Are there feminist role models in children's literature?

In this episode, Molly and Cristen talk about feminist role models in children's literature, specifically citing three beloved children's series as examples of literature that provides strong role models for girls.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From House top Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Christen. This is Molly. Molly. We've got

(00:20):
to start off this podcast episode with a shout out
to some very cool fans of ours we met recently. True,
we met Lindsay and Doug who are in Atlanta, our
hometown right now, performing in the production of looking Glass Alice,
which is based in Chicago, and we went to see

(00:41):
it and it was awesome. Yes, we both absolutely adorned it. Yes,
Lindsay and Doug incredibly talented folks and we were very
excited to get to see them perform. And looking Glass Alice,
as you might guess, is loosely based on Alice in Wonderland.
And Molly and I ran across a really interesting article

(01:03):
in Smithsonian Magazine discussing Louis Carroll in his relationship to
the real life Alice. And by Louis Carroll, I do
mean the real life Reverend Charles Ludwidge Dodgson. Yes, that's right, Christen,
but for for sake of easiness, let's just call him
Louis Carroll for the rest of this brief discussion of him,

(01:23):
because because Reverend Charles Ludwige Dodge hard to say a lot. Okay.
So in eighteen sixty five, Kristen, as you know, Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland was published, an immediate hit. Um Lewis
Carroll was pretty well known in a lifetime as being,
you know, this Victorian bachelor who wrote this book. He
had great relationships with children. Uh. In nineteen thirty two

(01:44):
he was honored by Columbia University. The real Alice Ladell,
who he made up the story for, traveled to New
York City to get the award. She was honored for
awaking with her girlhood's charm, the ingenious fancy of a
mathematician familiar with imaginary quantity, stirring him to feel his
complete understanding of the heart of a child. And I
think that's a really you know, well put way of

(02:06):
why people still love Alice in Wonderland, because it is
this heart of a child going through this weird, funky
world that nothing seems quite right. But I mean nothing
seems quite right when you are that age, I think,
and not only is it an enduring book for children,
but it's also something that adults read as well and enjoy.
Um But there's also this darker side to Lewis Carroll

(02:29):
and his relationship with Alice, because as this article in
Smithsonian explains, and many other scholars have gone back and
looked at this as well, but they've called him the question,
this relationship between Dodgson and the real Alice Liddell. Right
as the article puts it, that that Columbia University Acclay

(02:50):
was pretty much the last time that the book was
viewed without a lot of sexual confusion, because the very
next year there was a writer named A. M. E.
Goldschmidt who um wrote an essay called Alice in Wonderlands
psycho Analyzed, and the whole thing is about how Lewis
Carroll had the sexual desire for Alice. That the book
is just rampant with all this hidden pedophilia that you know,

(03:13):
every single thing that Alice does is somehow a symbol
of repressed sexuality. And there's some evidence acca Smithsonian that
this was supposed to be a parody of the psychoanalysts,
you know, kind of vogue that was going on at
the point. But for whatever reason, these kind of um
viewpoints stuck well. And there's one piece of evidence that

(03:35):
some will point to to say that Dodgson had some
kind of sexual obsession with Alice, and it's this photograph
that he took over where she's dressed up like a
beggar and she is partially nude. Although Smithsonian also points
out that Dodgson took a ton of photographs throughout his life,
over three thousand photographs, and about half of them are

(03:55):
of children. And then about thirty of those pictures or
the kids are depicted nude or semi nude. But then
the magazine explains, uh, you know, as all of our
red flags are going up saying whoa Lois Carroll child pornographer? Um.
He Also, the magazine also points out that in Victorian
era those kind of nude depictions of children were not

(04:16):
uncommon at all. Right, They're seen his portrayal of innocence,
portrayal of you know, angelic art. That this was a
time in a child's life to preserve and so you know,
they make a big point of saying this was not
out of the norm. The Ladell's, by all account, love
the photograph that he took of Alice. But there was
some sort of snag with the family. You know, he

