What would you wish for your daughter in the 21st century? Brains? Beauty? An Olympic gold and her own TV show? It’s only natural to want the very best for our girls; we love them, we feel ambitious for them. But what if being ordinary was the secret to living happily ever after?
Imagine if bog standard was the new gold standard and popularity and achievement – the heady power that so many girls envy – proved to be a poisoned chalice rather than a predictor of future success?
It’s not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. A number of influential women have been voicing concern about the pressure piled on girls to succeed – and suggesting that Good Enough can be a worthwhile goal.
In a keynote speech to the Girls’ Schools Association this week, Prof Carrie Paechter, an educationist based at Goldsmith’s College in London, said instilling perfectionism in girls can be harmful.
“Girls in the 'in crowd’ feel a need to stay on top rather than on the margins,” says Prof Paechter. “If you’re picked on, that’s awful, but if you’re just ordinary you can have a decent time at school, keeping out of that competitiveness.
“In middle-class families it’s not just about school: they have to be fabulous all-rounders. Schools give them the message that to stand out from the crowd they must be a fantastic human being as well as doing well at GCSEs and A-levels.”
That’s a heavy burden for any child to bear. No wonder, then, that best-selling author Helen Fielding, working on her third volume of Bridget Jones’s Diary, has identified the nation’s favourite singleton as an alternative role model.
“I’d like to think Bridget has allowed people, particularly women, to think it’s all right just to be all right,” said Fielding. “It’s all right just to be a person and sort of muddle through the complicated, overstuffed world that we live in… you don’t have to be an airbrushed picture in a magazine.”
Broadcaster Kirsty Young, mother of two daughters and two stepchildren, earlier this year spoke about her down-to-earth parental ambitions. “I don’t want my children to be 'happy’,” she said bluntly. “They’ll be lucky if they glimpse it now and again. I want them to be content and have self-worth.”
If I’d been a fairy at my daughters' storybook christenings, I would have simply wished them confidence and kindness. What they do with those gifts is up to them.
So is this debate over-pessimistic or a valuable reality check? We asked high-achieving women whether it is the Plain Janes rather than the Prom Queens who’ve inherited the earth…
I always felt I was too cool for school. The cult of the ordinary seemed so unappealing. I didn’t own jeans, watch EastEnders or get a suntan, and I’ve never consumed a McDonald’s. This allowed me the space to develop my own tastes. It’s great to be comfortable in your own skin, but if ordinary means middlebrow then I’d rather be different.
Sarah Storey, Paralympic gold medallist
I was seen as a bit of a freak at school because I enjoyed sport so much and frequently turned up with wet hair, having just finished training. I hated my final two years, but I wouldn’t go back and change it. I was following my dreams, which are still being lived out today. I have always felt lucky to be an athlete and am glad I wasn’t popular.
Hilary Boyd, novelist
Ordinariness has always been frowned on, something to be avoided at all costs. I was completely unthreatening to the dominant girls in my class, and not particularly pretty or clever. I think it is way more comfortable to be normal. If you depend on being the centre of attention, the cool one, for your happiness, you are constantly on a knife edge, positioning yourself and watching for others to react and respond. Must be exhausting. No, I’m for normal, me.
Allison Pearson, author and Telegraph columnist
I belonged to that sad sorority described by songwriter Janis Ian in At Seventeen as “those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball”. Blame the Four Eyes (matronly NHS specs) and changing schools every couple of years. Would I prefer to have been one of the cool girls? Of course. When you’re a teenager, a double period of chemistry without a group to sit with feels like all eternity. When I got older and felt popular and desired, it always seemed like a gift, not a right.
Joanna Rowsell, Olympic gold medallist
I think not being popular at school made me even more keen to be successful. I was quiet and shy but very focused on my training. After school, I would dash home to start exercising, rather than hanging out with friends. Perhaps I was too focused too young, but I am very happy with my life as an athlete.
Artemis Cooper, writer
I was so ordinary that, had there been a prize for it, I would have won. But there wasn’t, so I didn’t – nor for sports (hopeless) or academic subjects (too much gazing out of the window). I wasn’t that popular either, because I was no good at jacks, the craze at the time. Long live ordinary, I say!
Esther Rantzen, Television presenter
I was overweight, terrible at gym and could never hit a ball. So I had to find a way to be extraordinary. I wrote pantomimes, made up songs and told stories at lunch, all of which persuaded other people to do the chores in order not to interrupt me. I was certainly never cool, but I had loads of friends, and hearing people laugh gave me a confidence that has stood me in good stead ever since.
Bryony Gordon, Telegraph columnist
I was invisible at school, except for the time I tried to wear a seriously short skirt to stand out, and ended up in detention. I existed below the radar of everyone, from the teachers to the pupils to the janitor. And when I look back at what has become of the coolest girls in school – a drugs casualty here, some anorexia there, a boring job in accountancy elsewhere – I am relieved that nobody ever paid me any attention.
Beverley Turner, Television and radio presenter
I swam competitively before and after school at the local club, crammed homework at breaks and got a kick out of coming top in most lessons. Being a big fish in a small pond (only one of three kids in my year who went to university) fostered a confidence that offset my natural shyness. I was not cool – but I was different. At sixth-form college, the dorky, skinny girls began to emerge as the quietly confident grafters, with A-level requirements that played to our strengths. I pray that my daughters will be the uninteresting, peripheral girlie swots. There’s plenty of time to perfect laughing at boys’ jokes.
Shirley Conran, novelist
I was considered ordinary at school, by myself and everyone else. But to aim to be ordinary smacks of self-satisfaction, if not laziness. It seems to me not to be in the Pankhurst spirit, or the Thatcher spirit, or the cuckoo spirit of the American astronaut who played a flute in her spacecraft, or even in the let’s-organise-our-own-playgroup spirit.
Cristina Odone, writer
Dark, plump and shy, I was the blackhead in the otherwise perfect complexion of my all-American high school. I spent years cowering in the shade cast by leggy blondes who could outrun me on the lacrosse field and outwit me in every maths test. But being sidelined meant I had time to invest in reading and writing about far more exciting worlds than my own. I keep reminding my daughter of this, when she worries about being “popular”. I haven’t quite convinced her, but we’re working on it.
Celia Walden, Telegraph columnist
I don’t think I was a member of any group at school. I’m pretty sure that was a good thing: the cool group were always the most banal people. They listened to the music everyone was expected to listen to at the time, wore the clothes you were expected to wear and dated the people you were expected to date. Then in adulthood those women all got fat and married bankers.