Most leading characters in children’s books are male (unless it is a princess book), even if they are androgynous-looking animals. Girls are rarely the lead characters, they are usually observed by leading character, or act as a supporting character (this is true of children’s TV series and movies as well, girls make up just 25% of all the characters in animated films).
Book after book demonstrates to little girls that only boys are centre-stage, only boys have fun, only boys are interesting enough to write about (or to have adventures that don’t involve fairies).
Jan M. Ochman (1996)[8] studies some of the effects of non-gender role stereotypes in children’s literature on children’s self esteem. It was found that girls had a greater increase in self-esteem if they heard stories about an achieving girl rather than an achieving boy. Boys showed a comparable pattern; their self-esteem increased after they heard stories about an achieving boy rather than an achieving girl. This implies that if children hear stories about strong, competent boys, but not girls, the boys are most likely to experience an increase in self-esteem, whereas the girls’ self-esteem will not improve.
Radical Misfit Eeni B. Bella has written several brilliant posts about the “male default” in children’s books. She randomly choose books from one shelf on a the children’s bookcase that was in her local community centre to see what the ratio was for male to female characters. There were 28
books on the shelf. Sixteen of them had more male characters than female, two books had ONLY male characters, and 4 books had 1 or more characters that were definitely male and other characters of undetermined sex. Four books had an equal number of male and female characters. 10 books had male protagonists, 1 had a female protagonist (the rest didn’t have protagonists). No book had more male than female characters. 2 books had only male characters, and no books had only female characters. She noted that Dr Seuss rarely uses female characters, that Franklin books have predominantly male characters, and that Winnie thas only male characters except for Kanga.
he Pooh
Radical Misfit Eeni B Bella spent a year mastering the art of using “she” instead of “he” as the default pronoun. Most children were startled when they started hearing her do this, and she lists some of their responses in her post. I’ve reproduced a bit of her post here, but please check out her original post, it is really interesting:
I was watching a squirrel with a 3-year-old girl. We were sitting silent and still so as not to scare the animal, and occasionally whispering about the squirrel’s activity, when I said “Her tail is twitching” – the girl I was with loudly blurted out, “The squirrel has a vagina??” and the squirrel ran away! I hadn’t been talking about the squirrel’s sex directly at all!
When I’m out in nature with one particular 4-yr-old boy, and he points out a bird, and I say, e.g., “I wonder where she’s going,” he semi-snaps at me, “Maybe it’s a boy. You don’t know!” I reply with total calm, “Yup, maybe it’s a boy, maybe it’s a girl… we don’t know!”
Once I was in the sandbox with a 3-year-old boy who was watching a toad, and called it “he.” I called it “she”. The boy had no visible reaction, but called the toad “she” in his next sentence, as if he took it for granted that I knew the toad was female and was self-correcting. But 2 or 3 sentences later, he had reverted back to “he,” also without really seeming to notice what he was doing.
One time, I brought a 10-yr-old girl to the pet store so she could buy two pet mice. The mice were separated by sex, females in one cage, males in another. The girl knew she wanted two female mice and chose 2 feminine names for them, yet she and the saleswoman both referred to ALL of the mice in the female cage as “he” the entire time! e.g. “Oh look at that one; he’s so active! He’s stepping on his sister!” It was pretty amazing to witness.
A 3 year old boy asked me, in reference to a toy dinosaur, “Does he bite?”
I replied, looking thoughtfully at the dinosaur, “Hmm, I don’t know if she bites.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Did you say ‘she’??”
“Yup,” I replied. “Maybe that dinosaur is a girl!”
“No!” he said, laughing.
“Why not?”
“Because NO dinosaur is a girl!”
Tags: androcentric, animal characters, animals, childrens literature, default, female, female characters, gender, male, male centred, male characters, male is the default character
