Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

1. Defining the Feminist Children's Novel

1. D E FIN I N G THE F E MIN 1ST CHILDREN'S NOVEL My love of feminist children's books began in the late 1960s, when I was a child who complained because Bert and Freddie Bobbsey got to have more adventures than Nan and Flossie did. While I was rereading the first book in The Bobbsey Twins (1904) series recently, I discovered where my sense of inequity had come from: Bert's voice is "very much the same" as Nan's, "only stronger" (lO), and her four-year-old brother tells her: "Girls can't be soldiers.... They have to get married or be dressmakers or sten'graphers or something like that" (18). Since I was planning on getting married (to one of the Monkees, if possible) and having a career (as an emergency room doctor), I didn't much like Freddie's denying married women a career. For that matter , I can't imagine that I was too impressed with the career choices he offered, either. But I wasn't a sophisticated enough reader to understand that Freddie was contextually bound by the sexist age in which he was created; I couldn't begin to fathom that his voice was one of the agents of socialization designed to teach girls like me our place in a male-dominated society. So I did what any rational child feminist would do. I quit reading the books that angered me and turned to those I enjoyed. Patricia Beatty was my favorite author for years because in so many of her 2 . DEFINING THE FEMINIST CHILDREN'S NOVEL books, such as Bonanza Girl (1962), The Nickel-Plated Beauty (1964), Me, California Perkins (1968), and Hail Columbia (1970), girls were active and vocal. As an adult feminist, I find these books less satisfying . Too often, brothers silence their sisters as the Bobbsey boys do; too often, the child's quest is to help a Single woman get married or a married one improve the appliances in her kitchen. But at the time, I perceived Beatty's protagonists as the fictional opposites of Nan Bobbsey because they, at least, had strong voices. The study that follows reflects my lifetime quest to find and define feminist voices in children's books. My definition of feminism relies on a belief in the worth of all individuals . I define feminism as the premise that all people should be treated equally, regardless of gender, race, class, or religion. Thus, when girls choose to wear pink and play with dolls because they hope to grow up to be homemakers, they deserve to be treated as well as when they play chief executive officer in their spare time. The important thing is that girls-and boys-have choices and that they know they have choices. A major goal of feminism is to support women's choices, but another that is equally important is to foster societal respect for those choices. And since childhood is the time in our lives when our options seem most unlimited, it is a time when respect for choices about self and about others can have serious import. Because feminism and childhood are both imbued with issues of freedom and choice, they complement each other well. Consequently , it seems only natural that so many writers for children have adopted a set of values that allows their characters to have freedoms that writers in previous generations were unable to grant their characters. Elaine Showalter calls the "female" novel the pinnacle of feminist writing. Showalter defines the female novelist as one whose work focuses on "self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity" (A Literature 13). In a manner similar to those that Showalter identifies as "female" novels, feminist children's novels demonstrate characters "turning inward" in "a search for identity" because some form of environmental pressure has made them aware that they are not upholding SOcially sanctioned gender roles (A Literature 13). That pressure may come from DEFINING THE FEMINIST CHILDREN'S NOVEL· 3 family, peers, social institutions, or self-doubt, but the greatest distinguishing mark of the feminist children's novel is that the character who uses introspection to overcome her oppression almost always overcomes at least part ofwhat is oppressing her. Feminist children's novels, on the whole then, constitute a triumphal literature. Manifestations of feminism and its influence on children's...