Family & Relationships
In The Curse of the Good Girl, Rachel Simmons, bestselling author of Odd Girl Out, exposes the myth of the Good Girl, freeing girls from its impossible standards and encouraging them to embrace their real selves
In The Curse of the Good Girl, bestselling author Rachel Simmons argues that in lionizing the Good Girl we are teaching girls to embrace a version of selfhood that sharply curtails their power and potential. Unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless, the Good Girl is a paradigm so narrowly defined that it's unachievable. When girls inevitably fail to live up—experiencing conflicts with peers, making mistakes in the classroom or on the playing field—they are paralyzed by self-criticism, stunting the growth of vital skills and habits. Simmons traces the poisonous impact of Good Girl pressure on development and provides a strategy to reverse the tide. At once expository and prescriptive, The Curse of the Good Girl is a call to arms from a new front in female empowerment.
Looking to the stories shared by the women and girls who attend her workshops, Simmons shows that Good Girl pressure from parents, teachers, coaches, media, and peers erects a psychological glass ceiling that begins to enforce its confines in girlhood and extends across the female lifespan. The curse of the Good Girl erodes girls' ability to know, express, and manage a complete range of feelings. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting the expression of their needs. It requires modesty, depriving the permission to articulate their strengths and goals. It diminishes assertive body language, quieting voices and weakening handshakes. It touches all areas of girls' lives and follows many into adulthood, limiting their personal and professional potential.
Since the popularization of the Ophelia phenomenon, we have lamented the loss of self-esteem in adolescent girls, recognizing that while the doors of opportunity are open to twenty-first-century American girls, many lack the confidence to walk through them. In The Curse of the Good Girl, Simmons provides a catalog of tangible lessons in bolstering the self and silencing the curse of the Good Girl. At the core of Simmons's radical argument is her belief that the most critical freedom we can win for our daughters is the liberty not only to listen to their inner voice but also to act on it.
Read a Q&A with Rachel Simmons (Continued...)
What is the difference between a Good Girl and a Real Girl?
A Good Girl is trying to be something she's not. She wants to appear unfailingly kind, so she represses her feelings to keep the peace in her relationships. She wants to do everything right, so she only raises her hand in class when she has the right answer. Internally, her strongest thoughts and feelings are hidden. If she is unable to extinguish them, she punishes herself with relentless self-criticism. She may self-harm or explode at others. As she works harder to be someone she's not, she will feel increasingly ashamed of who she truly is.
A Real Girl stays connected to her thoughts, feelings and desires. Put simply, her own voice is louder than the voice of others she worries are judging her. She's able not only to listen to who she is but act on it. She will balance the needs of others without sacrificing the integrity of her own. A Real Girl is sufficiently aware of her limits to have a sense of humor about her mistakes. She has no illusions about perfection—a Real Girl thinks she learns from screwing up, and she isn't obsessed with what other people think if she does.
Does the Curse have repercussions for girls in their adult lives?
Turn to any business bestseller for women (Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office or Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman), and you'll see the Curse of the Good Girl all grown up. What limits a woman's success at work is often psychological: she struggles to negotiate a salary raise, manage conflict directly, and deal with feedback gracefully. These problems do not emerge on the first day of work. They begin in girlhood. The Curse of the Good Girl attempts to identify this emerging psychological glass ceiling and shatter it early—so a girl can enter the workplace ready to exercise the real world skills that will make the difference between being Good and great.
Why is your book especially relevant today? Do girls face more Good Girl pressure now than they did, say, 20 years ago?
The answer is yes and no. On the one hand, girls are enjoying unprecedented liberties. Permission to pursue their dreams has vaulted girls ahead of boys in graduation rates, college enrollment, and school leadership positions. Yet girls are still expected to accomplish it all on Good Girl terms. In a 2006 study by Girls, Inc., 74 percent of girls said they were under a lot of pressure to please everyone, a nearly nine-point increase from 2000. Nearly half the girls surveyed said that "girls are told not to brag about the things they do well" and that the "smartest girls in my school are not popular." A majority said they were expected to speak softly and not cause trouble.
The Curse of the Good Girl has not kept pace with the social changes of the late 20th and 21st century (and perhaps this is not coincidental). Girls still live with outdated expectations about what's acceptable for a girl, and they are suffering for it. Can you reach your potential if pleasing others is your prime directive? It's not enough to open the doors for girls; we have to give them permission to walk through them on their own terms.
What are some of the outward signs of the Curse?
The Curse of the Good Girl plays out right in front of parents and teachers. You can see the Real Girl to Good Girl transformation in a physical sense in early middle school. Though girls say they're most in touch with their true selves when they're being silly, crazy, loud, or goofy, by late elementary school a girl is likely to hear peers deem silliness "lame" or "immature." When girls shut down silliness, they restrain themselves physically, becoming intensely self-conscious. They begin disconnecting from who they are in order to try to be something they're not.
Self-defeating speech is also a problem. Girls use "upspeak" to turn statements into questions by inflecting up with their voices. This makes the speaker appear uncertain and even afraid, ready to abandon her idea at a moment's notice. The volume of girls' comments is frequently unstable, peaking at the beginning of a sentence and sliding into whispery nothingness near an idea's end. Girls regularly open their statements with apologies and disclaimers like, "I'm not sure if this is right," questioning their opinions before even expressing them. These habits weave a cloak of Good Girl modesty around speakers, allowing them to participate without coming off as too smart or too self accepting.
Then there is the body language: I frequently observe girls twisting hair coquettishly, covering mouths, lowering heads, and holding themselves in poses that resemble those of reedy girls in magazines—tiny, nonthreatening, cute—while answering a question in class discussion, reading aloud, or giving a presentation. These behaviors may seem ornamental, but they are central to girls' self-expression. They ensure girls know their place and do not take up too much of it.
