It was fiercest when its opponents were fierce, too.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Yes, there was a lot of talk about outfits, but she was all girl power.Īnd girl power, I saw, meant more to my daughters when it was facing off with something real. She reassured the grieving and wasn’t afraid (despite shrieks of warning from the first grader on the sofa) to venture into dark and abandoned places. She could scuba dive better than CIA agents. She saved friends from drowning, faced down thieves, and drove in car chases. Or, to use the language of Carolyn Keene, pseudonym for the authors of the mystery series, “presently, my daughters became entranced.” So one afternoon we sat on the couch and read. the books were tantalizing, their lined-up yellow spines like a light in the window. This was everything I was keeping from my daughters, praying they could grow up proud and strong, untouched by a culture that sends toxic messages about violence, fear, and who and what young girls should become.Īnd yet. Why, at 18, wasn’t Nancy in college? Why did we have to hear about her “slim figure” so much, or her “titian hair,” accentuated by the green fabric of her summer suit? Why, with his wife gone, does Carson Drew leave his daughter alone so much? And who buys an 18-year-old a blue convertible? Don’t even get me started on boyfriend Ned Nickerson. Not only does the old-school Nancy have some outright violent encounters (not a book goes by where her life isn’t threatened by a sinister male), but a few decades had left her on some shaky feminist ground. I understood why my mother-in-law was worried. Babar? Almost immediately his mother is shot by a “wicked” hunter and baby Babar is left sobbing.
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“The Secret Garden”? Within the first few pages there is cholera, death, and an emotionally distant mother, not to mention a colonial child throwing a racist temper tantrum. Through this lens, many of my old favorites didn’t make the cut. I wanted only positive role models, only sunshine. I had tried to protect my girls from the dark corners of the world. The good characters were good because of the way they acted when faced with negatives – ill treatment, ill circumstances, ill fortune.
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Mothers died and stepmothers sold kids into slavery.
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There were orphans without sparkly dresses or ice powers. Almost every book I read had a bad guy or mean kid or haughty wealthy people who needed a comeuppance. When I was a child, these harder-edged topics were the norm. They had read nothing to prepare them for gangsters, car wrecks, and grown-ups who lied, I thought, as I stared down at those Nancy Drews. But their books tend to be about kindness and equality, being nice to people who are different. How would my girls react to the young sleuth and her adventures with old clocks, haunted inns, and mysterious perfume bottles? They were just starting on chapter books, and while some classics seemed to click (we spent weeks pretending to live in a covered wagon, thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder), their childhood literary exposure seemed, well, different than mine. So why, and who, are they still fighting?īut to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I thought.