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 led you to become interested in researching and writing about girls?
When I was 24, I won a Rhodes Scholarship. I was working in New York's City Hall and was about to begin working on a Senate campaign. I was bound for Yale Law School after my Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. I was on a path to running for public office.
At Oxford, I became listless and depressed. I realized I had gotten so good at winning awards that I forgot why I was trying in the first place. In my attempt to overachieve and be perfect—to be a Good Girl who did everything right—I had disconnected from my Real Girl self. What did I really want? I didn't know anymore. To heal, I decided to turn away from achievements and pursue a project that was authentically important to me.
My mind kept returning to my friend, Abby, who turned my friends against me in the third grade. I had never forgotten the experience, nor had I made sense of it. Why did it bother me so much? I began interviewing women and girls about their experiences. That's how Odd Girl Out evolved. My research to learn about girls' psychological aggression brought me back to myself. The irony is that when I tried not to achieve at all, I was able to find my true passion—and avoid law school.
What surprised you most when you were doing research for this book?
The first thing that surprised me was the answer to a question I asked: "When a girl says she's 'just kidding,' what percentage of the time do you think she's really just joking?" I figured girls would say 70 or 80 percent. What I heard shocked me: Five percent. Fifteen percent. Thirty's the highest I heard. The answer illustrates the Curse of the Good Girl in action: Girls have adapted to the unrelenting pressure to be nice by hiding difficult or mean remarks inside of jokes. After all, if someone is "just kidding," you can't get angry with her, but you're left wondering what she really meant. The "joker" maintains her Good Girl image. The low percentage girls quote suggests they are constantly second-guessing each other, rarely believing that what they're hearing is the full truth. They are socialized by each other to assume someone is lying. This illuminates something profoundly sad about girls' peer culture, and exposes the powerful threat to personal integrity the Curse of the Good Girl poses.
The second thing that surprised me was the powerful influence of friendships on girls' empowerment and self-esteem. After several years of watching and listening to girls who attended my Girls Leadership Institute, I saw that the powerful relationships girls forged at GLI emboldened them to make huge leaps in their personal development. More than anything, it was healthy friendship that gave them the confidence to be themselves and pursue their potential. This taught me the crucial importance of giving the tools to build and maintain healthy relationships, which is one of the goals of The Curse of the Good Girl.
What are three important things you'd like readers to take away from your book?
The power to become a Real Girl is already inside you. This book is a compass of sorts that can help point a girl back to the self she may have disconnected from or hidden.
Not everyone is going to like you or be your friend. Girls do not need to be friends with everyone, but they do need to respect everyone. And just as a girl may not like everyone, not everyone will like her. That's okay, too; the measure of her worth is not her relationships but who she is. Relationships nourish us, but they cannot be the only source of our fulfillment. We are less likely to seek others' approval when we know who we are and what we want; developing a passion, whether through work, a hobby, a religion, or a sport, is key to accessing this knowledge.
When truth and friendship cannot coexist, get rid of the friendship. If you cannot safely be honest with another person, you should not be in the relationship. A friendship that lives without truth is an empty husk, an automatic indication that the relationship must be repaired or discarded.
