The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence

by Rachel Simmons

Overview

Bestselling author of Odd Girl Out, Rachel Simmons 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143117988
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/31/2010
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	517,673
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rachel Simmons is the author of The New York Times bestseller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, the first book to explore the phenomenon of bullying among girls. Simmons works internationally with girls, parents, and teachers to develop strategies to address bullying and to empower girls. A graduate of Vassar College in 1998, Simmons won a Rhodes scholarship and attended Oxford University, where she began studying female aggression. Simmons is the founding director of the Girls’ Leadership Institute, a summer program for middle and high schoolgirls, and currently serves as a consultant to schools and organizations around the world.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I A Map of the Good Girl World

1 The Myth of Girls' Emotional Intelligence 15

2 Is She Mad at me? Good Girl Communication Rituals 35

3 The Good Fight: Girls in Confrontation 53

4 All or Nothing: Girls and Feedback 75

5 Girl Meets World: Breaking the Good Girl Glass Ceiling 91

6 My Daughter, Myself 109

Part II Breaking the Curse

Introduction To Part II: From Good Girls to Real Girls 127

7 I Feel, Therefore I am: Building Emotional Intelligence 131

8 From Assuming To Knowing 161

9 Coming Clean: Telling and Hearing the Truth 169

10 Facing Criticism with Clear Heads 199

11 Check Your Good Girl at the Door 221

12 From Perfect Mothers to Real Mothers 237

The Greater Voice of Myself 249

Appendix 255

Acknowledgments 263

Notes 265

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

“An invaluable guide to girls and those who want to help them.”—Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia
 
“Every mother who wants to raise an authentic, courageous girl will be grateful for the clear-headed guidance that Ms. Simmons provides.  When parents ask me for a great book about girl psychology, I am going to recommend The Curse of the Good Girl.”—Michael Thompson, Ph.D., coauthor of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
 
“If you are a parent or an educator and want to know what stops girls from reaching their full potential and what you can do to make sure she does, please read The Curse of the Good Girl. My deepest hope is that girls realize the importance of what Rachel is saying to them and incorporate it into all of their relationships.” —Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabees
 
“Simmons is at her best when she helps girls understand that until they know and risk what they really feel and think, they cannot be true leaders.”—Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketer’s Schemes
 
“Simmons' trenchant cultural critique becomes an essential primer for raising and nurturing healthy resilient girls. An indispensible read for parents, educators—indeed, anyone who cares about young girls!.”—Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology, SUNY Stony Brook author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
 
“Rachel Simmons has perceptively laid out the current state of teenage girls in American society. As exciting as their futures can be, some of the same challenges that have held back women's success are still to be found in this newest generation of young achievers. The question is: who will reverse the trend permanently so young women can not only aspire to the same goals as their male counterparts, but will not get shut down along the way by either girls or boys.”—Cathie Black, President of Hearst Magazines and author of Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life)
 
“An amazing array of clear practical strategies for all adults dedicated to raising savvy assertive girls. A must read—again and again—for everyone who cares about girls.” —Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect

“If you care about girls, you will want them to be influenced by the ideas and practices in this outstanding book.” —Maurice J. Elias, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University and author, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting

From the Publisher

We all know the Good Girl: She's the perfect daughter; unfailingly polite, punctual, and friendly. While her sisters and brothers are cutting up or breaking curfew, she's dutifully completing extra credit assignments or cleaning up the garage. She's her mother's pride and her father's boast; but according to Rachel Simmons, she's probably seething inside. Resented by her peers, prone to excessive self-criticism, the Good Girl finally leaves home without the inner ballast that only comes from realizing that perfection is really unachievable. Simmons doesn't think, however, that the situation is hopeless. In The Curse of the Good Girl, she delineates lessons that can help reverse decades of self-denial and thwarted self-expression.

In this volume for parents of middle-school daughters, the author of Odd Girl Out observes that girls today still pressure themselves to conform to the old, narrow paradigm of a nice, people-pleasing, rule-following, even-tempered, socially acceptable good girl, shunning the image of a rebellious, proud, socially outré, in-charge, outspoken bad girl. To dispel the curse of the good girl, and despite using those familiar, easily misconstrued labels as a touchstone, Girls Leadership Institute founder Simmons offers instructive tales out of school and workshops, revealing that flawed communication rituals and fear of confrontation contribute equally to a girl's belief that it is more important to be liked than to be an individual. In order to become a successful, well-adjusted "real girl," she needs to know how to say no to peers, ask for what she needs and express what she thinks. In the second half of this book, parents will find concrete strategies and tools-confidence-building exercises that emphasize emotional intelligence, self-evaluations, q&a's, scripts and lots of first-person stories-to help guide a girl's growth into a young woman who can respect and listen to her inner voice, say what she feels and thinks, embrace her limits and present an authentic self to the world. (Aug.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

As Simmons describes it, it's a "yes, but" mentality: yes, be a go-getter, but be nice all the time. Yes, accomplish, but don't brag about it. "It is a constant qualification-two steps forward, one step back," she says. "And just as an anorexic might say, 'I shouldn't eat this, it will make me fat,' girls are saying to themselves, 'I shouldn't say this, it will make me a bitch, a drama queen, an outcast.' "

Nowhere is that qualification clearer than in the words of a bunch of middle-school girls, whom Simmons surveyed. Asked to write down how society expects a "good girl" to behave, their responses ranged from "perfect" and "kind," "intelligent" with "tons of friends" to "no opinions on things" and "doesn't get mad." A bad girl, on the other hand, was described as a "proud" "rule breaker" who "speaks her mind" and likes being the "center of attention." Or, to put it simply, all of the things that make somebody a good leader.

How do we reconcile those two extremes? Perhaps by shifting some of the blame onto ourselves. Time and again, studies that girls face pressures that are unique. We feel burdened to please everyone (as reported by 74 percent of girls in a 2006 Girls Inc. study) but worry that leadership positions will make us seem "bossy," (according to a recent Girl Scouts report.) Yet we've been mulling about the loss of girls' self-esteem since the '90s, when Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia became standard reading for every mother.

It seems that while the doors of opportunity have finally opened, we're still having trouble walking through them. "We've created what I call a 'psychological glass ceiling'," says Simmons. "But on some level, we need to say toourselves, 'Yes, I have the same piece of paper from the same university, but why aren't I walking through the law firm door?'" We've come along way, ladies. But we've still got a lot further to go.
—Jessica Bennett

Newsweek.com

Simmons (ODD GIRL OUT) explores how encouraging our daughters to be "good girls" (nice, polite, modest, selfless) can undercut their courage and self-confidence, making it hard for them to know what they feel and say what they think. As narrator of this provocative book, Christina Moore sounds genuinely engaged; she moves easily from dramatizing the book's plentiful dialogue (produced from interviews) to capably navigating its expository passages. Moore's varied pacing, expressive voice, and clear diction make listening easy and pleasurable, allowing for a deep consideration of the author's observations. Whether dramatizing the life of an insecure girl or offering Simmons’s recommendations to parents who want to raise "authentic girls," Moore's presentation enhances our understanding of this book. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile