Small Feminist Book Club
Emma is a communications strategist and mum of two. In 2019 she set up the Small Feminist Book Club; an instagram account which reviews kids books with strong and diverse female representation.
Kids’ books have a lot to answer for. Don’t get me wrong - there are loads of great ones out there and they give our children a love of reading, expand their imaginations and help them understand the world. But in my experience they are heavily, stereotypically gendered and lacking in representation.
When I first started reading to my daughter I was shocked. Picked at random most stories were about boys. Many didn’t feature a single girl. If there was a female she’d be a background character, voiceless and pink. Or the mum. Or a princess if she was a lead.
I started changing the gender of characters as I read the books to get some kind of balance. And then I started going through the books before I got them out. I’d take half an hour speed reading dozens of books in order to leave with a few that had even basic female representation. And that really fucked me off. It shouldn’t be that hard. And I had better things to do. Like watch Season 12 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
I starting ranting about this to a friend who pointed out that there is a whole series of feminist books out there. And yes, The Little Feminist/ Rebel Girls series are great and much needed. But they are fact based, and very overt about the feminist agenda which makes them niche. A feminist aisle in the bookshop or library is not going to fix this problem.
We need more lead female characters.
Not just princesses. It’s great that princesses are getting an overhaul (a la Princess Pearl in Zog, or Princess Pinecone in The Princess and the Pony), but modernising princesses is not the answer. They may be fierce but they are still princesses - something our daughters will never ever get to be. Banish them! Banish them all!
And how about having two female leads together?! It’s so rare. If there are two lead characters best case scenario it’s one female one male whereas two lead males can be found everywhere.
We need more female representation.
All too often girls are a minority.
One token girl in the background
(Keith the Cat/ Pirates love underpants). Or no girls at all
(Dear Zoo/ The Gruffalo). Books with animal/monster / vehicle characters are particularly bad for this. Most of these characters are given a gender and for the most part, they are male.
Language has a lot to answer for. ‘He’ is supposed to be the generic. I often catch myself referring to random dogs/ farmyard animals/ soft toys or whatever as ‘he’. But for the most part, it translates as male and is therefore incredibly exclusive. When we refer to most beings as ‘he’ we unwittingly make it a male world where to be female is to be ‘other’. And kids’ books do it all the time.
And we need a more diverse portrayal of female (and male) characters.
Teachers are nearly always female. Most other jobs found in kids’ books (milkmen, postmen - there even a gender-neutral term for these jobs..? - builders, pirates, farmers, police officers, scientists, police officers, firefighters, astronauts, professors) are given to the boys.
Baddies, robbers, and monsters are most often male.
The maverick characters are most often male. The sensible, rule followers are female.
Big, strong animal characters are often male. Small, delicate ones female.
Compounded together (and along with female representation in nursery rhymes and TV shows - both also pretty shit) they send a very strong message to impressionable minds about boys and girls and their place in the world. It’s bad for girls and it’s bad for boys too because it is limiting for both.
Things are starting to change for the better. But I feel like there’s a long way to go before the balance is redressed and 50% of any given bookshelf has stories with positive female representation.
Until then it requires more of a conscious effort. Researching books, leafing through them, getting recommendations.... Or, if you can’t be arsed with that, you’ll find a visual list and reviews of books with positive female role models in my @small_feminist_book_club instagram feed