by L.M. Redding

Created on: October 06, 2008

What behavior in society continues to influence the character of more girls than Beyonce and Britney Spears?

The compulsion to be nice. Or as I like to call it, The Nice Girl Syndrome. Generations of females grow up skipping rope to the nursery rhyme about little girls being "Sugar and spice and everything nice." Over the years how has this belief in "niceness" shaped legions of girls psyche?

This is the 21st Century and Women's Lib. has been around for decades. Women are no longer bound by antiquated notions or are they? Pay attention to the words women use, not behind closed doors when they think no one is listening, but out in the open when they know everyone's listening.

I know that females can and will be as assertive and vicious as males, but they mostly display this behavior among and against other females. So nasty behavior isn't what I'm referring to. I mean simply adding their true thoughts to a conversation and speaking as if their opinions matter, because it does. Not so. Girls will behave differently when boys are in the room. Recently when I was a substitute teacher for a class of 11th graders. They had been left instructions by their teacher to write a personal poem and they did.

Instead of merely collecting their work, I decided to have everyone read their poems out loud. The boys were the first ones up; they were brash in the reading of their poems. They ripped into teachers, parents and ex-girlfriends, often naming their ex-es, what lead to the break-up and why they couldn't stand their ex-es anymore.

The girls were more subdued. They questioned me on what they should write, agonizing over what they wanted to write but couldn't. They congregated together discussing potential topics.

I told the girls that since the poem was meant to be personal they could write about whatever they wanted with love or hate. "That's not nice," one girl said to me. I assured her it was okay to spill her angry feelings onto the page. "I'm not going to do that," said another girl, "it's not right."

No boy in the class had bothered to ask me what to write, and after listening to the first two boys read I had to ask them not to use profanity in their poems. The girls' poems were about their best friends or boys they liked. Only one girl out of the entire class wrote an angry poem; on why she hated the sight of another girl in her church.

Daily, I'm reminded of this pattern where women feel obligated not to speak their minds; to strain their feelings and opinions through

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