“The masculine is pegged for speed,” Peggy continues, “Not content. The feminine is all about content and not speed. The masculine is about the end result. The feminine is about relationships.”

Gossiping versus punching, lobbying for allies versus taking care of oneself. Girls versus boys. Boys claim space forcefully. Girls claim space insidiously. I’ve watched kids try to claim space throughout my 21 years of teaching. It doesn’t matter the age or the gender or the funding of the school. Kids claim space in a variety of ways.

Some claim space constantly, through their behavior or their loudness, their size or their brashness. Some kids are bold. They take risks to claim space, slyly working their way into the spotlight to make others mad, to make others laugh, to make others notice them. Some kids are quiet, working behind the scenes to manipulate their peers or their teachers. Some claim space by being a bully, others by being a victim. Some students claim space through their talents – their art, their athletic ability, their strengths in math or public speaking. Some kids claim space throughout their lives, while others never do. Some end up in the principal’s office or jail, others end up class president or state senator.

Some claim space positively. Many claim it negatively. Some are rewarded for their efforts. Others are punished. It would take a sociological study to break it down by race, economic status, sexual orientation, and gender, but the fact remains – adolescence is all about claiming or not claiming space, about carving out a moment in your immediate universe. It’s all about figuring out how you matter in the world.

Until I met Peggy Gilmer, I never realized that, as a teacher, my job is primarily about teaching kids to claim space positively, to their fullest potential so they might achieve whatever they set out for themselves to achieve. Be it finding success in school or getting through their lives without being shot or overcoming the abusive parent or a life of poverty and neglect, if I can teach them to claim space in the world in a way that not only makes a difference in their lives, but in the lives of others, then I have done my job well.

But oh, what a job.




I think of Alice, a spunky 10 year old who flips her hair when she’s angry. Her eyes roll in perfect timing to the tsk tsk of her tongue. “I don’t mean to be difficult,” she said to me one day, “but I can’t really work with her.” She tosses her long blond hair in the direction of Delilah, a tall 5th grader who, despite her ballet lessons, falls off chairs and knocks over her lunch almost daily.

I work with Alice for awhile, talking with her about appreciating differences, accepting Delilah for who she is and not hating her just because they struggle together. But Alice will have none of it. Eventually, I give up and let the two of them rub each other the wrong way. There’s too much to do in our class and by the end of the day, there are papers I must grade and meetings I must attend.

Then we head out on our field trip to Peggy’s farm. Both girls love horses. They both squeal with excitement. They prattle on to their significant friends about their thrill of going to work on the farm.

I divide the class into four groups of four girls each. I put Alice and Delilah in the same group. They are not pleased. I’m thinking, They need to see how they are more alike than different, but I worry the whole thing will backfire and the horses will stampede with the pulsating anger radiating between them.

Delilah goes into the arena first. Peggy talks with her quietly. “Have you worked with horses before?” she asks, her hands gently on Delilah’s shoulders.

“Yeah,” Delilah says shyly, which surprises me as she’s generally gregarious and boastful.

They approach the horse, get acquainted, stroking the long, powerful neck of Savannah, the steadiest of Peggy’s mares. Delilah has watched other classmates work with Peggy all morning so she knows what she will be asked to do. Peggy asks her to extend her hand, palm up, and invite the horse to follow her, but Savannah will have none of it. She stands at the railing, ears erect, watching the other horses graze in the pasture.

“Get her attention,” Peggy commands. “Use a strong voice. Call her name as if you are the one in charge.”

Delilah giggles. She is self conscious, aware of the other girls watching her. Aware of Alice watching her. “Savannah,” she says half-heartedly, her voice high-pitched and strained.

Peggy walks over to Delilah. She places her hands on Delilah’s shoulders again and says, “Where’s that strong voice? You must set the little girl voice aside. Little girl voices are not leader voices.”

Delilah tries again and this time we all hear her, loud and strong, forceful. “Savannah!”

Savannah turns, then drops her head to saunter over to where Delilah is standing with her arm firmly extended, her palm up.

“Slow down and keep your head high,” Peggy instructs, “And look to where you want to go. No one wants to follow a leader who doesn’t know where she is going.”

Delilah straightens, fixes her gaze on an orange cone at the other end of the arena, and walks with confident, meaningful strides. Savannah follows, inches away from Delilah’s outstretched hand.

It’s a ballet. Savannah the ballerina, Delilah the self-assured male dancer. I look over and I see Alice smiling, applauding softly at her classmate’s success.





“Horses,” Peggy tells me, “are balanced energy. The herd comes first. Sure, they establish the alpha and the beta right away and the alpha always eats first, but once the hierarchy is firmly set up, they are connected, a unit who breathes together, who are wired together. There is no repression of the feminine. They are holistic. They are one.”

