Faith and Hope in the Feminist Political Novel for Children: A Materialist Feminist Analysis

To be an artist is to be a prophet and is to try and reflect to the people the elements within the social conflict that will make a synthesis, not a destruction.

Meridel Le Sueur (qtd. in Hampl 66)

Fiction that reveals female oppression and offers constructions of femininity challenging traditional ones can be a powerful resource for girls seeking liberation from patriarchy. Much of this literature offers girls examples of unconventional female characters, and an impressive body of feminist scholarship has analyzed this literature over several decades. While this "strong girl" literature is significant and merits the attention it has garnered, so too is another group of books that engage the political not only on the level of the individual but also of the collective. This fiction focuses on the labor, abolitionist, and civil rights movements, and of particular interest in this essay, efforts by the women's movement to challenge male violence and to achieve educational, economic, and political equality for girls and women. The best of these novels link a common theme in children's literature—the development of individual identity—with the aims of the political novel—the exposure of structural oppression and the means by which it might be overcome. While I cannot fully analyze this fiction here, I will briefly analyze Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice, as it typifies an individualistic approach to female empowerment, and go on to discuss two exemplary feminist political novels: Trudy Krisher's Uncommon Faith, one of a group of books that represents the first wave of the women's movement, which focused its energies on achieving the vote for women; and Joan Bauer's Hope Was Here, which represents the continuing significance of political activism today. These novels stress that overcoming oppression is not an individual project but a collective one.

Although history would indicate that rights are not secured merely through individual self-actualization, representations of girls and women engaged in political struggle in specific historical conditions—some of which are successful as literature and some of which are not—have been critically neglected, perhaps because current trends in literary criticism favor fiction that represents the politics of individual subjectivity rather than that which focuses on political issues as they have traditionally been conceived. This emphasis on individual rather than collective change is characteristic not only of poststructuralist theory, but is visible also in the rejection of the (supposedly) monolithic categories of class in post– Marxism, and of gender in post–feminism. After critiquing these positions, this essay employs a materialist feminist approach attentive to representations not only of the politics of subjectivity but also of structural change in order to analyze representations of activism by and on behalf of girls and women designed to transform American society.

Individualism and Children's Literature

The stress on the collective in feminist political fiction confronts the celebration of the individual that is a core component of American ideology. The individualist analysis of society resulting from this ideology does not understand race, class, or gender as social institutions resulting in unearned, stratified social outcomes, but attributes failure or success to qualities internal to individuals. Meredith Cherland points out the emphasis on the individual in award-winning children's literature:

Older Newbery winners like Onion John and Blue Willow serve both to naturalize poverty, and to assign the responsibility for the relief of such poverty to kind individuals rather than to social programs. More recent Newbery winners have treated racism as something caused by the attitude of the individual (Maniac McGee, for example) and poverty as the result of individual bad luck (Shiloh). Class relations, furthermore, are presented as involving the individual's struggle, and the individual's sense of responsibility, and class restrictions are often presented, in these narratives, as being overcome through an individual's perspicacity or an individual's effort.

(124)

The phenomenon that Cherland discusses is also evident in literature that is understood to be relevant to feminism (if not influenced by it).¹ For example, Karen Cushman's Newbery Award-winning The Midwife...