Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (review)

Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a fast-paced and articulate, if not always rigorously scholarly, indictment of the “girlie-girl” culture of twenty-first-century North America. It is not, though, particularly about fairy tales.

Orenstein, like many journalists who write pop culture critiques, carefully balances personal narratives, such as her 3-year-old daughter’s consumer-culture requests (for Barbie dolls, pink clothes, and Disney Princess toys) and her own internal struggles with both hyperconsumerism in general and pink-princess-girliness specifically (she also occasionally includes her husband’s takes on the struggle), with statistics, studies, and interviews. Some of those narratives, such as the preschool that is deliberately reinforcing positive cross-gender interactions between children, are fascinating. Others, such as the description of the study that purports to show that male rhesus monkeys prefer “boys’ toys” while the females prefer feminine items, are patently ridiculous, implying not only that objects (such as toy police cars) are inherently gendered but that monkeys recognize a cooking pot as (a) a cooking pot and (b) for female use. (If this is true, then Planet of the Apes is a documentary, and we have some explaining to do about our zoos and laboratories.)

A good journalist offers both sides of an argument, though, and Orenstein is a good journalist. She talks about Jay Giedd, of the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, who argues that statistically there is as much difference within the genders as there is between them in terms of both interests and competence (71). It is a flaw that Giedd’s words, which come after such a lot of data (using that term loosely) on inherent sex differences, seem more like a throwaway comment than an effective rebuttal. As a mother trying to fight against a current social construction of femininity that treats girls as hypersexual objects, Orenstein occasionally undermines her own arguments against essentialism and consumerism, as when she admits to having spent a ridiculous sum of money on a “research” trip to the American Girl doll store.

I picked up the text partly because I had been hearing a lot about it from family members with young children and partly because I was thinking about offering the book as a course text for upper-year undergraduates in a children’s studies program. It worked relatively well there, with students experienced enough to question some of the more problematic references to sex work, socioeconomic status, the entertainment industry as a monolith, and so on. Cinderella Ate My Daughter might work in an introductory course in fairy-tale studies if excerpts were used rather than the entire book, primarily because the volume is much less about fairy tales than it is about the Walt Disney Corporation’s fairy tales and really more about Disney’s marketing campaigns and consumer goods than it is about the tales themselves. But Disney Ate My Daughter might have been too risky a title.

Orenstein does get into interesting fairy-tale territory when she leaves the Disney Store behind and explores the Brothers Grimm tales, sharing an English translation with the aforementioned 3-year-old as bedtime reading; this takes up, however, only one chapter of the book. Orenstein is surprised and disturbed by some of the hard-line but unpredictable violence but notes that Daisy (her daughter) seems to enjoy and engage with these stories. A flaw here is a significant overreliance on Bruno Bettelheim’s 1977 text, The Uses of Enchantment: it is pretty much the only academic text to which Orenstein refers in terms of fairy tales. Bettelheim’s particular psychoanalytic approach, which, among other weaknesses, interprets Sleeping Beauty as the “natural” lethargy of adolescent girls at the onset of menarche (225) and positions frogs as phallic symbols because frogs are “tacky,” “clammily disgusting,” and “repulsive” (291), has been treated as problematic in academic circles...