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:
What is the Curse of the Good Girl?
The Curse of the Good Girl is the pressure girls face to embrace a version of selfhood that severely curtails their power and potential. As most any girl will tell you, a Good Girl is nice, friends with everyone, and humble. She follows the rules, and is a hardworking, straight-A student. On the surface, she seems happy and successful, but look closely and something more troubling emerges: a Good Girl is nice all the time.
To maintain her perfect image, she doesn't express her real feelings. Instead, she projects a false self, splitting off from what she authentically thinks and feels. Her emotional intelligence— her ability to know, say, and express a full range of emotions— is diminished. Because she's trying to do everything right, a Good Girl is loathe to make mistakes or accept criticism. She avoids the risks that might lead to failure, especially mistakes others can see. A Good Girl may deny or hide her mistakes, damaging her integrity. The humility of the Good Girl demands that she avoid owning her talents, and even demean herself around peers.
The Curse is not only the pressure to try and be Good; it's also the futility of the attempt. Trying to be Good consigns girls to an endless cycle of ruthless self-criticism, and a persistent sense of not being Good enough. The Curse installs a psychological glass ceiling in girls' lives that places girls at odds with themselves and curbs the fullest expression of the self, beginning in girlhood and extending across the female lifespan.
In your last book, the bestselling Odd Girl Out, you took on the issue of female bullying. How did the writing of that book lead you to The Curse of the Good Girl?
In Odd Girl Out, I argued that the pressure to be nice at all costs led girls to go behind each other's backs, repress what they really feel, and explode in uncontrolled acts of cruelty. When I asked girls why they didn't simply settle their problems directly, they said they feared conflict would terminate the relationships they cherished. "If I tell her how I feel," a typical comment went, "she won't be my friend anymore."
Odd Girl Out introduced me to the Curse as a relational phenomenon undermining girls' social relationships. As I began to research girls in other areas, it became clear that the Curse was active there, too: in classrooms, extracurricular activities, and sports fields. Their fear of disappointing or angering others, their intense need to please, was limiting their skills and potential as individuals. Odd Girl Out was my attempt to define the problem of girls' aggression. The Curse of the Good Girl not only deepens the discussion; it contains ten years of strategies and solutions from the Girls Leadership Institute designed to empower girls to break the Curse. GLI's summer and year-round programs give girls a personal foundation of assertive self-expression, emotional intelligence and conflict management skills for success in leadership and life. GLI has worked with schools on three continents, including the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.
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