Well, this is a big subject right now what with articles in
the actual paper by YA stars like Louise O’Neill but I’m ignoring the pressure;
this was always going to be taking my life in my hands somewhat. But I have a
daughter who’s about to turn ten and I’m aware there are hard times a-comin’,
so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books which meant a lot to me around
that age.
I would classify helpful-in-being-a-girl books in three
broad ways.
One – the books which are just about being a person. Lots of
these are great precisely because they are about courage or honesty or kindness
or creativity and really gender is immaterial. I would like my daughter to know
that there are lots of great ways and things to be which have nothing to do
with being a girl. And yes, it’s nice as a girl when it happens to be a girl
Getting Things Done, whether it’s Mary Lennox or Claudia Kincaid or Kizzy
Lovell or Rosemary Brown. But any kid can also learn from Harry Potter or
Charlie Bucket or Indigo Casson or, for that matter, Smokey the Cow Horse.
A kind of subsect of these ones are the very many books out
there whose central friendship is between a boy and a girl and which treat this
as completely normal. I don’t think I ever even noticed that Ramona Quimby’s
best friend is a boy – Howie – as far as I recall the first time anyone makes a
thing out of it is in Ramona Forever,
the second-to-last book, and it’s an adult, Howie's annoying Uncle Hobart. Of
course to be truthful the last book, Ramona’s
World, sees Ramona go out and find herself a girl best friend but usually I
ignore that because I didn’t read this book till I was an adult so as far as
I’m concerned it’s not canon.
Susie Day does this too. I don’t want to spoiler up this
post but her first Pea book, the Book of
Best Friends, is all about it: gender is plopped down for us all to take a
look at but basically the tone is, yep, it’s there, and who cares when there
are much more interesting things to think about.
Then there are the books where it is an issue, and a character
has to be brave to have a friendship across gender lines – whether they happen
to be a boy, like lonesome Jess in Bridge
to Terabithia, or a girl like Rusty in Back
Home who nearly gets expelled just for having a word with a lad in the
street, but who is fairly defiant about it, ending up shinning down three
floors of scaffolding to meet him in a wood in the middle of the night. Both
heroes who understand that having a proper friend is worth catching a bit of
flak from morons.
Okay. Two – the books that rile you up on sexism, whether they mean to
or not. I write this as somebody who was an absolutely raging feminist as an
eight/nine/ten year old and I have to give full credit to (I think) the first
person to make me aware of an issue worth getting this angry over – I’m looking
at you, Enid.
Ah, George Kirrin. Who bests boys constantly in battles of
boyishness – heck, the girl can throw a lasso – and yet gets told off by the
virtually-never-wrong Julian for taking it all too far and not helping Anne
with the washing up (I'd like to see Julian explain himself to Miley Cyrus). I
don’t know quite what Enid Blyton was up to in her stories that feature boys
– she didn’t even really assign any power to those traditional girl roles, unlike
Arthur Ransome, who, besides writing the rollicking all-girl Amazon crew, was fairly clear on the fact that John might be the Swallows’
captain but Susan is the one who tells everyone what to do.
There were also the books which are explicitly about
battling sexism, like Nobody’s Family Is
Going To Change, by Louise Fitzhugh – all about a girl who wants to be a
lawyer, her little brother who wants to be a dancer, and their parents who
essentially think they’ve got their ambitions the wrong way round. This,
together with Blyton and the more old-fashioned books on my shelf, pointed out
to me what I might have missed otherwise till I was older: that some people
think girls are so different from boys that they ought to be doing different
things, most of the time. This is a hard lesson to learn about the world, but
books are a pretty good place to learn it.
I believe though I’m not a fantasy expert that this debate
over gender continues there today, with fierce advocates gunning for girls’
rights against knuckle-dragging authorial morons (sorry, was that not
conciliatory?) – Alanna of Trebond was, again, a big character for me and I’ve
got all four books lined up on my wardrobe floor waiting for summer holidays
when I’m going to hand them reverently over to my daughter. Because she needs
to read about a girl so determined to follow her own path that she spends eight
years disguised as a boy tougher than all the other boys, comes out as a woman
and makes everyone accept it and then just carries on duffing up men, sleeping
with the ones she fancies and saving the world.
And then there is Three, the category into which I put books
which are not necessarily feminist although they may be. These are the
realistic books which accept that not every person can be a kickass warrior who
doesn’t give a monkeys what her friends think, and that turning from a girl
child into the beginnings of a girl adolescent can be extremely hard exactly
because you don’t want to defy every convention and cliché and gender
expectation, even if you could.
The other book I’ve just bought, for the upcoming tenth
birthday (yes, okay, I buy her a lot of books and keep them in the wardrobe
till she’s old enough/I’ve read them) is Are
You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Margaret was part of pre-adolescence for
me, as for countless other kids since first being published in 1970. I notice
that when talking about it nobody – not even me – mentions what I remember
being the general consensus of my friends: that it was a massively embarrassing
read. There is an hagiographical atmosphere round Judy Blume at the moment
which I’m all for and I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, but at the time it
was a bit like reading Just 17: you
shrieked with laughter at the concept of girls doing chest-expanding exercises
together (individually with the bedroom door locked, telling no one, would have
been a different thing), and wondered if any girl ever really did look forward,
with excitement, to getting her first period. And while you blushed and giggled
you learned an awful, awful lot, not least that there were other girls out
there who were insecure about how they looked and how they were and how messy
everything was.
I also admire Judy for giving us Deenie, and a point of view I think is unusual in realistic MG
fiction – that of the girl who’s so damn pretty she’s supposed to be the thick
one. Generally we don’t like glamorous heroines in MG-land (I don’t think
I’m speaking only for myself) – unless they are justified by starting out plain
before a satisfying transformation, like Anne Shirley – homely as hell when she
arrives at Green Gables; the second hottest chick on campus by the time she
gets to university – or Harriet from Geek Girl who never dwells much on
the aesthetic affirmation that the rest of us assume girls get from becoming models.
What is more typical in an MG book is the suggestion that our MC has the raw
material, the promise. Anastasia Krupnik and Meg from A Wrinkle In Time,
both clearly set to turn into their better-looking mothers a bit further down
the track – even old George Kirrin has those noteworthy blue eyes. Always a
sign, like red hair (see almost all these pictures).
I seem to have descended into not-very-feminist territory
here, suggesting that I am uncomfortable with gorgeous heroines. Let my
daughter, and all our daughters, not dwell upon such matters, judging by looks
whether in fiction or reality. Let them instead be kind and silly and loyal and
independent and defiant and responsible and brave like Pippi Longstocking,
Dicey Tillerman, Mina Smiths, Alanna of Trebond, Lesley Burke, Anastasia Krupnik, Meg Murry,
Anne Shirley, Pea Llewellyn, Rusty Dickinson and all the rest of them, and plenty
of boy characters too. When they struggle with changes and the hard bits of
growing up, like Margaret Simon, let them not think they are the only ones
struggling. And let them remember that books are a great place to go when you want to try out something different, or to be how you used to be, or when you need some joy in your life.
