Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The Construction of Gender in Children's Literature (review)

Susan Lehr, ed. Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The Construction of Gender in Children's Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.

Susan Lehr's rather eclectic collection of essays, Beauty, Brains, and Brawn, addresses the representations of gender in children's literature ranging from author profiles to scholarly textual analyses. Some essays examine the relationship between the child identity presented in the text and the child reader's search for identity; others address gender issues particular to a genre such as historical fiction, series books, and fairy tales and fantasy. Charlotte Huck's introductory remarks pronounce the book's overriding theme to be a call for "adopting more egalitarian gender attitudes" in the construction of children's books (x). At least, Huck believes that each writer in this text would "attest" to this statement and that each reveals the "complexities of the task"(x).

Although this "eclecticism" is beneficial in that it carries multiple perspectives and meets the reading needs of a more general audience, the text's structure lacks physical and thematic continuity and makes for difficult reading of a text that would not otherwise be so troublesome. The writing is informative, engaging, and easily understood.

The book is divided into five distinct parts: "Children at the Crossroads: Tough Boys, Fragile Girls?," "Images of Children in Illustrated Books," "Teaching the Past without Corsets and Chastity Belts," "Challenging Gender Stereotypes," and "The Politics of Gender: Teaching the Whole Child." These parts are numbered in the table of contents, but are not signaled correspondingly in any way within the text itself. So, readers are tossed from one focus to the next without warning; thematic movement is blurred.

Where most readers would expect an editor's preface to highlight the arguments presented in individual essays and explain how essays are tied to the book's central theme, that is not the case in Beauty, Brains, and Brawn. Lehr instead offers a closing essay under Part Five, "Politics of Gender: Teaching the Whole Child." On first reading, this essay appears to be an editor's commentary on how this collection of essays was constructed; after the first page, it also becomes an elaboration of, or a counter to, contributors' arguments. The placement of this seemingly introductory material at the book's conclusion may confuse as many readers as it may assist in synthesizing the reading, providing that readers can move beyond their preformed idea of textual formatting.

When readers move to the interior of the text and note how essays work within each of the five parts, they will be struck with the inclusion of Margaret Chang's essay "Are Authors Rewriting Folklore in Today's Image?" under the heading of "Images of Children in Illustrated Books." The reader may question how this essay, which does not discuss picture book illustration, is linked with others that address illustration and gender. Readers may question the relationship between some of the profiles and the theme of the section in which they are placed, regarding how well they speak to or complement the focus of that section.

Setting the structural anomalies aside, readers will find the debate regarding authenticity in historical texts engaging, particularly Chang's attention to fiction depicting Chinese girls and women and the importance of listening to a story on its own terms (82), its history and culture intact. Ignoring the "'historical realities'" of Chinese women in the past, she writes, "obviates the courage and intelligence . . . used to negotiate the terrain they were born to"(82). Authentic texts give readers a context with which to place their own lives (86).

In "Separating the Men from the Boys: Coming of Age in Recent Historical Fiction for Children," Daniel Woolsey delves into the depiction of male gender, the only contributor who directly does so, revealing ways in which Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award winners depict boys making progress toward "taming the beast within" as they come of age (124). Deborah L. Thompson, in "Deconstructing Harry: Casting a Critical Eye on...