The feminine is about relationships. The masculine is about the end result. How do we achieve balance in a feminine repressed society? A key phrase in our school’s mission statement is that we “create women world leaders.” Prospective parents always want to know how we achieve this goal. After working with Peggy, I’m not certain anymore. I thought we were grounded in feminist principles, but the more I think about the work we do, the more I realize we are driven by masculine models of leadership and organization.

I see it in our classrooms every day. We create huge projects for the girls to complete. They have a great deal of choice and will only succeed if they take initiative and are self-directed, but achieving the end goal is driven not by process but by time – due dates, presentation dates, and the ultimate event, a public performance of their learning.

I see it in my own teaching. I make decisions daily about what to teach and what to sacrifice. I push the girls to conform to the model of what I think is acceptable and valid. I define what success is and how it will be achieved. I try to build relationships with my students, to find out their interests and strengths, but I always feel pressured to deliver curriculum and the discussions about who they are and who they want to be often get pushed aside so we might reach a specific goal.

I see it in our faculty meetings, too. We are all working to capacity. Everyone, from the school secretary to the admissions office to the classroom teachers, is putting in more hours in a day than are healthy. We start the beginning of the year all thin and relaxed and by the end of the year we’re all 15 pounds heavier, exhausted, and cranky.

“I’m worried about the pattern we’re creating,” says Bill, an 8th grade teacher. He is a gentle, thoughtful man who, I’ve come to realize is very feminine in his thinking. “We are doing more each year because opportunities present themselves and we feel we can’t pass them up, so we don’t and soon we’re all doing more and feeling the pressure to succeed beyond all standards. Is that the culture we want to create at this school?”

It’s a valid question. One we don’t have time to really answer. Our meeting is coming to an end and we must race back to our classrooms to be with the girls again. Bill goes on, “We can justify every decision and choice we’ve made. We can find validity in all of it, but the end result is that we are all stretched beyond our capacity.”

The end result. What have we sacrificed for the end result? What message are we, a girls’ school, sending to our future women leaders? We are about speed. We are about outcomes. We drive with time, as Peggy has said. The masculine model is sink or swim. The masculine model is speed to goal. It’s about the future. The feminine model takes a developmental look at the process. The feminine model is respectful of where we (the individual or the institution) are now with an awareness of where we want to go. It is both present and future. Future cannot exist without an awareness of the now.

At work, we are about the future…future world women leaders, future of the school, sustainability of the organization for the long-term. We are not in the now, in the present. This is not much different than what I experienced in public schools only this time, the entire faculty and staff of the private school is involved in the process. The direction of the school is not driven by state standards or lost in overworked committees. It’s not driven by a school board who oversees more than one school. It is not governed by state and national regulations or required, under threat of severe penalties, to leave no child behind. It is driven by us and we are following the same model most schools follow, a masculine model.

When parents ask me what’s the difference between private and public school, between co-ed and all girls I search for the differences, but in the end, there aren’t many. We are still driven by a masculine model, one that defines success by the end result and not the relationships along the way.

It makes sense, of course, that this is the way we operate. All of us have succeeded under such models. They are familiar to us. We’ve learned to thrive under a male model of leadership, in organizations that are goal oriented and time-driven. We are, in fact, rewarded for our ability to function within such a system. We know how to claim space in a masculine world. As teachers, we pass this ability onto our students without knowing what we have suppressed. We structure curriculum that is built on incentives such as meeting deadlines, following instructions, and completing a task, but in the process we have forsaken much of the nurturing and compassion needed to sustain a community.

While our girls succeed once they leave our school, they succeed within that male model. As a girls’ school we are sustaining the very system that keeps our world out of balance. As a girls’ school we are, unintentionally perhaps, we are creating future women leaders who will transform the world not by envisioning a new form of leadership, but by operating within the confines of the one that currently exists.

“There must be a structural tension between the leader and the organization,” Peggy tells me as the wind whips more rain against the kitchen window. “I ask the girls to connect with the horse first, to build a relationship. Only then can they lead, only then will the horse follow. If there is no relationship, if there is no feminine energy balanced with the masculine energy, the horse will sense danger and not follow. The horse will not accept you as part of the herd, as the leader of the herd.

“You go faster in the end,” Peggy concludes, “if you go slowly in the beginning, if you build those relationships. Once you attend to the people of the organization before you attend to the goals, the goals will be achieved more quickly and more meaningfully. Like a herd of horses, you will be wired together, you will breathe together and each person will have value in that organization.”

