Discussions about gender issues in children’s literature are perennial (even in the pages of this magazine; see the special issue on gender in September/October 2007; articles on boy and girl reading in the September/October 2010 issue; and, most recently, Carey E. Hagan’s “One Tough Cookie” in the September/October 2011 issue). My personal experiences differ from many of the perspectives I have read and have led me to believe we should stop dividing reading by gender.
I have never liked the lists of “boy books” and “girl books” that appear in libraries, parenting magazines, educational handouts, and even make up whole books themselves. There always seems to be a note included that the choices can be enjoyed by both genders, and yet there continue to be separate lists. As a feminist, it drives me crazy that we are still talking this way, but it is more than that. The separation doesn’t make sense to me because it does not match my experiences reading books with boys and girls.
I have been reading aloud to kids and discussing their reading in book groups, as well as reading with my sons, for the past fifteen years. I have yet to have a child tell me they disliked a book we have read because they thought it was either “for girls” or “for boys.” The secret is that it simply has to be a good book.
It is sad to think that girls who read the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and the books of Louisa May Alcott would miss out on reading Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Or vice versa.
When my boys were very young, I never gave the gender of characters a second thought. I just read as many wonderful stories as possible to them. I noticed that picture books had far more male characters than female. It doesn’t get more fun than Dr. Seuss, but there are few admirable heroines in his stories. I did not, however, notice my two sons caring whether the lead character was a male or female person, or for that matter, as was often the case, a male or female animal. Do we hold the animals in E. B. White’s books or those of Robert Lawson to rigid gender stereotypes? Do children think about the fact that Charlotte is a girl who is the truest friend to Wilbur, a boy? I don’t think that is their focus.
As my sons grew and we read more chapter books, the gender of the characters continued to make no difference. They loved the silly Pippi Longstocking and the fierce Ramona as much as they did little Sam Krupnik in Lois Lowry’s series. As a result, they had the opportunity to laugh at and admire kids not all that different from themselves. I remember the special joy they experienced when, as second graders, they could be hysterical about the antics of a preschooler. It was such fun to see them looking back at their past. And it made no difference if it was a boy or a girl; it just had to be funny. I don’t think kids care if the main characters in the Roald Dahl books are male or female; they eagerly jump from Charlie and James to Matilda and Sophie. The kids I know insist on reading them all.
In many of the early children’s classics we read, such as those of E. Nesbit, it is a group of children, both male and female, who have the major roles and adventures. C. S. Lewis sends two girls and two boys into the wardrobe to Narnia. Does anyone ask this gender question about Harry, Ron, and Hermione?
There are so many books I want to share with my sons that no matter how much reading we do (and we do a lot), I have lists in my head that we will never be able to complete together. That is what got me started on our read-aloud summer of “‘Girl’ Books I Didn’t Want My Boys to Miss.” We started with The Secret Garden, which really shouldn’t be considered a girls’ book because two of the three main characters are boys. It is a book, however, about feelings. Not only did my sons love it, but my husband didn’t want me to begin the reading until he was home. So I decided to see how far I could push this idea of mine. If you are setting up a girls’ book category, nothing fits better than A Little Princess. Well, all I can say is that my three male listeners were as enamored of it as they were of the others by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The fact is they were responding to the beautiful writing and not to the gender of the characters (in an all-girls school). Could I go still further? Yes, even my much-loved Fossil sisters in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (and then Theater Shoes) were a hit in my house—though it was not the ballet but the portrayal of theater in England to which my family was drawn.
As we began reading aloud Little House in the Big Woods, I found myself stunned that this was considered a girls’ book. Laura and Mary may be the heroines, but if you want to stick to stereotypes, has anyone noticed how much of this book is about the technical construction of homes and barns and icehouses or how many pages are devoted to guns and hunting and defending oneself? (What we noticed most about the book in the series about Almanzo’s childhood, Farmer Boy, was all the food!)
We also read Heidi and began seriously planning a family vacation in the Swiss Alps, which exceeded all our dreams when we were able to make it happen more than three years later. (My son ran through the fields of flowers, announcing he had made it to “Heidiland!”) In any case, this summer reading series continued a good deal past the summer and answered both my questions and my prayers.
Some might argue that the men in my family are in the minority and that the children in book groups are not a random sample, and that all may be true. But I have spent a lot of time considering the powerful negative impacts of generalizations. There is no need to reinforce the ideas of differences between the sexes. Those ideas are still widespread and deeply engrained in our culture. There are, however, serious reasons to protect those in the minority and serious dangers in encouraging people, particularly children, to believe that they belong to a somehow “deviant” group.
Our children—both boys and girls—lose when we constrain their reading preferences. Ironically, what is acceptable in books for girls today is a much wider range of characters and themes, thanks to the advances of feminism, while what is acceptable for boys is still sadly influenced by what I assume is homophobia and an intolerance of effeminacy. A girl reading Homer Price, Sherlock Holmes, or anything by Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain would be viewed as a reader of classics, but a boy reading much of Louisa May Alcott, the Brontës, or Jane Austen would have a harder time with his image. Girls, at the same time, are harmed by believing boys cannot be interested in female heroines and authors.
Of course, some boys may want to read books about boys and some girls, books about girls. I would hope, though, that we could let those choices be truly free. Let’s stop dividing into blue and pink pages. Let’s protect every person’s right to read what they love.