(04:37):
um took many children, not just the Ladell children al
And he would he had no children of his own,
so we take them out for picnics. He would take
them rowing on boats. He was sort of an adopted uncle.
He was seen as a fun, friendly uncle. But there
was some ripped with the family that caused him not
to see the girls of ladel family after the book

(04:58):
was written. And while the popular rumor would be that
it was because of some sort of untoward advances that
he made towards Alice, uh, there's also a possibility that
he could have had an affair with Mrs Liddell, with
the nanny with the older girls. Um, something probably along

(05:18):
the way happened, but we're not sure and it doesn't
necessarily implicate Lewis Carroll as a pedophile. But it makes
me wonder, though, Molly, if discerning parents out there who
know this possible backstory to Lewis Carroll and his relationship
with a real life Alice, I wonder if there's been

(05:38):
some sort of um small backlash towards sharing these books
with children because of maybe these sexual undertones that they
weren't aware of. Well, think about the most recent Alice
in Wonderland that came out, the one directed by Tim Burton.
I think that one was directed towards adults. Yes, I
think that because people can see so much you know,
psychedelic groov nous for lack of or term in Alice

(06:01):
in Wonderland that you know, there is sort of a
backlash against sharing them with children. But um, and I
think that that's why I liked this article so much.
Is you know, I remember reading that book and just
thinking it was pretty cool, crazy book, and then when
you find out all this backstory is just like whoa.
I mean, even when I was watching the play, it's
you know, it's impossible to be distracted because it involved

(06:22):
acrobatics and the tea party every now and then you
remember like, oh, yeah, this is supposed to be like
very subversive, and I'm I'm not getting it or I
am getting it and screeping me out right. Um. And
now listeners might be wondering at this point, uh, why
we're going on and on about Lewis Carrol when the
question we're supposed to be talking about is whether or

(06:42):
not there are feminist icons in children's lit. And I
think this discussion is a really good example of how
you might be able to take children's literature and really
analyze it to the point that it might devalue the
original text. And I think it might be a good

(07:03):
starting place for us to really shift from Alice, who.
I don't know that we could call Alice a feminist icon.
I mean, it's a fantastic book, but I don't know
what you consider Alice a feminist icon, Molly. I see
a lot of feminist elements center she. You know, she's
on this journey by herself. Yes, she's very independent. She's independent,
she's very clever. She makes a goal of becoming a

(07:25):
queen and sets out to meet it. But isn't that
a negative gold how to be give a queen? Well?
Now see that's the thing is can you unpack it
too much? As a kid? I was just like, oh, man,
here's this spunky girl who's going through a crazy world.
I want to have crazy adventures too. So, and especially
when you're watching the play, which, as I said, involves

(07:45):
all this acrobatics. Our fan Lindsay, who plays Alice, does
all these cool tricks circus tricks. She has circus training.
I mean when you see that, I would think of
you're a little girl in solid You'd be like, man,
that girl is awesome, Yeah, very strong, very powerful. As
you said, Christ, they're going to move away from Alice
because you know, it's it's just been read into far
too much in my opinion, and it's as you said,

(08:08):
it's hard to separate all the analysis from perhaps the
text itself. So we want to talk about other favorites
from our childhood literature reading days and whether the girls
and women we encountered within those books were in fact
some sort of feminist role models, you know, did they
help make us the girls who grew up to be
stuff mom never told you. Now, there was a study
that Molly and I found by Manjari Saying called Gender

(08:31):
Issues in Children's Literature, and it basically theorizes that there
is a general gender bias in the language, content, and
illustrations in a large number of children's books because, first
of all, she says that a majority of the books
are dominated by male figures. Um For instance, there was

(08:51):
an analysis titles of children's books that found male names
represented nearly twice as often as female names, and then
you often and have the characterizations of boys as being
more strong, adventurous, independent and capable, all girls with a
sweeter naive, conforming, and more dependent characters. So seeing this study,

