When I think about everything about womanhood that hamstrung me with fear when I was thirteen it all came down, really, to princesses. I didn’t think I had to work hard to be a woman (which is scary but obviously eventually achievable). I thought I had to somehow magically – through superhuman psychic effort – transform into a princess instead. That’s how I’d get fallen in love with. That’s how I’d get along. That’s how the world would welcome me.

– Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman

Welcome to part two of Kickass Princesses – a look at some subversive female protagonists in children’s literature. You can read Part 1 here.

The more children’s books I read and the more princesses I come to know, the more I realise that ‘kickass’ probably wasn’t the best term to use. Some of these characters do kick ass, but the main feature is turning out to be simply that they make unconventional princesses.

As the archetype of a fairytale princess is so ingrained, it takes looking at a wide variety of ‘unprincessy’ examples to unpick exactly what some of our starting assumptions are. A closer look at the ‘unconventional’ princesses here, and in my previous post, reveals that these women and girls have agency, interests, and are more than just a beautiful, delicate, unsullied physical appearance. Sometimes they aren’t even beautiful at all. What they are – what, we realise, makes them ‘unprincessy’ – is often simply the fact that they are two-dimensional characters.

Ouch. This stereotype needs subverting roughly forever ago. On with the show…

The Ordinary Princess

• Written and illustrated by MM Kaye, published in 1980 by Doubleday

At 107 pages, this one’s aimed at a slightly older age group than the rest of the books in this post, which are all picture books.

The plot begins when the seventh princess is born in the land of Phantasmorania, and even the fairies are invited to the Christening, despite the King’s reservations. The bad-tempered and seaweedy fairy Crustacea, pissed off by the bad journey in to the palace, gives the baby the gift of ordinariness. Instantly the baby cries for the first time, and becomes considerably less attractive. As she grows up, our girl Amethyst (known as Amy) doesn’t look great in fine gowns like her blonde, willowy, ethereal and frankly boring and unknowable sisters. Instead, she loves climbing down the wisteria which grows up the castle walls and sneaking out to the forest.

Thanks to her extremely ordinary looks, Amy turns out to be impossible to marry off. Oh, the shame of it all! Not that our girl is bothered, but the rest of the kingdom is. When she learns of a harebrained scheme to get her rescued from a dragon so a prince will be obliged to marry her, she runs away to the forest, where she lives happily until her clothes start falling apart. So, in need of money to buy a new dress, she goes and gets a job in another palace, living in disguise as an ordinary girl. Where she meets a prince – but I’ll leave some plot to those who want to read it.

The style of writing makes for a truly luscious fairytale, and the black and white line-drawn illustrations by the author are very pretty too (just the right side of twee). Plot-wise, this book is strongest in its treatment of Amy’s interaction with Crustacea, her Godmother, who is practical, warm-yet-tough, and advises her to get on with it.

It’s weakest – in my humble socialist opinion – when our girl loves every minute of working insane hours on the lowest rungs of the servant-ladder. C’mon, girlie, you’ve worked out it’ll take you roughly a year to earn enough to buy a new dress. Aren’t you a bit annoyed at the sucky pay? Also: the insinuation throughout the book that freckles and an upturned nose make someone undateable got on my nerves quite a bit. Freckles can be well hot, and don’t get me started on pixie faces…

(Interestingly, each book I’ve looked at for these posts has often pushed an idea of what a typical beautiful princess looks like, but none of them quite match.)

I was a little disappointed in how conventionally the ends got tied up, but I suppose how the plot came to be is more important than what came to be. Our girl has agency, there’s no doubt about it. And there’s nothing wrong with a happy ending.

Princess Pigsty

• By Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer, Chickenhouse, 1997

In Princess Pigsty our girl is one of three sisters, who live the traditional fairytale princess life:

Their beautiful clothes filled thirty wardrobes. They had footmen to blow their noses for them and ladies-in-waiting to tidy up their rooms, hang up their clothes and polish their crowns until they shone.

Every morning, three teachers taught them royal behaviour – how to sit on a throne without fidgeting, how to curtsey without falling over, how to yawn with your mouth closed and how to smile for a whole hour without taking a break.

Isabella, the youngest, despite being perfectly capable of walking the princessy walk, is not happy, and makes her feelings known by waking up the whole castle shouting:

“I am tired of being a princess! It’s boring, boring, boring!”
Her older sisters looked up from their feather pillows in surprise.

“I want to get dirty!” cried Isabella, bouncing around on the bed. “I want to blow my own nose. I don’t want to smile all the time. I want to make my own sandwiches. I don’t want to have my hair curled ever again. I do not want to be a princess any more!”

And with that she took her crown and threw it out of the window. Splash! It landed in the goldfish pond.

In the pitched battle of wills with the King that follows, Isabella is sent to work in the kitchens until she changes her mind. When she enjoys her work in the kitchens, learning about how their food is made and essentially having too much fun to relent, she’s sent to the pigsty – where she gets along with the pigs and enjoys their company even more.

