Jasmin Sandelson

Friendships between young people in low-income neighborhoods are often framed as “risky”—a source of peer pressure and conflict. Yet Jasmin’s book, My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood, out now with the University of California Press, tells a different story.

Over four years, Jasmin joined two cliques of teenage girls in their homes, at their hangouts and parties, and online. In My Girls, she shows how girls used their connections to secure care and support that adults often could not give.

Girls consistently, creatively identified and met a wide range of one another’s needs. Together, they battled boredom, found stability, embraced adulthood, and processed trauma and grief. In person and online, young women took care of their friends both day-to-day and under tremendous strain.

This book shows the power and potential of girls’ friendships to alleviate even the most tragic consequences of American poverty. 

My Girls can be preordered from Amazon, UC Press, or Bookshop.

Reviews

"Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork, My Girls offers an intimate and tender account of the lives of teenage girls striving to break the cycle of poverty. In these portraits of solidarity and struggle, Jasmin Sandelson shows how girls growing up in public housing rely on each other in countless ways when navigating social media, boyfriends, and hardship, including neighborhood violence. Heartfelt yet unsentimental, these stories testify to the enduring power, and limits, of friendship and love." — Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

"A remarkable ethnography of friendship. My Girls is about growing up, getting by, looking for love, and finding support. It shows how an ordinary group of teenagers in a poor urban neighborhood makes connections, and how social bonds create meaning, purpose, and possibilities for a better life. This is a major contribution to sociology and a fantastic, gripping read." — Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

"My Girls offers a powerful alternative to research that frames low-income young women of color as 'lacking' in so many ways. Beautifully written, it illuminates how friendship provides recognition and sustains dignity as these girls move toward adulthood while mobilizing social media for support. This powerful analysis of challenges and responses to marginality will engage college students, social scientists, and the larger public alike.” — Michèle Lamont, author of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World