(09:13):
Molly and I kind of wanted to reverse a little
bit and think about the girls that we read growing
up and um also with contemporary children's books today, whether
or not there's been more of an effort to um
alleviate that gender bias, suppose a gender bias, and we

(09:33):
ran across then an article, a recent article in the
Guardian newspaper. It was written by a mom who has
a young son and a young daughter and she was
trying to she basically tested out feminist children's books on
her kids. Right, she noticed that her boy was getting
a little too stereotypically boyish, didn't want to invite girls

(09:54):
to his birthday party, and the girl was turning into
you know, pink princess extraordinary, and so she was like,
what can I read them that will subvert all these
things that they must be subconsciously picking up somewhere. So
the article is her adventure through what she calls feminist
books for five year olds, and she has pretty mixed
success she reads the kids Peppy long Stocking. She reads

(10:17):
them a coloring book called Girls Are Not Chicks, which
included one line when she stopped chasing the dangling carrot
of conventional femininity, she was finally able to save her
being a woman. And as a five year old girl,
I know that I would have understood every word of
that and probably taken it to heart. All I can
hope is that since that was a coloring book, you
got to color a carrot, because I mean, that was

(10:37):
all I could cling to in that sentence. And I'm,
you know, in my twenties. But um. She also reads
the books Princess Smarty Pants, The Pirate Girl, which I
have to uh just plug features a girl named Molly,
which is always plus in my book, and a book
called Adventure and he goes to work and you know it,
as you might imagine when you read books that are

(10:58):
kind of you know, for lack of a better word,
maybe preachy. It just it doesn't work with kids. And
she didn't even like all the messages like let's take
the pirate book. The male pirates get punished at the end,
and as the woman points out, punishing the oppressor is
not true feminism. It's just role reversal. Um. But the
kids did both the boy and the girl did like
the Pirate book because the pirate aspect appealed to the boy. Yeah. Um,

(11:21):
and then she was a cool like heroin It sounds like,
but but what kind of message do you send if
you just like punish the guys at the end? Very true.
And I thought it was funny too that with Pippy
long Stalking, her daughter really loved the book. I remember
Peppy long Stalking back in the day, and um, and
I thought she was great. But the boy couldn't her.

(11:41):
Her son couldn't care less. Yeah, you like the monkey
and I also, I mean, basically, after reading these five
or six books, the only lessons she says that the
kids really picked up was, um, the existence of the
term ms MS, which we have discussed at length in
this podcast. Um. And also the idea that marriage is
not everyone's idea of a fair detail ending, which I

(12:01):
think is a pretty cool lesson for a little kid
because in the Princess Smarty Pants books, Um, you know,
she runs off all the male suitors and it's like,
I'm just gonna be happy by myself. So that brings
up The next question then, of are we as parents
or in my case as an aunt with a young niece, uh,
is there any value in going over and beyond to

(12:25):
select maybe pro feminist titles for our young children who
probably are not going to understand terms like heteronormative our
favorite term. Yes, should write a children's book just called
the heteronormative Puppy or something like that. Now girls are
not chicks, for example, might be a little heavy handed,

(12:47):
um in terms of pushing you know, an agenda like
you mentioned, Molly. But I, but I do think there's
something to be said for selecting or suggesting books for
especially for younger girls, not a lescence, that do promote um,
if not feminism, directly positive themes for girls. And we
found a site, um, a blog actually that listed her.

(13:10):
She picked her top twenty books for younger girls. Right.
This is Jen Robinson's book page is the name of
the blog, and some of the twenty cool girls and
children's literature that she calls out are let's see Claudia
from the Mixed Up Files and Mrs Basily frank Wiler,
Charlotte from Charlotte's Web, um Meg from A Wrinkle in

(13:31):
Time Hermione Granger from Harry Potter or Ingles from Little
House in the Prairie, And let me just say I
devoured those books as those are quite good. Joe March
from Little Women, and she included, uh, two women that
were about to talk about because we figured that they
were two of the ones that had big impacts on us,
so we picked them at random. You could easily do

