Book Review - Marjo Molfino’s, Break the Good Girl Myth

It is high school. I stay behind in class to hurriedly finish my notes, and the conversation between three peers draws me in. Slowly the conversation starts petering out, and so one of the girls takes her leave, having talked among them only minimally. When she leaves, another of the girls waits a second before saying, “I like her, she’s so nice.”

How many times have you heard this said about a woman? Maybe you’ve thought this was the ultimate compliment, a simple remark that expresses explicit acceptance and goodwill towards someone. As we become more involved in the progressive move towards understanding what makes patriarchy so pervasive, we should also start wondering about what lies behind such seemingly harmless compliments as this one.

Marjo Molfino’s novel, Break the Good Girl Myth, unpacks the well-kept and hidden consequences behind the need to be nice. For many women, it still stands as an insidious aspiration, valued and exalted throughout girlhood. As we enter a more prevalent era of feminism, we can begin to talk about dismantling one of the hardest testaments to misogyny – the idea that being likeable and agreeable will make your life easier. We are sold this lie as young girls and cornered into buying it. Molfino seeks to uncover how far along we’d get, if we started to reject the myths built around this social pronouncement, viewing it is a form of social control enforced to keep women down.

Molfino applies her specialized learning in design thinking to create a self-help book focused on women’s experiences, as it contends with the effects and nuances of women’s early socialization. Molfino, who is now a leadership coach for women, draws from anecdotes of her own life and those of her clients, to delve into the mechanisms and systems through which women are tricked into believing that being agreeable will combat deeper, underlying issues stemming from misogyny and rigid gender norms. These forces are often made invisible to us, and we may take for granted those differences which society tells us divide men and women, but Molfino does not sum these differences up to gender. Instead, she attributes these differences between men and women to our early socialization, looking closely at what behaviors and attitudes young girls and boys are encouraged to adopt, reject, abandon, or are simply made to accept.

Molfino relies heavily on her leadership advice, while trying to lean into profound analyses of her own childhood as well as those of her clients. In this way, she directs us towards an analysis of our own past, intent on tracing out a time and place in which we were safe and withdrawn from the torrent of abuse we endure as women. She leads us towards that place where we can dig out our most authentic selves, “where we’re going...some call it the essential, original, or native self.” As any good self-help book inevitably does, Molfino asks us to reach deeper into our self-knowledge, asking us to examine what cultural teachings and “rules” we’ve integrated into our personalities and manners. She creates a framework for us through which we may re-evaluate our reactions and approaches to our life’s aspirations and needs.

These myths that we filter our lives through work together to disarm us, offering us a false sense of security in exchange for our self-authority and confidence. Molfino guides us through all 5 myths by way of anecdotes and studies. She splits the book into sections, each focused on the myths of Rule, Perfection, Logic, Harmony, and potently, Sacrifice. Her framework incorporates journal exercises and activities, such as meditations, to help us unearth a common core, or issue, which molded us into the person we are today. This book attempts to reestablish confidence in women. Intent on restoring a confidence which is slowly eaten away by a ceaselessly hungry society that feeds on the lives and energy of women, no matter what they do.

Although we are being drawn into a self-motivating effort, we hardly notice it as we find ourselves recognizing aspects of our lives and childhoods within these women’s stories. Their struggles are made universal, as they seek to understand where they stem from. There are moments in which the reader can’t help but have tiny self-epiphanies, discovering that the socialization they experienced was designed to instill and grow fears, doubts, and inhibitions within.

Molfino relies heavily on design thinking and lived experience, but also incorporates her own studies to support her arguments and observations, as can be seen in the following quote that accompanied one of her client’s main concerns during a session, “In a study that videotaped parents giving their children praise, girls and boys received the same amount of praise, but parents of boys used a greater percentage of process praise, which focuses on effort and strategies, than did parents of girls, who praised them instead for personal traits such as intelligence.” Such research input does not form the basis of Molfino’s approaches towards building up women’s confidence, but they instead serve as tools through which we can reassess and reframe our own lives, allowing us to give ourselves grace and opportunity for change.

These opportunities can become realizations in our lives once we acknowledge them and find the necessary efforts to dissipate their harmful effects, in order to bolster self-confidence andfulfillment.