At the end of our conversation, Peggy and I walk to the arena where she is scheduled to work with one of my students in a private session. As I watch Peggy work, I try to envision how our school would have to change to reflect this balance between male energy and female energy. Soon, though, my thoughts are lost as I am caught up in watching the transformation I seek for my work happen in the heart of a 10 year old girl.


“Would you like to get on the horse?” Peggy asks Ivy. The wind has died down and the rain has stopped. The clouds hang lighter in the sky and the green pastures glow in contrast to the gray backdrop.

Ivy has worked for over an hour with Peggy. As I’ve watched, Ivy has never really relaxed, felt confident or at ease with the horse in the arena. She goes through the motions, attempting to breathe in and out like a horse as Peggy has instructed her, a puff of air and flapping lips with every exhale. But she is tense through the entire session.

When Peggy asks if she wants to mount the horse, Ivy looks up big-eyed and says in her girly voice, “I’d like to, but I’m afraid.”

“What courage you have,” Peggy beams. “I like that you are willing to try something you are afraid of. That takes a great deal of bravery.”

For the next half hour, Peggy works with Ivy to get her on the horse. Peggy asks me to enter the arena and stand on the left side of the horse so that Ivy doesn’t feel as if she is going to fall while mounting onto the bare back. Ivy doesn’t want to touch the horse’s mane, she’s afraid the horse will move if she grabs too hard or pulls too strongly. I offer my hand and Ivy clasps it firmly cutting off circulation to the tips of my fingers.

With much coaxing, Ivy makes it to the top of the horse, but she is frozen in fear. She holds my hand. She holds Peggy’s hand and every time the horse shifts her weight, Ivy gasps in another tense gulp of air. She is not breathing. The air that goes in never comes out.

Peggy encourages her. “Take a deep breath in and let it out slowly. The horse is going no where. She wants you to trust her.” But Ivy, in her pink shoes and pink coat is white with fear.

“Can I get down now?” Her voice rises at the end. It is high-pitched and fearful. It’s a voice I hear often when Ivy’s in class. She is uncertain and double checks every instruction. She wants reassurance she is doing exactly what is asked of her and worries in creative moments when there is no right answer.

“You can get down in a minute,” Peggy tells her, “But first, I want you to sit on top of that horse confidently. I want you to breathe in the power you have while sitting up there and realize how much courage you’ve shown today. I want you to breathe in that courage and power to the bottom of your belly and let out that breath with determination and pride.”

Ivy inhales. Her grip on my hand relaxes ever so slightly. She exhales and her shoulders move away from her ears, her head lifts. “Now you can get down.” With that, Peggy grabs Ivy by the waist and lowers her to the ground. They embrace, stroke the horse, and then Peggy says, “Okay, take the lead rope and go play with that horse. Practice everything we’ve done today, okay?”

Ivy takes the rope and moves around the arena a changed girl. She maneuvers the horse between the slalom of orange cones and Savannah follows. Ivy’s whole disposition has transformed. Everything Peggy asked her to do earlier Ivy does now only this time without fear, without hesitation, without tension of any kind.

“Why now?” I ask. “Why is she able to do those tasks more confidently than before?”

“I took her to the edge,” Peggy explains. “I asked her to go to the edge of what was comfortable for her, to go beyond her fear by sitting on that horse. Now, the tasks she once thought were too difficult are easy. She has a relationship with that horse.”

She has a relationship with the horse, I think, but she also has a relationship with Peggy. End result? Ivy can claim her space and lead the horse in any direction she wants her to go.




We all claim space differently, but we are not either or, male or female. The space we claim is both feminine and masculine though we tend to glorify the latter and suppress the former. We even do this at an innovative girls’ school partly because it is the predominate model we have all grown up in, worked in, succeeded in, but partly, perhaps, because we’ve never envisioned a different model, a different way of being.

“I take the girls at whatever level of bravery they want,” Peggy tells me as we walk back to the main house. “It never fails. Bravery will jump right up and claim the space.”

On my drive home, I am lost in my thoughts. What is my level of bravery? How do I balance my energy? What patterns have I assumed over 21 years of teaching that have depleted my energy, skewed my balance? How do I reclaim it? How do I take what I have learned and apply it to my life, to my work and have it actually make a difference? How do I transform in an effort to transform my students and my place of work? What space can I claim and how can that space be innovatively different than the space I’ve claimed my entire career?

It begins, I think, with Ivy. Afraid, worried, apprehensive. It begins with Stacy. Shy, fearful, and timid. It begins with Alice and Delilah. Self-conscious, intimidated, uncooperative. It begins with an arm extended, a powerful voice, eyes on the destination. It begins by claiming your space, moving the head of a large gelding out of your way, demanding his respect as if you were as big as he was. As if you are a leader. As if you are someone of value and patience, confidence and compassion.

As if you are a girl – strong, whole, and brave.