(13:52):
ten podcasts on Chillern's learchure, but we're going to focus
on three reading uh, heroes of our childhood. So you
from Jen Robinson's list coming in at number one on
her list, was Anne of Green Gables coming in at
number eleven on her lists, Ramona Quimby, and then girls
that did not make her list. But the Chris and
I have decided are well worth discussing, the American girls Molly, Samantha,

(14:16):
Kirsten Feliciting. Now some of you are scratching your heads
right now about why we're going to discuss American girls.
I will say that obviously the American girl books aren't
don't necessarily hold a revered place in the canon of
children's literature like Alison Wonderland, but for today's girls, due
to their popularity. I think that they're definitely worth a

(14:37):
discussion because they were also books that Molly and I
read and enjoyed for certain reasons. But to kick things off,
let's start with shall I call her the Queen of
children's lit? Molly Anne of green Gables? Oh, queens? Such
a hard title to put on just one lady from
children's literally true. Make your case why is she the queen? Well,

(14:59):
maybe not kids lit, as I really didn't read Anne
green Gables soul I was probably twelve, but before that
the PBS special you know what I'm talking about. Every
time I was sick, I would even fake six sometimes
just so that I could watch and of green Gables.
I loved it. Um. But going back to your question,

(15:19):
why would I say that she deserves the top spot? Well,
first of all, there's just a huge catalog of Anne
of green Gables books, although they seem to kind of
descend in quality, um, A lot of series gonna do.
But also, she's just such an icon, and I think
a lot of a lot of young women looked up to. Right.

(15:43):
I liked We found this article from two thousand eight
by Kate Bullock in the New York Times, and she
points out that when the first when the book first
came out, the New York Times deemed its heroine the talkative,
redheaded orphan and Shirley to be all together too queer.
They did not like her at first, But now, as
you said, she's pretty universal beloved um And I think that,
you know, if I'm not ready to give her the

(16:04):
child queen, she's certainly um up there because she is
she goes her own way. I mean, when you're a kid,
when you're a little girl, I think that that's sort
of the best a book you can have as a
girl who goes her own way. You know, she lived
in kind of a weird fantasy world sometimes, well she
was an orphan Molly, she wasn't a fat in fantasy world.
She had a window friend. She overcame tremendous you know, hardship,

(16:26):
and she comes to this adopted family and they want
a boy, and she proves that a girl is just
as good as a boy. Right, So I do think that,
you know, she's often described as sort of this early
feminist icon in children's literature because you read it and
you're like, I can go my own way. I can
have hair that doesn't fit the norm. I can have
an attitude that doesn't fit the norm, and I'm going
to be loved and uh, you know, applauded all the same.

(16:50):
But speaking of Lucy moud Montgomery, Molly, why don't you
share a little bit with us about her life? So
I shall. Kristen Element Garment was born in eighteen seventy four. Uh.
She had a very sad childhood. Her mother died very
early in her life. Her father leaves her with her grandparents. Um,
so she's this only child living with, you know, very

(17:11):
elderly people who may not get her. She was essentially orphaned, true,
much like Ann and she retreats into her imagination. She
writes books, she wanders around Canada, because if you go
to Canada, well, she's associated with Canada, Prince Edward Island.
She's beloved by Canadians, and we know how many Canadian
fans we have. So anyway, fact about me though, my

(17:33):
ultimate vacation destination when I was a child was Prince
Edward Island. That was like going to the Bahamas for me,
not that I ever did it. I'm just saying, like
a dream, my dream car was an RV and my
my dream place to drive. It would have been Prince Efford,
Prince Edward Island. That's the best fun fact we've gotten
about you yet, Kristen. Someday your dream will come true.
So now she took care of her grandparents as they aged,

(17:57):
She taught as later Anne would also, And then she
married a young reverend and moved off Prince Edward Island
and really tried to focus on her writing as she rose,
as she brought up her children, and she got just
a ton of rejections. She was not popular at first. Um,
you know, she was making some money as a writer,
not a lot. Nineteen o five, she writes and up

(18:18):
Green Gables. It's rejected, and it's not told usually that
she dusted off, and she's like, oh, I'm gonna try again.
She finally, she finally gets it published, and then she
continues to write, go on to write twenty novels, many
of them about Anne's later life. Um. But one sort
of factor I liked about this biography that that we
got on Ella Montgomery is that they point out, you know,

(18:38):
just how almost it sounds weird to say, but almost,
how tragic her life was, and how deeply she felt
all these things that were going on about you know,
there was a war going on, and her husband had problems,
and she had this very sad childhood. And I think
that the later and books get really a lot of criticism.

