Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [8]
I can remember extraordinarily well a moment when I began to shut down pan of myself in order to be liked. During my early grade-school years, I had this devilish streak in me, even though I was also pretty shy. In sixth grade this cute and cocky boy named Kevin transferred to our school and into my class. Everyone, boys and girls alike, fawned over him, and as the year went along he got kind of big for his britches. Where I grew up, in upper New York State, the first of May was celebrated by kids exchanging May Day baskets they made by pasting crepe paper on old oatmeal and saltine cracker boxes and filling them with candy. This particular May Day I decided I wanted to get Kevin's attention, but instead of fawning, I tried a more irreverent approach that I thought he'd appreciate as a cocky kid. I made the rattiest looking May Day basket with water-stained, ripped crepe paper, then filled it with stones, and left it on his desk just as everyone was coming in from lunch.
Well, you would have thought I'd yelled the words sexual intercourse at the top of my lungs. A hush fell over the class as kids realized what had happened, and once it was discovered I was the culprit, they looked at me in horror. I tried to make light of the situation, but that night I went home feeling something I had never experienced in school before: shame.
From that day forward I did my best to hold that little devil down. I got with the good-girl program that is reinforced all through adolescence. Abigail Cook, a friend of mine who is a trader on Wall Street, puts it this way: “If I could have hung a motto over my bed in high school it would have been: ‘Be nice, you'll be liked, you'll get married.’ “
Though many of Gilligan's theories were developed over fifteen years ago, educators and researchers say they see the same dynamics at work today.
Barbara Berg, dean of the upper school of Horace Mann, a private school in New York, and author of Crisis of the Wording Mother, says that she witnesses many young girls caught in the good-girl trap and unable to feel a personal sense of empowerment. “A girl who was being verbally harassed by some boys came to my office lately for help,” says Berg. “I suggested that one step would be for her to tell the boys that she didn't want them to do that. She said that she couldn't. She was wonted that if she did, they wouldn't like her.”
In school, a girl may find herself in a constant and draining state of either/or. You can be pretty or powerful, you can be popular or smart.
So take a trip back to your early life and think about when and how the good girl in you began to emerge. You may remember how wonderful it fell before you had to put on the muzzle.
THE GOOD GIRL GOES TO COLLEGE
For some girls, college is the time to try to break out of the good-girl mold. And yet by then the message is pretty ingrained in many of us and there may be a reluctance to challenge the “system.” or at the very least an inability in knowing how to begin. Dr. Gathron says that as part of her research on women and self-esteem, she asks freshmen women to tell her what they think and feel about themselves, using adjectives and descriptors. The results are the same from year to year. “What is so amazing is that they sit and ponder,” she says. “They have a hard time coming up with anything. As women, we're told all our lives how to act and what's expected of us. We haven't thought enough about ourselves and what we feel and think.”
As a member of the first coed graduating class of Union College. I found myself the first year in a class with twenty men and only one other woman, and through the entire semester the professor never once made eye contact with either of us. On Halloween we wore matching pumpkin outfits with