Eventually, seeing there is no way around it, her father relents and says she doesn’t have to be all princessy if she doesn’t want to – but by now our girl likes the pigs and stays in the pigsty just as often as in her feather bed.

Though no mention is made of any innate unprincessy looks (beyond curled hair), Isabella rejects her princessy role in life quite actively. While Amy of The Ordinary Princess is a failure at traditional princessy things (but isn’t that bothered about it, either) Isabella has lots of guts and lots of agency, not to mention an upbeat and cheerful nature. Eventually her father is won round. The patriarch isn’t a baddie, and – once it’s clear she’s happier that way – he accepts her as she is. Tangled, mucky and doing things that interest her. Hip-hip hooray for doing what you want! Hip-hip hooray for converting people! Hip-hip hooray for male allies!

Shrek!

• William Steig, Macmillan, 1990

Didn’t know Shrek started out as a book? It did, and it was… not a huge amount like the movie franchise. (Have the first part read to you by Stanley Tucci here, though sadly without pictures.) Shrek, in both media, is a famously revolting and ugly character, who delights in his own disgustingness (“wherever Shrek went, every living creature fled. How it tickled him to be so repulsive”) – but that’s where most of the similarities end.

The book is a very short picture book with a quest narrative. A witch tells Shrek’s fortune: “Then you wed a princess who/Is even uglier than you.” Shrek decides this sounds great, and goes off in search of this princess.

He strode in and his fat lips fell open. There before him was the most stunningly ugly princess on the surface of the planet.

When they meet they declare their love for each other’s revoltingness, and live “horribly ever after.” But if you’ve seen any of the movies, you’ll know this wasn’t quite how it went down when Dreamworks got their hands on it.

In the movie Princess Fiona (who has a name, unlike in the book) is only ugly after dark, – during the day she appears as a beautiful woman, and during the night she is an ogre, and she’s self-conscious about it. The only way to cure this is with “true love’s kiss” – and it’s initially an unpleasant surprise for her to learn that when the spell is broken she’s actually stuck with ogre mode constantly.

While the movie does feature a green monster called Shrek and an (eventually) ‘ugly’ princess – their unconventionality is treated as something they’re both self-conscious about. Fiona, especially, with all the princessy expectations heaped upon her, needs reassurance that she’s loveable.

Alhough the movie doesn’t mention weight specifically, one of the main factors of Fiona’s transformation (apart from the green skin) is that she becomes considerably heavier. Fiona is more of an everywoman – learning that she doesn’t need to be a size 8 to find love – and literally kicking ass. Caitlin Moran tracks the rewrite as part of a post-feminist trend:

In the last decade the post-feminist reaction to princesses has been the creation of alternative princesses: the spunky chicks in Shrek and the newer Disney films who wear trousers, do kung fu and save the prince.

While some cool people (I’m looking at you, Babette Cole) have been subverting these roles for a long time, it takes a while before the effect trickles down to a Hollywood blockbuster and the much wider audience that a movie like Shrek can reach.

While the original very short picture book is more about two people with unconventional values and no qualms or neuroses about them – a la The Twits or The Addams Family – the movie Shrek presents Fiona as someone extremely kickass, but with a fairly conventional narrative of body issues (though admittedly hers are mythical ones) and a postmodern self-consciousness about breaking the known conventions of the ‘fairytale’ wedding.

In this way Fiona is far more relatable (and has infintely more agency) than the nameless princess in the book, but part of me is sad that she doesn’t start with the self-assurance of our happily ugly picturebook princess. After all – if this is a world where gingerbread men can talk and cats can fence – surely we can have a princess who can just get on with her thang without worrying about being pretty enough?

Coming up next time:

• “Rapunzel’s Revenge – Fairytales for Feminists”
• Tatterhood
• The Tough Princess
• And more…

Very quietly, in April, a study was published that found that in American children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, female characters were under-represented by a ratio of 1.6:1. Not much happened. Then, at the beginning of this month, the Guardian wrote it up, and the Daily Mail tried their best to misrepresent it, failing to note the criteria used, representing the research as if it had been conducted in the UK, and generally being, well, a bit Daily Mail about the whole thing.

Two things then happened. The lovely lovely Daily Mail comments section went mad with people declaring (presumably based on the many years of research that each of them had done) that the results were clearly rubbish and anyway a bit of sexism never did me any harm now get in the kitchen and put my tea on. The Guardian‘s commenters largely ignored the piece, or said ‘no shit, Sherlock’ and went back to what they were doing before. So far, so par for the course.

But this lack of inquisitive attention is wrong for two reasons: first, this is a massive undertaking, so, y’know, kudos; secondly, these findings are Important. Important enough to use a capital ‘I’: at a time when children are developing their own gender identities, their literature both represents and defines what is expected of them. We need to know what those expectations are; the expectations that come not from our own choice of books for our children, but from what the literary establishment deems ‘good’ award winners are – rightly or wrongly – arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of acceptability. So when a study comes along that pays particular attention to, amongst other things, a century-worth of Caldecott Medal winners, we should be sitting up and taking notice.

