Assumptions of gender

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Every Day sounds like an awesome YA version of Quantum Leap.  I'll have to check it out.

Your comment about thinking of the narrator of Every Day as male because he/she falls in love with a straight girl, though it sounds like the book is aiming for no assignment of gender, made me think of two things:

On the YA and older front, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness is an interesting exploration of how deeply gender assumptions and biases are ingrained in human perception.  It follows a human ambassador, Genly Ai, who is sent on a peacekeeping mission to a planet on which there is no gender.  Every person on the planet Gethen is both male and female, with the ability to shift between genders at will.  Because of this, there is no gender bias -- who would you be biased towards, who against?  Genly tries to work within this new frame of understanding, but keeps making assumptions about his hosts based on the gender they are currently presenting, and is thrown for a loop when they change.  An interesting LeGuin note: in an essay written a number of years later, LeGuin comments on how many of her early science fiction books feature male protagonists.  Even as a female author, even when writing about gender directly, she defaulted to the male point of view because that was what she was used to reading in science fiction by other authors.

On the board book front, there's the wonderful 10 Minutes Till Bedtime, which has become one of our go-to books when I'm home alone with the girls and need to cut their fingernails.  Eleanor can read the whole thing aloud, and the pictures contain enough detail on each page (finding all those numbered hamsters) to keep both girls occupied until I'm done and can read them something longer.  The kid in 10 Minutes Till Bedtime could be either a boy or a girl: fuzzy-haired, bright-eyed, in overalls and pajamas with pants, but in no other way gendered.  Still, and although I often read her aloud as a girl, Eleanor and Isabel default to the male pronoun (actually, so do you, in your post about the book).  We've written about this tendency at length before (here, here, here, and here); still, I find it striking.  And I wonder, in my girl-heavy house, why it persists.

Love, Annie

Good authors, more good books

Dear Annie,

Such good choices of books about school!  I would add two to your list -- one from each author you mention:

Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathman is a hilarious send-up of boring elementary school assemblies.  Officer Buckle speaks to kids on safety tips and puts them to sleep with his delivery. One day he brings along Gloria, a dog who has wandered into the police station.  Gloria is a natural ham, acting out the oblivioius Officer Buckle's safety tips behind his back.  "Never leave a thumbtack where you might sit on it," inspires Gloria to jump in the air with a pained expression on her face.  The audience loves her, and Officer Buckle becomes hugely popular.  He discovers what she's been doing when a news crew does a story on them. "Do not go swimming during electrical storms," he says, while Gloria fluffs her fur in a shocked-looking way and the kids cheer.  Officer Buckle is hurt and offended and stops his speaking tours.  All comes out right in the end, with the two remaining fast friends.

I tend to discourage this one as a book for pre-schoolers because knowing what an assembly is makes it so much funnier.  But it's a good laugh for anyone.


Chester's Way, by Kevin Henkes, isn't a school story, but it's the book that introduces the indomitable Lilly. Chester and Wilson have a very quiet friendship filled with charmingly rigid habits.  It makes them both happy, in a quiet sort of way.  Then the flamboyant Lilly moves into the neighborhood.  They can't handle her at all, until her over-the-top behavior scares some bullies away from the quiet boys.  They all become fast friends:

She goes on to the plastic purse, which may be her best moment, and Lilly's Big Day, which disappointingly emphasizes her overbearingness and leaves out her conscience.  And of course good old Lilly is the big sister in Julius the Baby of the World.

Both these authors put lots of thought, skill and humor into all the illustrations, offering new discoveries on many re-readings.  A delight.

All this talk of school somehow has made my mind wander to math.  Will post on two good stories about math next time.

Love,

Deborah

School books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong direction by asking about first day of school books which depict school as something to look forward to rather than to fear.  As you say about community involvement in your post about The Concrete Lorry, maybe the idea that school is a positive thing is best absorbed through a good story.

Two good school stories we've been rereading lately come from authors we've written about regularly: Peggy Rathmann (Good Night, Gorilla; 10 Minutes Till Bedtime), and Kevin Henkes (Julius, the Baby of the World, Kitten's First Full Moon, A Good Day).

From Rathmann: Ruby the Copycat.  Ruby is a new girl in Miss Hart's class, with Rathmann's trademark fuzzy hair and lit-up face (see the unspecifically gendered child in 10 Minutes Till Bedtime.  Or the gorilla.).

The book covers Ruby's first week of class.  She's seated behind Angela, "the girl with the pretty red bow in her hair," and is so entranced by her that Ruby can't help but copy everything Angela does: she goes home for lunch and returns with a bow in her own hair, tells the class that she, too, was just flower girl at her sister's wedding, and essentially plagiarizes a poem that Angela writes.  Angela is at first flattered, but becomes increasingly upset by Ruby's attention.  Miss Hart gently intervenes, and after a little backsliding, Ruby is encouraged to claim her own interests and act like herself.  School is the social environment where all of this plays out, and the influence of peers is clear.  Miss Hart is a warm and accepting presence, who ultimately helps Ruby shine in the eyes of her classmates.  Eleanor is very much into the social dynamics of the story, and Isabel loves to point out the pictures of cats on the wall.

From Henkes: Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.  We've mentioned Lilly before, but have not yet given this book its due.  Lilly, who appears in several other books as well, is a confident, outspoken, dramatic child (well, mouse).  She begins this story in deep adoration of her teacher, Mr. Slinger, who does seem pretty cool:

Mr. Slinger was as sharp as a tack.

He wore artistic shirts.

He wore glasses on a chain around his neack.

And he wore a different colored tie for each day of the week.

Instead of "Greetings, students"

or "Good morning, pupils," 

Mr. Slinger winked and said, "Howdy!"

For a while, inspired by his coolness and the rainbow-striped shirt Mr. Slinger wears in one illustration, I thought Henkes was subtly indicating that Lilly's favorite teacher is gay.  I was wrong: in Lilly's Big Day, he marries a female teacher at the school, and Lilly lobbies hard to be their flower girl.  (I'll admit, I was a little disappointed.)

Lilly gets a new, awesome purple plastic purse, shiny jingly quarters, and sparkly sunglasses one weekend, and brings them in to school to show off.  She can't keep quiet about them, and Mr. Slinger confiscates them until the end of the day.  Lilly is furious, and draws a mean picture of Mr. Slinger, sneaking it into his bag at the end of the day.  Of course, he leaves her a very sweet note in her returned purse, and she feels TERRIBLE. This is why it's a good book to help discuss guilt over doing something which hurts someone else's feelings.  Lilly apologizes, and draws a new picture.  Her mom writes Mr. Slinger a letter, and her dad bakes cheese balls to bring in. All is forgiven, but the feelings are deeply felt.

School here is exciting, social, and full of learning.  It's Lilly's main focus throughout the book: the first sentence is "Lilly loved school."  All the adults, teacher and parents, are understanding but firm -- no one makes excuses for Lilly, and they help her make amends.  Henkes also has a nice comic-book-like way of drawing some of the pages, with multiple images and lots of little throwaway dialogue lines or captions in the pictures.  It's a fun book to peruse -- way too long for Isabel to sit through at the moment, but one of Eleanor's favorites.

So it's back to school for us all!

Love, Annie

On the Road

Dear Annie,

I think you just have to forget about packing lighter when you have small children.  Not possible.

When we spent our one month a year in Maine when the girls were little, we'd mail a couple of boxes of books and toys to ourselves in Maine before we left D.C.  That said, local libraries are a real asset.  When you guys come to Maine in August, we'll introduce you to both the Brownfield Library, which was much smaller when our girls were little, and the Fryeburg Library which introduced us to, among other things, Webster and Arnold.

I spend a fair amount of time at this time of year recommending books for people to take with them on trips.  One of my big favorites for people closer to Isabel's age, but Eleanor would still enjoy it, is
10 Minutes till Bedtime. I remember when your mother (my sister) discovered it -- possibly before Eleanor was born -- so I suspect you're quite familiar with it.   It's by Peggy Rathmann, who wrote the wonderful wordless Good Night Gorilla.  The basic plot of this one is so wackily wonderful: a boy's father tells him he has ten minutes till bedtime, and his pet hamster organizes a tour group of hamsters (ten of them wearing numbered shirts) to watch the process.  Suspense grows as one wonders if the boy will be ready by deadline, and if the hamsters will be gone by the time dad shows up for the good night kiss.  Each turn of the page brings the reader a minute closer, and the pictures become increasingly chaotic.  For fans of Good Night Gorilla, there are many references to that book, including the gorilla and her banana.  It's an I-Spy book for toddlers: there's lots to look for.  And once one is reading numbers, one can identify behavior of different hamsters: #10 is always talking, #9 is always the highest on the page.  One can hand it to a child strapped into a car seat, and she can get absorbed for a while.

Less inspired, but useful for toddlers, are small lift-the-flaps.  My favorite in this category is
Open the Barn Door.  It's little and easy to put in a parental pocket or purse.  There's one flap per page, each hiding a different farm animal, but it maintains interest.

Moving on to Eleanor, you've got the advantage of chapter books: less bulk, more time-consuming.  And as your pile of books attests, paperback picture books don't take up too much space.   About a half dozen of Robert Munsch's books (best known for Paper Bag Princess: we've written about him here and here) have been issued in tiny paperbacks: about three and a half inches square, but readable, with full text.  Another put-in-parent's-pocket size.

Enjoy your vacation, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love,

Deborah

Shocking?

