Newsweek calls them "Gamma Girls" -- "emotionally healthy, socially secure, independent-minded, and just plain nice." They're involved in sports, church activities, and community service. They achieve academically. Some of them have jobs and manage at least a portion of their own finances. The ones with steady boyfriends still spend a lot of time in mixed groups or with the girls they've been best friends with since grade school. Their lives are a healthy balance.

They're the subject of this week's cover story, "In Defense of Teen Girls." The title derives from the article's attempt to counteract the images of teen girls presented recently in two sudden best sellers, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees & Wannabes and Rachel Simmons's Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Both of these books portray teen female culture as being a frightening society of self-absorbed, cutthroat girls obsessed with sex, appearance, and popularity who ride herd on the character-stunted sycophants whose only desire is to be accepted by them.

Anyone who knows the girls I've been privileged to work with (and now, to live with) over the years knows that these are stereotypes. While any school (or any work place) has such specimens among its population, they are far from being the majority. Most girls I know are delightful youngsters with clear goals, high moral standards, and a keen awareness of how much they have been given and how much they stand to gain by contributing to society rather than taking from it.

Pictured above are three Gamma Girls. That's my daughter on the right, with two of her classmates. This picture was taken last season, at the start of their sophomore year. They are rising juniors now, and all too soon they'll be the grand old ladies of the hockey team.

At the end of season banquet I watched the senior girls take their final bows and I felt an overwhelming joy in remembering what Lynn's sports participation had given her as an individual and us as a family. She was exposed to wholesome role models among older girls, she learned teamwork and leadership, and we all made friends. I resolved then to remember these girls at graduation.

And if I'd forgotten that, the Newsweek article would have reminded me, for every single one of them could have been a model for it. So last Friday I bought a dozen graduation cards, all alike, and a dozen books of stamps (with a pane of "helper" stamps, since the first class rate is going up at the end of the month) because even in this age of e-mail people always need stamps. 

I wrote them a letter and told them that to know them is to have hope for the future. When I graduated from high school in 1965 it was into a world beset by unrest and bedeviled by differences. Nevertheless, it was a good time to be alive and to be a young woman. They are moving into times more terrifying than any of us ever imagined, yet it is still a good time to be alive and an even better time to be a young woman. And I gave them the words of my generation's great troubadour, Bob Dylan:

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars,
And climb on every rung,
And may you stay forever young.

I mailed the cards on Monday. The mail truck was very late, coming by well after 5:00. Those letters could not have been delivered before yesterday, the day of commencement.

Today I received three thank-you notes.

Gamma Girls indeed.