Have you ever been called a ‘good girl?’ I don’t mean as a small child, when you ate your greens or got full marks in a spelling test, but later, as an adult.
I have and - full confession - in my early twenties, I actually quite liked it. When senior men would hand me a pile of photocopying, or ask me to pretend to be their wives over the phone to airlines (strange but true), I felt a wave of validation fizz through my body when it was accompanied by a ‘good girl’.
There might not have been a literal pat on the head along with it (although there was the occasional one on the knee) but it felt as though I’d performed my role perfectly. It was a superficial adrenalin hit that kept me compliant, eager to please and happy to do what anyone and everyone else needed and wanted, instead of considering what I might need or want myself. It took years to get there.
Anyway, it felt good at the time. Why wouldn’t it? After all, I’d been striving to be a good girl my entire life: told by my parents, teachers and Little House on the Prairie, that it was what I should be aiming for. That being ‘good’ would bring with it certain rewards and recognition. Beth March in Little Women had been loved for that quality, even in death.
When did that change? It should have been around the time that I left a job where the unspoken rule was that women in office should wear a skirt and heels in order to be seen as ‘good enough’ to be there and therefore, perhaps, good enough for a promotion. Though, funnily enough, none of us ever got one. In fact, it was much, much later - long after I should have known better.
Nowadays, I hope that I’d react like BBC reporter Jane Lewis, who was called a ‘good girl’ by Celtic football manager Brendan Rodgers this week. Lewis had been pressing Rodgers for his insight into the Scottish premiership title race , when he refused to answer and ended their tense post-match interview by saying “done, good girl, well done.”
I sat up in bed when I heard that clip on the radio, because it was so revealing - the phrase ‘good girl’ being used to shut down a woman and stop her from doing her job, seemed to capture what I’d been too naive to understand during those early days of work. That it’s not a compliment, but a way to keep women in their place - using our own sense of what it means to be successful to stop us from getting above our station.
I think it’s a pattern in so many of our lives. We’re told to be good girls at school, good girls at home, good girls when we start work, good friends, good girlfriends, wives and mothers. It’s people pleasing, but it’s also unintentional self sabotage - because behind the adrenaline hit we get from being good to others, we’re slowly but surely hollowing ourselves out and building an entire identity around being a good girl, rather than the flawed girl we’re meant to be.
And, guess what? We don’t get rewarded for it. It’s absolutely galling, when you realise
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