Dear Annie,

So here we have a study of a lot of books published in the 20th century.  These hard-working researchers discover that children's books seem to reflect public attitudes about gender.  The male figures take up more space than the female ones.  The ratio gets worse in the Fifties, one of the bigger back-sliding decades for women's rights.  And the ratio gets up to "close to parity" in the Nineties.  No word on what's happened in the past ten years.

This is only 20 seconds, and I can't resist putting it in here:



It's hard for me to work up much surprise at these findings.  It sounds kind of common sense. Books are part of the popular culture.  Sometimes they help shape it; usually they reflect and reinforce it.  And we all know that popular culture leaves a huge amount to be desired.   It took me a long time to understand that Barbie wasn't who was going to warp my daughters' brains; it was every billboard and every TV show and every passing stranger saying, "aren't you pretty -- who's your boyfriend?'  The biggest anti-warping influence, of course, is family  And unlike billboards and passing strangers and kids in the playground, books are something parents have a fair amount of control over -- at least in the age group this study was talking about (pre-school to third grade).

We all pick and choose what we want to read with kids.  Good engaging books come with many different kinds of content.  We read the books we like.  If we feel a gender or an ethnic group is getting short shrift, we go find some books to offset that.  We discuss the less-than-perfect aspects of otherwise wonderful books.  We help create critical thinkers.

The part of that study that I find more interesting to explore is the question of animal characters, which the researchers found to be much more lopsidedly male than human ones.  I think that many of us have a default setting with animals (and this goes for passing drivers too -- but that's another discussion): they're all "he" until proven otherwise.  I just had an interesting time doing a little Bow-Wow research online.  You and Isabel have given me a much deeper appreciation of the delights of the
Bow-Wow books for toddlers.  I went looking for Bow-Wow tonight to use as an example of a character whose gender a parent can change pretty easily: few or no words in these books, one could just start calling him "she."  What I discovered is that I'm the one who assigned "he" to Bow-Wow.  The authors' wonderful website appears to go out of its way not to mention gender.  And the dog who is credited as "the inspiration for Bow-Wow" is a female Australian terrier named Ruby. 


Good Night Gorilla is another almost-wordless book which would be easy to change to a female main character. In this case, the jacket copy identifies the gorilla as male -- but why don't we ever think of her as a girl? (Peggy Rathmann, by the way, is also the creator of Gloria the dog in Officer Buckle and Gloria, which you mentioned in your last post.)


Sheep in a Jeep Sheep in a Jeep is another one -- are they all male? All female? Hmmm.  What does it take for an ambiguously gendered animal to be a she?
 

Thoughts to explore.

Love,

Deborah

Beyond Words

Dear Annie,

A delightful Dutch book arrived from a publisher this week, reminding me just how varied wordless books can be. This one, called
The Surprise, by Sylvia van Ommen, follows a serious and industrious sheep while it takes a bath, rides a motorbike to go to the store, buys red dye, dyes its wool (while it’s still on), shears itself, etc., all the way through knitting a gift for a friend. It’s both whimsical and very clear and straightforward.

Peggy Rathmann is the queen of toddler/preschooler wordless books, with both
Good Night Gorilla, a hilarious and simple story about a mass zoo escape (the goal is to sleep in the zoo-keeper's house), and
10 Minutes till Bedtime about a boy getting ready for bed while a tour group of hamsters complicates the process. It’s all in the details, and there are lots of them. You can spend many minutes, if not hours, discovering all the things going on in each picture. And it has a number of references in it to Good Night Gorilla.

In Quentin Blake's
Clown, a group of toys is thrown out, and the clown doll sets out to find a new home for all of them. He has setbacks along the way, but ultimately finds a family in need of some cheering up, and they all end up happily together. Blake -- perhaps best-known for his illustrations of Roald Dahl books -- puts lots of emotion into this one.

David Wiesner does more complex, weirder and (sometimes) darker wordless books, but for an older child, they're quite wonderful. In
Tuesday, frogs float out of a swamp one evening on lily pads and have adventures in town, turning back into their land-based selves at the end of the evening. The pictures are amazing, bordering on the eerie, with details one can keep finding on re-readings. And his
Flotsam puts a washed-up camera at the feet of a boy exploring the beach. He develops the film in the camera, finding fantastic pictures of magical underwater worlds, and self-portraits of other children who have found the camera. At the end, he takes a picture of himself, and sends the camera back into the waves.

I'll end at the ocean still, on another younger book.
Wave, by Suzy Lee, shows a girl's day at the beach, with all the wonder and occasional overwhelmingness of the waves. Lovely.

So now that I've listed these, I'm wondering how you as the reader in the parent/child group, feel about wordless books. A welcome change? An extra task (now I've got to make up the story too...)? Something that can be read without you around? What do you think of them?

Love,

Deborah