Life

Elizabeth Wurtzel Takes On the Curse of the Good Girl

If only niceness were teenage girls' worst problem.

It’s always seemed odd to me that Lou Dobbs is a Harvard graduate, and downright ridiculous that Pat Robertson has a law degree at all, much less from Yale. They are both smart enough, and obviously successful. But both of them are incorrect or cacophonous—and embarrassing—much of the time. Elite institutions are not merely supposed to produce intelligent alumni—they are also supposed to teach rigorous thinking and create beautiful minds. Plainly, this is a mistaken notion on my part. Ever since the fancy schools started recruiting in the shtetl and the hood, elitism as a coherent narrative has declined to meaninglessness. It’s now perfectly Princeton to be, say, a fitness-equipment infomercial mogul, clever and determined but also, in some deeper way, crass and wrong.

I was forced to remember this because Rachel Simmons, the author of the really ridiculous The Curse of the Good Girl, happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, as is mentioned prominently on the back-jacket flap. In fact, her mission, which seems to be making teenage girls into solid women, is completely respectable unto itself. But her book is the sort of crap sociology based on pop psychology that a classical education is supposed to have taught her to view with a dimly critical eye. That’s what her editor and agent and publisher all must have thought when they ushered this book about teenage girls through the process as if it were a serious work of thought, when in fact it’s just obvious, unconvincing, and diagnoses exactly the opposite of what’s wrong with the kids today.

The book’s premise is pretty simple: Too many teenage girls, in an effort to please their parents and peers, don’t express their true feelings. “Where the truth is obscured,” writes Simmons rather sententiously, “assumptions will flourish.” The consequences of this quietude are enormous, according to Simmons: Repression leads to bullying or hysterical outbursts; keeping it all in results in depression and even suicide. Finally, if these girls make it to adulthood, they are lousy leaders and managers because they are aggressive or passive, instead of just being assertive.

When Carol Gilligan wrote about this same problem in 1982 in her influential and seminal In a Different Voice, she noted the way girls suddenly get shy and introverted at about age 11, how they go from being the best students in the class to ceding those positions to smart-alecky boys. These preteens seem to “lose voice,” as Gilligan put it. Then a professor at the School of Education at Harvard, Gilligan was documenting a real problem at the time, and her book rang true to an awful lot of us. Critics have since argued against Gilligan’s work—In a Different Voice was really about female morality and how distaff notions of right and wrong differed from male counterparts’—but her ideas have remained the reference point to this day.

Because Gilligan has done such solid work in this area, at least one problem with Simmons’ book is that it’s redundant. But truly, to catalog everything that’s wrong with The Curse of the Good Girl, I would have to go in alphabetical order. Among the goofier oddities are references to entirely new professions such as “brain scientist” (Neurologist? Neurobiologist? Neuropsychiatrist?) and “emotional intelligence expert” (this sounds like some sort of CIA analyst, but actually refers to an author).

But then it gets more troubling: Simmons’ research methods are unsound. Most of her observations are based on what she sees at the Girls’ Leadership Institute, an organization that Simmons founded, which is connected with no university or research institution that is peer-reviewed and accredited and which seems to mostly run camps and seminars and classes that train girls to avoid “losing voice.” Since the young ladies who attend the offerings of GLI are a self-selected bunch, mostly from good homes with loving parents who are concerned about their well-being, this group is hardly representative of what’s going down with teenagers. When Simmons’ girls “lose voice,” it’s a household emergency.

Tags: Elizabeth Wurtzel, teenagers, The Curse of the Good Girl

Elizabeth Wurtzel , the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, is a lawyer in New York City. Click here to follow her on Twitter.

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