(18:59):
Very few people read them because you really just want
the spunky girl. They kind of peter her out. And
as Anne grows, I mean, she marries, she wants all
her friends to get married. Um, you know, she becomes
very conservative in terms of social norm So I think
that that's probably why people might have trouble totally embracing Anne,

(19:19):
because she kind of becomes weird. I'm just gonna quite
say that she becomes weird. She becomes weird. But I
think that that is a reflection of La Montgomery's life.
And I think that that's why you can't, as opposed
to this arc on The Guardian, all of a sudden,
just say well, I'm only going to embrace like the
raw ra feminism books because life is hard and that

(19:41):
reflection in literature can be very valuable for a child. Yeah,
And and that brings up an article that we've found
in the New York Times from two thousand that really
points out that a lot of these children's books that
we really hold Near and Dear have a lot of
darker undertones that are reflect did in the author's life.

(20:01):
So I mean it calls out the fact that Beatrix Potter,
and writing about Peter Rabbit, was really writing about life
and death. We have Hans Christian Anderson who was broody
and reclusive, and Luisa may Alcott who romanticized the confusion
of her own childhood and a self portrait of Joe
and little women, right, you know, I mean, and and
you see the same thing like we're talking with Ellen
Montgomery orphaned and as orphaned. Those books that seemed to

(20:26):
strike a chord with children are the ones that do
reflect the fact that life is hard, that maybe the
girl doesn't always win in the end, and that's sort
of the opposite of what the woman in the Guardian
was looking for for her children. I mean, and girl
or boy? I mean, if I think the classic example
of this would be um Maurice Sadas Where the Wild
Things Are. I mean, it's a boy protagonist, but I
mean it's a very violent book about a very angry child.

(20:50):
And um girl or boor I don't I don't feel
like that just because there isn't a girl in the book.
It doesn't that it pushes some kind of gender agenda. Um,
but uh yeah, I mean I think it's it's pretty
clear when you start digging into those books that we
really identified with personally as children, Um, they were the

(21:11):
ones that really, um, I don't know, they had had
the darker undertones to them. For instance, I think this
would be a good point to segue into number eleven
on that list we mentioned earlier, which are the Ramona
Quimby books. Number eleven on that list, but number one
in my heart. Yes, Molly and I both huge fans

(21:33):
of the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. Ramona Quimby actually
started off as a character in her Henry Higgins books,
which were also fantastic, and then she sort of took
on a life of her own and then spawned this
eight book series. And I don't know about you, Molly,
but when I think of all of the young girl

(21:56):
characters that I fantasized about and you know, played as
my imaginary play as a kid, read about, etcetera, etcetera,
Ramona Quimby stands out in my mind as the number
one girl I identified with. I just wanted to have
her attitude do you remember when um, the lady told
her the cat's got your tongue, and she stuck out

(22:18):
her tongue. Like. I could have never done that when
I was five. I would have been like, too rude,
too rude. But I just loved that Ramona did it. Yeah, well,
I think it was just as a as a kid,
it was really it was really great to read about
this girl who, yes has a has a lot of pluck.
She was pretty funny in the descriptions. The Beverly Query
Rights are just so great, but there are also a

(22:39):
lot of very painful, poignant moments in these books because
life isn't perfect for the Quimby family at all. You
have her dad who loses his job at some point,
and it stays at home while he's looking for work,
and he's chain smoking all the time, and there's understandable
tension between Mr and Mrs Quimby and Ramona over heres

