The Girl Effect and the Books I've Been Reading

Click on the link below to find out about The Girl Effect. It's maddening, inspiring, motivating. Today is the day for all bloggers to blog on this topic. Please excuse the self-indulgent/ranting quality to this off-the-cuff blog entry.

http://www.taramohr.com/girleffectposts/ 

I've been doing a pile of reading, and most of it is truly great stuff. But I always try to track the roles of girls and women in the material; in effect, to track the Girl Effect. In probably 80% of the books I've read in the past 2 years, female roles are passive, worshipworthy, ancillary, or non-existant. My most recent review is a case in point. The Hobbit and the Rings Trilogy, are books about guys, guy bonding. There are some important women's roles, maybe two (Eowyn and Galadriel), but for the most part women are minimized. There are no orc women, for example, and none of the elf warriors are women.

[RANT ALERT] In the most telling scene, able-bodied women are sent to hide in the caves while frail old men and wee boys are sent to fight. It's senseless! Faced with the end of humanity, half of the fighting force is sent to hide. This absurdity was picked up by Peter Jackson who shows the frightened faces of perfectly able women, helpless and segregated. None stand up to fight. Even Eowyn ends up in the caves. This is the ultimate in marginalization.

But I digress. What I find in my reading of children's literature is that even in books totally centered on girls, the books are more about training for stereotyped adult womanhood than they are about girls finding out how to do and be on their own terms. A case in point is Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. She is highly flamboyant, one of a kind (oh that red hair!), but most of her drama focuses on problems of romance. Alone among many heroines, Anne holds out for a career--but only until she gets married. In the second to last book, so sadly, we find that Anne's writing is trivialized and she herself views it as unimportant, compared to making Gilbert and her children happy.

OK, ok, I'm not down-grading motherhood, wifeliness, or any of that. But why does it have to be all there is? Think of Nellie Bly sailing the oceans traversing many lands. She's seen as a footnote in history, if at all. After marriage, female achievement wanes, at least in most of the books on my list.

Another case in point is everyone's favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder. She ends up deep in debt and deep in grief while Almonzo continues on his merry extravagances. It's not her place to complain to or correct her husband, repeating the pattern of her mother's life. But we block it out. No one remembers this part of the books.

I keep coming back to Pippi Longstocking. She's strong, inventive, smart, funny. It follows, then, that she is ugly, boyish, and somewhat of an outcast. Still, I'd rather go Pippi's way than Laura Wilder's or Anne Shirley's way. Ironically, one of the few books that I feel truly represents women as full characters, people of depth, was written by a man. I'm referring to Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. The women in those four books are well drawn and full. They do not march lockstep down a pathway of expectations. And they bear their own consequences like men, or like people.

That's enough. I keep searching for value in the books I read, and most of them have plenty. The Rings Trilogy in particular is a fantastic piece of writing and leaves me richer and happier and sadder and so many other things. I laughed with Anne Shirley and wondered at the sights Laura saw. But I'm looking for just a little bit more, and if I find it, I'll be sure to let you know.