Ruth Sawyer: A Woman's Journey from Folklore to Children's Literature

The development of children's literature is a story like any other. It has a plot, setting, characters, symbols, and style as clear as a folktale--with a subtext as complex as a folktale. The focus here is on the characters, though of course their action comes into play, and the setting is primarily Euro-American. The theme is folklore's journey into children's literature, and the quest(ion) is: Who are the heroes?

Women, Children, Folklore, and Literature

The relationship between folklore and children's literature involves a curious and often hidden gender dynamic. Historically, most public storytelling traditions were dominated by men, from Celtic and Western European bards to East European Hasidic rebs or professional Middle Eastern storytellers. Women's storytelling remained largely in the private domain. There are exceptions, of course, but a trend of gender division is clear. Most child-rearing, including much informal transfer of lore in the form of nursery rhymes, finger play, lullabies, and stories, has historically been done by women, especially in children's earliest years. Folktales were often called "old wives' tales" or "granny tales," and women were key informants for male-authored folklore collections that dominated early children's literature: Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-15), and--when children were increasingly targeted as the primary folktale audience--Andrew Lang's multicolor series (starting with The Blue Fairy Book, 1889). These women were, in terms of recognition, invisible. One could say that women had the unsung role of midwiving a significant amount of children's folklore (meaning here the folklore that was consumed by children as opposed to the folklore generated by them) from an oral to a print tradition, from private to public settings, from informal to formal venues. But their "delivery" of stories was primarily done behind the scenes. The formal realm of publishing and scholarship related to those stories was mostly men's. ¹ Women such as Madame Le Prince de Beaumont and Madame d'Aulnoy never achieved quite the classic status of their male contemporaries.

When the twentieth century saw women themselves moving from the private to the public sphere, their behind-the-scenes role in perpetuating folklore as children's literature continued, with positions slightly shifted to fit the print tradition. A collaboration of editors/publishers and librarians/storytellers midwived the entire industry of children's literature--a corner allowed them by a male-dominated publishing trade (Hearne, "Margaret K. McElderry and the Professional Matriarchy of Children's Books" 755-56). These women drew heavily on folklore as a cornerstone of children's books in the form of both illustrated folktales and folkloric motifs in original picture books and fiction. Just as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women had "delivered" folklore to the world through the medium of collectors and scholars, so twentieth-century women delivered folklore to the world through the medium of authors and illustrators. This time the women functioned not as informants but (a) as editors selecting manuscripts, matching texts with illustrations, and balancing aesthetic and commercial success; and/or (b) as librarians selecting books and reading or telling book-based stories to children. In both cases, their work remained obscure, if not anonymous, until the recent practice of naming imprints for editors, such as Margaret K. McElderry and Charlotte Zolotow, or the equally recent naming of awards after pioneering librarians such as Anne Carroll Moore and Margaret Edwards. (Note that the two biggest U.S. awards in children's literature, established in 1922 and 1938, were named after men: John Newbery and Randolph Caldecott.)

A parallel behind-the-scenes role existed for women in the scholarship of folklore as it relates to children's literature. Storytelling, folklore, and children's literature were seen as interconnected and were taught in library schools for at least seventy years before being...