There was the time on my first “real” job when I asked for a raise and then detailed, for my male boss, not my value as an employee but my living expenses and my inability to meet them.
There was the later time when another boss asked if I would be interested in competing for a promotion. I thought hemming and hawing would make me look modest, but it just prompted her to offer the job to someone else.
I can’t count the times I’ve swallowed my feelings when a friend has been unkind, nursing a grudge instead of just saying, “That hurt my feelings.”
And let’s not even go into the number of losers I’ve dated mostly because they were interested in me and, well, that was more important than what I wanted, right? Or the dates I never pursued because I felt like I should wait to be asked.
All of these cringe-worthy moments (as well as the even more spectacularly pathetic episodes pride prevents me from disclosing) are examples of how what author Rachel Simmons would call my “Good Girl” programming trumped my real feelings. As she points out in her 2009 book, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence, in each instance, my decision to be “good” instead of true to myself proved painful and costly.
“Unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless, the Good Girl is an identity so narrowly defined that it’s unachievable,” Simmons writes. “The curse of the Good Girl erodes girls’ abilities to know, express, and manage a complete range of feelings. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting their expression of their needs. It requires modesty, depriving them of permission to articulate their strengths and goals…. It touches all areas of girls’ lives and follows many into adulthood, limiting their personal and professional potential.”
Ouch, huh?
I don’t know about you, but that was my first reaction to reading Simmons’ hypothesis. My second: How can this still be what girls are taught? It’s 2010, a full
45 years since my indoctrination to the cult of the Good Girl began and more than
35 years since my mother and her peers started agitating for the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, and other recognitions of women’s civil rights. Arguably, the body politic hasn’t come far enough since then, but supposedly we had this whole self-defeating culture thing licked. Weren’t we raised to believe we have every right to chase our aspirations, be they for the boardroom, the White House, or the home? I was.
And yet, as I sat reading Simmons’ book I became acutely aware that I was hot and sweaty but unwilling to go lower the thermostat — or ask a favor. Somewhere in the crannies of my ur-brain, I hoped my partner, who is usually cold, would somehow intuit my discomfort and leap to my rescue. Maybe we haven’t come such a long way, baby.
It would be so much simpler if we just said what we felt and needed, wouldn’t it? Too bad, then, that girls are taught that if we speak up directly, we are not being “good,” which puts us at risk of losing important relationships. Too often, we exorcise the resulting hurt and anger through “relational aggression” — or by using friendship as a weapon. Boys bully with their fists, but girls — particularly Good Girls — do it via backbiting remarks, silent treatments, exclusion, and rumormongering.
The cycle can be life-warping: Good Girls can’t tolerate constructive criticism from coaches or teachers; we qualify our opinions instead of asserting them confidently; we don’t admit to ourselves what we want or deserve; instead, we seethe and sulk. We are, Simmons writes, “Good but never Great.”
Back to my sense of déjà vu. Simmons is writing about girls whose mothers supposedly conquered this beast, so how come the cycle hasn’t been interrupted? This is where things get really interesting: Good Girls, it seems, grow up to be doctors and lawyers, and homemakers, but also Good Mothers. “Mothers,” Simmons explains, “are the victims of a cruel cultural setup: In order to succeed as mothers, they must model the destructive, self-effacing behavior that compromises their daughters’ development.”
The author asked a group of mothers to make two lists, one of the traits a “role-model mother” would possess, and another describing the “perfect mother.” The role model is truthful, strong, independent, and assertive — everything the mothers wished their daughters to become. By contrast the perfect mother, the one they felt pressured to be, was organized, crafty, well-dressed, and doesn’t yell or buy fast food. Think Martha Stewart with well-behaved kids.
“The pressure to nurture everyone before herself, excel at tasks both professional and domestic, and produce ‘perfect’ children manifested in behaviors that set a bleak example for girls,” Simmons concludes.
Double ouch.
Fortunately, Simmons offers prescriptions for replacing the Good Girl standard with a Real Girl one. She lays out “rules of engagement” to teach girls to speak up, question their assumptions’ about others’ feelings, and handle conflict in a way that is respectful of their own feelings as well as those of others’. I’m sure these ideas will have value for anyone raising girls, but they should also be recommended reading for those of us who once were girls.
“As more adult women assert their Real Girl selves, they will empower their daughters to ignore the Good Girl rules and live by their own,” Simmons writes. “Our task is to help girls find the voice that is already there and to create spaces where they can safely access it. We can do it every day, in the tiniest of moments for them and by example.”
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
