3 “Good Girl” Beliefs Hidden in the Snow White Story That Can Still Make Us (and our children) Insecure Today
The new Disney Snow White movie is a great opportunity to reflect on the lessons from your childhood and talk with your daughter—or son—about the deeper messages that fairytales often carry, especially for girls.
In this short video, I unpack three sneaky "good girl" beliefs embedded in the story of Snow White that can shape how we see ourselves, often without us even realising it:
- A woman’s worth is based on her beauty.
- To be valuable, a woman must outshine other women.
- A woman earns love through unpaid emotional and domestic labour.
These messages don’t just affect children—they linger with us into adulthood and can quietly erode our confidence and self-worth.
In invite you to watch the video and reflect on how you learned these beliefs—and how you can help your children form different and more empowering beliefs about themselves and their worth.
Once you see these “Good Girl” beliefs, you can’t unsee them. If you’d like to discover more of the subtle, damaging messages that hold women and girls back—and how to break free from them—you might like my new book, Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me.
👉 Learn more about the book here.
Transcript
3 good girl beliefs in the Snow White movie that can make us insecure
if you see the new Disney movie
you might want to discuss these with your daughter and your son
and even think about them yourself
how you probably learnt them as a girl
and how they might still be affecting you now
No.1 for a woman to be worthy
she must be beautiful what's the central conflict in Snow White
physical beauty
this belief is an absolute disaster for girls and women
because in our society no woman is ever beautiful enough
but yet we would we are told that in order to be worthy
we must be beautiful and it gets even worse than that
because who gets to decide if we are beautiful
not us beauty is an external measure
it's bestowed on us by someone else
and then it is just as quickly taken away
for example in Snow White
it's bestowed by a man in the mirror
and then it is taken away by the same man in the mirror
if we grow up reliant on other people's judgements of our beauty
it's going to be really really hard to like ourselves
No. 2 that in order for a woman to be valuable
she must be better than another woman
it's not enough for the Queen to be beautiful
she has to be more beautiful than Snow White
she has to be more beautiful than every other woman in the kingdom
if we are reliant on another woman's inferiority
in order to feel good about ourselves
we will by definition be insecure
and the third a woman has to earn her worth through free labour
why do the dwarfs love Snow White
sure at the end of the movie
she becomes a brave leader
but when they accept her and love her and welcome her into their home
it's because she is performing unpaid
domestic and emotional labour
so what does Snow White teach us
for a woman to be worthy she must be deemed beautiful by someone else
she must be more beautiful than another woman
also decided by someone else
and she must perform unpaid
domestic and emotional labour
you might think that this is just a story
just harmless entertainment
but the lessons in stories like this are taught to girls
over and over again
it's a way of manipulating girls and women into compliance and service
and then we go through life never feeling like we're good enough
and it makes us really really tired