(23:01):
fights that they have. And then at one point, Yeah,
we were talking earlier and you said, how, um, how
how one of the points in those fights really got
to you as a kid. Yeah, there's some moment I
forget which book it was, where um, the Quimbies are
fighting and like the father Swatts, the mother with a
spatula or something like that, and it really affects Ramona hard.
She's convinced that her world is going to end. And um,

(23:23):
I remember thinking, oh gosh, Ramona isn't an abusive household.
But um yeah, I mean just that, as you said,
like that pluck in the midst of dark times. It
doesn't jump out as a feminist hero per se when
you're reading it, But I think that that is what
makes it so relatable and so valuable for little girls.
And also the thing I liked about Ramona. She wasn't cute, right,

(23:43):
I mean it's kind of grubby. Yeah, I mean, like
if you think of um, I think it's the kind
of Ramona quimby ag where it's just like her weird
face and her weird hair that's all like different links.
She's yeah, because she has to have uh haircuts at
home because they can't afford to, you know, pay for
her to go get a haircut elsewhere. Yeah. I mean,
and I think that there's a movie coming out and

(24:05):
I think Ramona looks like actually kind of pretty, and
I I kind of don't like it. I mean, that's
a whole another issue about like reflections of beauty and
to girls at a young age. But I think that
plays a factor. I think one of the reasons I
did like Ramona as I was like, oh good, not
a princess, right, But I gotta say, Molly, when I
was reading all of these articles about, you know, feminist

(24:26):
icons and children's lit. What we should be passing along
to our girls, reinforcing these values for strong womanhood, etcetera, etcetera,
and then I remembered Ramona. I mean, to me, the
most the more important thing that I would like to
pass on to my niece isn't necessarily girls aren't chicks,
you know, teaching her about you know, just go for it,

(24:48):
young girl. Don't e just blast through the glass ceiling.
She doesn't know about that, you know. I think it's
more important to pass along literature that um takes kids
seriously and I don't know, gives them a chance to
um use their imagination but also relate to things and

(25:12):
be able to ask those questions that they might not
want to ask about, you know, why their parents are fighting,
or why their dad's at home and can't find a job,
and you know, all of those, all of those types
of issues that there is no easy answer for. I
think that those big things are more important in children's
development than necessarily um setting out the you know, the

(25:32):
differences between male and female psyches, although there were a
lot of differences between Henry Higgins and Ramona Quimbe instream.
So on that note, Kristen Let's transition, ever so briefly
to the American girl dolls. Um, when I was growing up,
these girls came into being in the and so I
was there for the beginning of this. I remember when

(25:54):
there were just three American girls. Now they're like, really
dating yourself, Molle. That's fine because when never I talked
to my little cousins now who know about the spectacle
that is an American girl store, they don't understand what
it was like to just get your catalog and the
mail once a quarter. Getting that quarterly catalog was so
exciting in my household, and you'd circle the things you'd

(26:16):
want and you mail away from them. That they was
They were so weird because they weren't in stores. And
now I would argue that maybe the American Girls means
something different to a younger generation because it is like,
must consume all dolls must go to the store and
have a tea party with my doll, which, by the way,
control which, by the way, I really want to do. Well.
I hope I'm invited. Molly, you can bring your American

(26:37):
girl doll. Yeah, Molly and I both had the same
American girl doll. Side note, we had Samantha. Many people
think I would have Molly because, as I noted earlier,
I loved books with my name and them that was
my guests. But I feel that Molly's backstory was not
as exciting to me as Samantha's was. But speaking of backstory, um,
because that's the little reason we're bringing it up in
a book podcast. You should talk about the books because

(26:59):
they've got When it just started out, like you said,
with the three girls. I mean this was the company
was started by a woman named Pleasant Rowland, and when
it started out, there were three girls, and they were
also the books that went along with the dolls, and
that was half the experience. You know. I would go
to you know, I only had Samantha, but I would
read all Felicities books and ADDIE's books. Well, actually, I

(27:19):
think Addie was kind of after my time. Molly's books
you get the Drift. I've read all the books and
you learned so much from They were both educational and
things you could identify with, because, like Ramona, these were
pretty spunky girls having adventures in hard times. Me Samantha
was also an orphan. But I will say to this day,
I know what a petite four is thanks to Samantha Parkington.