Children’s books, and books in general, are not here-today-gone-tomorrow entities; they persist. In short, voices from both the distant and recent past are telling our children that women are simply not as important as men.

I’m not going to blather on about why it’s important for the message of gender of equality to be strong in the cradle and the classroom, nor why the repression of female characters in children’s fiction reinforces patriarchal gender systems, because if you’re over at BadRep you probably already know (and if you don’t, plenty has been written on the subject before).

I am going to blather on about why on earth this disparity between the genders hasn’t changed very much in a century.

So, let us return to the statistics. Since the early 1970s, studies have repeatedly found girls and women to be under-represented in children’s fiction, and this latest one is no different. It finds that in central roles male characters have a representation of 57 percent, and female characters only 31 percent. Significantly, it notes that “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent”. You can get a free PDF of the whole study, by Janice McCabe, Emily Fairchild, and others from universities in Florida and Indiana, here or read the abstract here.

Not only are there fewer female characters in books in the first place, but “reader response research suggests that as children read books with male characters, their preferences for male characters are reinforced, and they will continue reaching for books that feature boys, men, and male animals”. This disparity of gender representation is made even more significant when we learn that boys redefine female protagonists with whom they identify as secondary characters¹ and recast secondary male characters as central when retelling the same stories². Educators, too, make a distinction between the genders when choosing appropriate literature for their classes, opting for stories with male protagonists more frequently than female even when their self-reported politics would suggest they do otherwise. ³

It is worth mentioning at this stage that the numerical representation of the genders and the stereotypicality of the behaviours those genders present are separate issues, and while the latter is fascinating in all sorts of ways, it is a large enough arena of study to warrant a separate post.

Children’s literature is particularly sensitive to sociopolitical forces. It’s probably not surprising, then, that this study finds spikes in the parity of gender representations coinciding with the second – and third – waves of feminism, so the books published in the 1930s-1960s show less gender parity than those published before and after, and more equal representation of the genders in books published after 1970.

Take this graph – Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters across the full set of 5,618 books the study analysed, spanning a century from 1900-2000:

These peaks and troughs in the equality of gender representation paint a worrying picture. When the feminist movement is active, female and male characters do move towards a parity of representation. But when feminism goes off the boil, so does gender equality.

What does this mean for the futures of feminism? Are we destined to keep pushing the message, safe in the knowledge that it will be quickly unlearned if we stop? We cannot rest on our laurels. The third wave feminist movement has, arguably, made feminism more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. But history teaches us that we need to take the waves out of feminism, to keep working, to question inequality whenever we see it mindful that old habits die hard.

“Ending discrimination”, says Kat Banyard in her book The Equality Illusion, “will require a no less than a total transformation of society at every level: international, national, local and individual.” Our children’s books are an indication of this, and a litmus test by which progress can be measured.

You can find more musings on various aspects of kid lit over at my blog TreasuryIslands, including an ongoing series on feminism for beginners with heaps of recommendations. Meanwhile, here are a few of my fabulous feminist favourites.

Totally awesome feminist children’s books:

Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, translated by Chantal Wright
Isabella doesn’t like being a princess. She doesn’t like being waited on, she doesn’t like smiling all day and she doesn’t like her pretty frocks. She’s had enough. Throwing her crown into a pond, she awaits her punishment from the king, but when he sends her to live in a pigsty, the results are far from what he expected…

Captain Abdul’s Pirate School by Colin McNaughton

Pickles is a pupil at pirate school. A reluctant student, Pickles learns how to talk like a pirate, make cannon balls, fight and get up to all the mischief expected of a pirate at sea. Leading a mutiny against the teachers, Pickles shows bravery, cunning and compassion.

Only on the last of the book’s 32 pages is Pickles revealed to be a girl named Maisie.

Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Dr Mairi Hedderwick

With a little help from her dungaree-wearing, tractor-driving granny, Katie Morag delivers the mixed up post on the Scottish island where she lives. She’s a great young heroine with a seriously badass gran.

Give Us The Vote! by Sue Reid

Based on the true story of Dora Thewlis, 16-year-old suffragette. A Yorkshire mill worker, Thewlis took part in a mission to break into the Houses of Parliament in early 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned, a move which found her on the front page of the tabloids nicknamed ‘the baby suffragette’. Part of the My True Story series, Give Us the Vote! is an excellent lesson in first wave feminism.

Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.

Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

1. a finding by Elizabeth Segel, whose 1986 work is referenced in the study.
2. Bronwyn Davies noted this in her 2003 book Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender, and it’s also referenced.
3. Deborah A. Garrahy’s 2001 study “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior” is worth a look for more on this, in The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 81-94.