Fairy Godmothers or Wicked Stepmothers?: The Uneasy Relationship of Feminist Theory and Children's Criticism

Now there is no woman, only an overgrown child.

(Margaret Fuller, 1844)

The cultural myth of cocooning suggests an adult woman who has regressed in her life cycle, returned to a gestational stage. It maps the road back from the feminist journey, which was once aptly defined by a turn-of-the-century writer as 'the attempt of women to grow up.'

(Susan Faludi, 1991)

My first mistake was in thinking "children" instead of "child. " My second was in seeing The Child as my enemy rather than the racism and sexism of an oppressive capitalist society. My third was in believing none of the benefits of having a child would accrue to my writing.

(Alice Walker, 1979)

Why is it that I still—like Fuller, like Faludi—react so vehemently to being called a girl? Why, if I want to revalue childhood and children and children's literature, do I persist in seeing associations with childhood as negative? The fact is that I, like other feminists, am spoken by a discourse of maturity that devalues children. My feminism and my commitment to children's literature exist in an uneasy relationship—if the relationship is maternal, then there is a constant slippage in the feminism between being a fairy godmother and being a wicked stepmother. The lack of parallelism between the two modifiers in my subtitle—the adjectival "feminist" and the possessive "children's"—is symptomatic of the uneasy relationship between the two fields.¹

Of course it is true that there are affinities between feminist theory and children's criticism—that, further, if feminist criticism is more "mature," at this point, then it may have more to offer children's criticism. It can be argued, as Perry Nodelman has, that children's literature is a kind of women's writing, writing that responds to repression or, better yet, finds "an alternative way of describing reality," writing that is often nonlinear and contradictory, writing in which "adjustments are made to societal responsibilities" (33, 34). It can be argued, as Lissa Paul has, that the common ground between women's and children's literature "lies in a shared content (the enclosed, interior scenes of the action); and in a shared language (of otherness)" (187)—in entrapment and deceit. Certainly, most of those who write, edit, buy, and critique children's literature—at least in this century—are women. That precedence contrasts strikingly with the situation of women who have written for adults: as of 1992, only 32 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded for fiction had gone to women and only 8 percent of the Nobel Prizes in Literature. Yet women had won some 66 percent of the Newbery Medals. So it should not be surprising if children's literature has addressed some women's concerns.

Not that most feminists have noticed. At the risk of being unsisterly, I want to point to the profound ambivalences that mainstream feminists have about children's literature.² If Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that women have suffered not so much from a Bloomian "anxiety of influence" as a more primary "anxiety of authorship," a fear that they cannot create, that writing will destroy them (49)—then I would add that women (and other) critics also suffer from an "anxiety of immaturity." They fear that literary creation will be so associated with procreation, and with that which is procreated, that they themselves might be considered childish. And thus they—we—become anxious to dissociate ourselves from immaturity.

Much of the feminist ambivalence about children has been related, I think, to an ambivalence about motherhood. In the early seventies a working-class feminist mother like Tillie Olsen could point out how rare it was for a woman who is a mother also to be a writer (31-32). Other feminists, like Kate Millett, were more specifically resisting male theories and theorists, especially Freud—for whom, with respect to maternity: "It is as if ... the only self worth worrying about in the mother-child relationship were that of the child" (Suleiman 356). Even now an...