Finds in the Bookcase

As part of my "since I'm home, I might as well clean up and clean out" effort, I went through the bookcases in the family room and kitchen today.

Yes, I have a bookcase in the kitchen. One of the few features I like in my otherwise outdated, desperately-in-need-of-a-remodel-else-we-risk-the resale-value-of-the-house (not that we are going anywhere any time soon) kitchen. I love cookbooks and have quite a number of them, so it's great to have all of them right there with me. Well, most of them. There has been some overflow to the rest of the house.

Anyway, I went through the kitchen bookcase and selected several to take to the swap area at the town dump, er, recycling center. Then I moved on to the bookcases in the family room.

There, in the family room, on the top shelf, all the way to the right, was a book from a college women's studies class. I'd forgotten I had it - and now is the right time for me to find it, parentally speaking.

The book is "Don't Bet on the Prince:Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England." Mine is the original hardcover edition, but Amazon has the 2nd edition in paperback available.

We did a section in that women's studies class on children's literature, and this book was part of that section. There is work in the book by Judith Viorst, Jane Yolen, Margaret Atwood and Anne Sexton. My favorite piece is the very short and to the point Judith Viorst piece. You'll have to go look for it, really. There also is a section on feminist literary criticism around fairy tales. It's a great book. I intend to start reading some of the stories to S immediately.

I remember another exercise from the class in which we took well-regarded children's picture books and evaluated them from a gender point of view. Things like number and frequency of girl characters, and placement of girls within the illustrations. My group looked at "The Polar Express." Great book, yes....for boys. If you have the book, go look at it. Tally the number of identifiable boy characters and girl characters. Look at the number of times a female speaks. How many times does a boy speak? Look at the illustrations. How many times are the female characters smaller than the males or placed physically below the males? Interesting, isn't it?

In contemporary children's literature, some of these things are blatant and some are subtle - some would say all of it is altogether meaningless. But it's not meaningless - it's all a part of how we communicate to girls in our society about their "place."

I've been thinking about this more and more as S gets more into books. Not only do I want to find more books with strong female characters for her, I want the boys to read a few more, too. I want all three of them to see and read stories with strong girls and balanced gender relationships. No damsels in distress in need of manly rescue for us, please.

Finding those books is the hard part, but I have been pleased to find a few. Right now, a couple of S's favorite books are Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey and The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke. Both have strong girls as their central characters.

We just need a whole bookshelf more.