Book Cover: A Thorny Way, Mary Bradford Whiting

Part of the difficulty of working on historical books for young people is that much of the basic information that you can readily find for adult literature has not yet been compiled. Though there are some excellent bibliographies of Australian children's literature, it's still not that simple to locate everything that is out there, nor much reliable biographical material about the authors themselves.

Kerry M. White lists Mary Bradford Whiting among lesser-known Australian authors of girls' family stories, yet I can't find much about her that indicates that she lived in Australia at any point. A Thorny Way was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in London, and it was not an uncommon route for Australian children's writers to publish via an English publisher. What I can find suggests that Bradford Whiting predominantly wrote religious publications for the Christian Knowledge Society and Religious Tract Society.

We cannot accuse her of not embracing diversity as, in addition to her foray into girls' books, she also published a book on Dante with Cambridge and wrote Shakespeare criticism in the Gentlemen's Magazine. Some of these publishing avenues suggest that she had nothing to do with Australia whatsoever. Yet Austlit shows that she published several children's books set in Australia, including Peggy and Pat: A Tale of the Australian Bush (1931), Josee: An Australian Story (192-) and Wallaby Hill (189-). And let us not forget A Daughter of the Empire (1919), which looks like a must-read.

Sadly for me, it seems A Thorny Way is set in England, so I will join the heroine in casting my head down on the desk in despair.

Book Cover: Gem of the Flat, Constance Mackness

For the 3-year project I'm working on, 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Culture, 1840-1940' , I've begun buying Australian girls' books in earnest. British girls' books, I'm finding, are much more readily available for sale online, possibly because they had much larger print runs. Some of the Australian titles are simply not to be found, or rare copies are being sold for hundreds of dollars.

Many of the covers are very striking and ornate, so I'll share a few here. This copy of Gem of the Flat (Angus & Robertson, 1914) by Constance Mackness has its paper spine illustration intact. I was surprised to see that the cover images were illustrated by May Gibbs, of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie fame. These sorts of girls' books with elaborate covers were often given as gifts and prizes, as was this one, which is inscribed "To Mary, With much love from Auntie Minnie + Uncle Sidney, Ballarat, Australia, October 1930."

Stepping Back in Time: Reviewing Caitlin Flanagan's Girl Land

The first I knew about Girl Land was a parody produced by Bitch magazine to mimic LOLcats. A series of cat photographs were overlaid with old-fashioned quotations about how girls should be. This sounded intriguing. First: here was a book about the history of girlhood. Second: feminists hated it.

Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land will not be released in Australia until April, but I bought an ebook and started reading on my laptop straight away. Part of the criticism levelled at Flanagan is that she has not talked to any actual girls in order to write her book. As I work on girlhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I think a lot can be gained by understanding how girlhood was culturally constructed in the past and by comparing how these constructions have changed. A book on how girlhood has transformed in the United States from the 1920s could be extremely valuable, but, sadly, Flanagan has not fully exploited the potential of the histories of girlhood to help us think about contemporary girlhood.

It seems it is something a sport to tear the book to shreds, but I must join the chorus of critique, even if I did find some sections of the book illuminating. To begin with the obvious, the very title and concept of female adolescence as “Girl Land” is a bit twee, suggesting it is an almost “magical” state that is lost through sexual maturity. Boys don’t feel the same way, it seems. They don’t even care about their old toys, unlike girls who feel emotionally connected to them because they mourn the loss of their childhood. Flanagan must have watched Toy Story to gain this information.

One of the central premises of Girl Land is that a girl is “a creature designed for a richly lived interior life…in a way most boys are not” (6). This means that girls like to spend time alone in their room pondering, writing in diaries and reading. Flanagan hit a raw nerve when she jumped from this nostalgic idea of diaries with little metal locks and keys, to suggesting that girls should not have computers with access to the internet in their rooms.

I agree with Flanagan’s suggestion that how girls choose to record their interior lives has changed, and that through using the internet they both reflect “on their emotional lives" and "broadcast the ephemeral enthusiasms of their Girl Land" (61). Well, I don’t know about the “Girl Land” bit, but there is indeed pressure to keep up another kind of online identity, composed of Facebook photos, carefully worded profiles and suitably up-to-date references and memes. We have seen problems with cyberbullying, in that young people no longer come home and escape from schoolyard problems. Harassment can continue at any time of the week online via email or on social networks, or via text messages.

Yet Flanagan does not fully draw out what being part of the first generation raised from birth with computers and the internet is like. I’m quite amazed to see the kinds of websites girls now code and design in a way that I could not manage as an adult, as well as the online comics and stories they create. What might be the positive and empowering aspects of access to the internet for girls? Instead of considering the answer to this question, Flanagan recalls her own girlhood periods of respite in her bedroom in her “forest green tracksuit” (it sums up the lack of social pressure within the sanctuary of a girl’s bedroom) and suggests that the internet “violates” the sacred space of the room “and robs [girls] of the essential requirements of keeping a diary” (62).

