Children learn
about the world through many means; observing it for themselves, through
parents and peers, and of course through the books they are exposed to. Picture
books especially are crucial to the development of a child’s values and their
view of the world, other people, as wells as themselves. (Fine 2010, 217) And
because these books are mostly written and illustrated by adults they,
intentionally or not, have values and prejudices attached to them.
When I took a walk
through my local public library’s children’s section I had an eerie sense of
déjà vu. Was it just me, or did a lot of these protagonists have something in
common? Most of these picture books had little boys on the cover! I wish I
could say it was surprising, but it wasn’t. I had to actively hunt out the
books that had a girl as the main character (not just a background character or
sidekick), and even those stories where written by males and feature
stereotypical gender behavior. In this essay I will analyze the representations
of gender two children’s picture books: one with a male protagonist and one
with a female protagonist. For the sake of simplicity, I am focusing on books
with a strong narrative and a human protagonist.
First up is a
typical picture book: How I Became a
Pirate, written by Melinda Long and illustrated by David Shannon and was
published in 2003. The story is written in first person, from the point of view
of a little blonde boy named Jeremy, who gets picked up by a pirate ship while
at the beach. He soon realizes being a pirate is not all it’s cracked up to be,
so goes home to soccer practice. Long’s biography in the back of the books
says, “How I Became a Pirate evolved
from a girlhood spent burying treasure in her backyard,” and yet she chose to
write this story from a boy’s point of view. Why? Alleen Pace Nilson writes in
her 1971 article, “Women in Children’s Literature,” that in a course about
writing for children, “the instructor told [them] that the wise author writes
about boys, thereby insuring himself a maximum audience, since only girls will
read a book a bout a girl, but both boys and girls will read about a boy.”
(918) This is part of the idea that there are certain activities for boys and
certain activities for girls, which, according to Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, we learn at a very
early age from parents, peers, and you guessed it: media including books.
(2010, 214)
The only
representation of a woman in How I Became
a Pirate is Jeremy’s mother, who is tending to Jeremy’s infant sister – all
of the pirates are, of course, men. The message is clear: women are mothers
that stay at home and men are pirates that sail the high seas and have
adventures. The activities Jeremy does in the book are typically male. Some of
the activities Jeremy does with the pirates include eating, playing soccer,
staying up late, sailing a ship through a storm, and burying treasure, which are
all in stark contrast with our next book.
The next book we
will look at is Imogene’s Antlers, which
was written and illustrated by David Small and was published in 1985. The story
is about a little girl, Imogene, who wakes up one day to find she has a massive
pair of antlers on her head. The doctor and school principle come to visit, and
have no suggestions, Imogene then finds uses for her antlers, but when she
wakes up the next day the antlers are gone and have been replaced by a
peacock’s tail.
I will start from
the top. On the very first page we see Imogene’s room, which is filled with
stereotypically feminine objects: a frilly pink lamp, a tea set, a dollhouse. Imogene’s
activities could also be construed as stereotypically feminine. She helps in
the kitchen, sits in the garden, practices piano, and goes to bed on time. She
is surprisingly passive and indifferent throughout the story. It’s her brother
Norman who suggests Imogene has turned into a miniature elk and the kitchen
maid who uses Imogene’s antlers as a drying rack. This is in contrast with
Jeremy’s role in How I Became a Pirate.
Where Imogene is indifferent to her antlers, Jeremy gets to decide that he
doesn’t want to be a pirate.
This passivity is
also extended to Imogene’s mother, whose entire character is comprised of her
fainting at any mention of Imogene’s antlers. Out of her ten appearances in the
book, Imogene’s mother can be seen fainting three times and in a fourth
illustration she is lying in bed from the shock and in her other appearances she
is worrying in the background.
This kind of
narrowing of roles is not uncommon. In Alleen Pace Nilson’s study of fifty-eight
picture books, twenty-five of those books had pictures of women and of those
twenty-five twenty-one had images with a woman in an apron. (1971, 918) Is this
the role models we are giving young girls? An experiment conducted by Eleanor
Ashton at Worcester State University in 1983 suggests that children are more
likely to play with gender stereotypical toys after reading a book containing
gender stereotypes. (43) Therefore, these picture books are yet another way for
young girls to internalize gender stereotypes, as well as enforcing what kind
of behavior is acceptable for what gender.
I don’t want to
give the impression that there aren’t great picture books that star girls or
unconventional gender norms and there are more all the time. But, the
overwhelming majority of picture books feature a boy and confine women to
mothers, sisters, or teachers. It’s with this in mind that I decided I wanted
to write and illustrate a little picture book of my own. I wanted to focus on
non-traditional gender activities, as well as affirming that femininity is not
weak or bad. I also focused on the importance of speaking out against gender
stereotypes because children often pigeonholed into stereotypical behavior and
activities by a need of being accepted by peers. (Fine 2010, 218)
The lack of
non-stereotypical gender portrayals is a contributing factor to the
internalized sexism that plagues every female in western world. But of course
these issues are just a reflection of the hegemony in our society. According to
James Lull in his article on the subject, hegemony is a means of making
oppression seem “natural,” so that we are actually buying into the system. He
writes, “hegemony implies a willing agreement by people to be governed by
principles, rules, and laws they believe operate in their best interests, even
though in actual practice they may not.” (2003, 63) In the context of gender
and children’s literature, these picture books are unintentionally helping to
normalize gender roles and helping us to internalize these roles from an early
age so we don’t question this hegemonic structure.
That,
unfortunately, paints a rather bleak picture of our society. However, I think
that change is possible, and in the case of picture books, there have been a
rise of books with female protagonists and non-stereotypical gender roles. I
would urge you to be aware of the all the gendered queues around you and turn a
critical eye to the world.
Bibliography
Ashton, Eleanor. "Measures of Play Behavior: The Influence of
Sex-role Stereotyped Children's Books." Sex Roles 9, no. 1 (January 1983): 43-47. Accessed March 29, 2013.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00303108.
Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of
Gender. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Long, Melinda. How I Became
a Pirate. Illustrated by David Shannon. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003.
Lull, James, Gail Dines, and Jean H. Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media. 2nd ed. N.p.: Sage Pulbishers,
2003.
Pace Nilsen, Alleen. "Women in Children's Literature." College English 32, no. 8 (1971):
918-26. Accessed March 12, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/375631.
Small, David. Imogene's
Antlers. New York City: Crown Publishers, 1985.