(27:40):
Very true, me too. But these books were written by
Valerie Trip, and many of them, not all of them, Yeah,
a lot of them were written by by Valerie Trip.
And we read an article about Trip and she said
the thing that she really wanted to drive home with
those books was keeping them age appropriate. She felt like,
you know, a lot of times girls, younger girls were

(28:01):
sort of pushed from being girls straight into being women,
you know, and she wanted to give them something that
was educational and that would get them reading and also
allow them to enjoy their girlhood. And I think a
great thing about the American Girl books where that all
of them are set in different historical time periods, and

(28:22):
they would have these nifty little sidebars on some of
the pages that would give you a backstory, historical backstory
on whatever is going on at the time, because, for instance,
I remember what the Samantha books. There was some book
about her grandpapa or something getting a horseless carriage, and yeah,
and and so they had, you know, a sidebar on
on the model t or something like. I learned a

(28:44):
lot about World War Two from the Molly book What's
a Victory Garden? I know because of Molly Me Can Tear.
So these are three random examples Kristen picked from different
time periods. There four different ages, but these were three
formative characters. I'm gonna group all the American girls as
one character, but um, three characters that just really spoke
to us as young girls. And I think that we've

(29:06):
identified that the common theme is that they have hard
circumstances that they've got to overcome or at least identifiable problems.
They are plucky and clever about solving those problems. Yea,
they have to use their wits to get out of
a jam. And what else can we say about them?
Because I do think these are sort of feminist role models,
but maybe not necessarily feminist, with like all the strident

(29:29):
militancy that sometimes the term implies. Well, I think that
we could say I'm kind of like you mentioned we
were talking about Ramona. The stories have to do deal
more with the girls brains than their bodies, you know,
and it allows us to maybe you know, teach us
girls to value um building strong characters rather than having
to obsess over their faces. Um. And also I think

(29:54):
we need to call out if if any of you
guys are interested in learning more about more modern day
um books with feminists overtones for younger readers. Molly found
the Amelia Bloomer Project, which is kind of a kind
of an interesting blog you might want to check out. Yeah,
what they do is every year they pick the best
books that have come out in the previous year for

(30:16):
everyone from birth to the age of eighteen. Uh, that
that have good examples of female role models, people who
are are getting it done. And uh they released about
like fifty books every year, so you could you could
occupy yourself for for quite a while, which is the
Amelia bloomerless. And speaking of occupying yourself, the reason we
did talk about literature today is we are again asking

(30:38):
as we did last year, for everyone's summer reading lists. Yeah,
because everyone loved that. We've got lots of ideas about
what to read and we want to know what you're reading,
and what you read as a child that you think
shaped your life in some demonstrable way. Right last year,
people were reading a lot of Chuck Palink, Neil Gaiman,
and David Sedaris, et cetera. What are you reading this summer? Oh,

(31:00):
and of course the Twilight series and Sukie Stackhouse, which
inspired our vampire podcast. So we'll love to see what
you guys are doing because it may inspire yet another
book podcast. Yes, send us your list, or if you
don't want to send us your email. If you want
to share your reading lists with everyone else, you should
post it on our new Facebook page. Let's just search

(31:21):
stuff mom Never told You. It will come up, or
you can do Facebook dot com backslash stuff mom Never
told You. But if you'd like to email us, the
email address is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And if you'd like to follow Molly me during the week,
you can hop on over to Twitter. We have a
Twitter account there with lots of fun tweets. Our name

(31:43):
is mom Stuff Podcast. And then finally, you should check
out our brand new blog, It's stuff I've Never told
You and you can find that at how stuff works
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(32:05):
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