I think this is where we find the launching pad for criticism to get ugly. Who says keeping a diary is essential to girlhood? Girls are writing blogs, making sophisticated compilations of images (some of which they have photographed themselves) on sites like tumblr, and keeping their thoughts on their own Facebook pages. If these are kinds of diaries, then it would have been useful to include more evidence about what the transformation from private to public actually means in terms of diaries. Do girls see it as a kind of “performance” as Flanagan argues (63)? And how different is it to “perform” some of the time, as she acknowledges they did in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, versus “all the time”?

The fodder for ugliness continues in the chapter on dating, which argues that girls are extremely vulnerable to assault. This claim is borne out by Flanagan’s personal recollection of a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer on a date until she began yelling and kicking. It is indeed true that many women are subject to sexual assault and that it is a serious and real issue for girls and women, especially in developing countries beyond the United States, which is Flanagan’s focus. Setting back the cause of feminism somewhat, Girl Land proclaims: “The father is the first line of defense between between a girl and the men who would exploit her sexually”(31). Flanagan describes the tradition of boys meeting fathers as serving as a kind of “warning” not to assault, and in her concluding section, in which she provides ham-fisted advice on how to raise today’s girls, she asserts that the number of single-mother households is to blame for an increase in date rape (132).

And it doesn’t get any better in the chapter on menstruation. Critics have seized on Flanagan’s claims that today’s girls “anticipate menstruation with excitement, as a marker of the coming glamour of the teen years” (34). Now, not that my own memories are any better evidence than Flanagan’s, but I was absolutely mortified by menarche, as I was not yet eleven, and there were very few girls who had their period in grade six. After a younger child found a used pad or tampon in one of the toilet cubicles, a special toilet was designated with a sanitary bin inside and a sign on the door that read “Grade 6 and 7 girls only”. This meant that anyone who went inside had their period. No one ever went inside that toilet in front of anyone else. As far as I know no girl ever used it. It was not a marker of pride or joy twenty years ago, but who is to say that today’s girls are not connecting painful cramping and stained underpants with boyfriends and romance as Flanagan contends?

Nevertheless, the menstruation chapter does highlight some of the achievements of the book in re-telling the social history of American girls. Girl Land provides a fascinating description of the evolution of sanitary products and how their marketing became entwined with the new world of teens in advertisements such as "The Story of Menstruation", which was funded by Kotex and animated by Disney. Sections in the dating chapter that draw together historical books and pamphlets of dating advice for girls, as well as parenting manuals, are entertaining and revealing.

However, it is just one problematic aspect of Girl Land that sources such as G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence, Flanagan’s own memories of girlhood, The Diary of Anne Frank and fictions such as Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and, I kid you not, The Exorcist are treated as equivalent sources of evidence. Each of the eras considered in Girl Land ought to be grounded in a broader sense of what concepts of girlhood were like and how it was evolving in relation to social and cultural norms. More recent history suffers the worst fate by allowing Blume and the possessed Regan to explain the transition between bobby soxers and Team Edward.

The prom chapter also offers something worth the attention of girls' studies scholars, not only in the form of quotations from early guides to hosting proms, but in the actual analysis of prom that Flanagan offers up. Prom had its origins in the 1920s, and was in some ways directed by girls in a manner that debutante balls were not, but also, Flanagan argues, prom allowed parents to reel in the liberation the girls and women had fought for in the previous decade, specifically during the war. Flanagan is not sufficiently anti-feminist to deny the socially conservative origins of prom in its adult intervention into girls’ romantic life and the return of adult supervision and formal protocols of restraint. It is also useful to consider how little prom has changed, as Flanagan argues, in that superficially the traditions of boys turning up on the front porch with a corsage in hand and the strict pronouncements on how girls and boys may interact at prom remain in place. Nevertheless, Flanagan suggests that what has changed is the after-party ritual at which “Pimps and Hos” is supposedly the usual theme. Flanagan explains that this produces a contradiction: “Girls have intentionally combined two events, one composed of traditions that suggest a very formal way of being a teenager, and one composed of behaviors that suggest the exact opposite” (110).

I don’t disagree with the idea that girls and women are increasingly barraged with competing images and ideals of how to be. But many of the causes Flanagan identities for these contradictory ideals and proposed solutions for making girls’ lives better are devoid of any solid foundation. The popular media definitely encourages an “increasingly sexualized teen culture”, but Flanagan inexplicably blames rap music in particular (123), and, subsequently, the mainstreaming of pornography. She is not simple enough in her thinking to fall for the moral panics over “rainbow parties” and “oral sex crazes”, instead measuring her assessment to note “a major shift in modern sexual habits and expectations” (118). I came away from Girl Land without an understanding of what this shift entails and what it means for girls, apart from a sense that mothers and fathers need to rally to protect their children “in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape…from pornography and violent entertainment” (125).

In all this, girls are victims and girls should be, and are, afraid. Girls suffer a greater emotional drain during adolescence because “they are forced to confront the sexual attention of men” (45) while “men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment” (123). It is disappointing that a woman who has spent significant time reading through many historical advice manuals to girls and parents could not see how her own claims reproduce sexist ideas about girls. Much like Bettina Arndt’s article in the Age today that argues men cannot help staring at breasts, Flanagan also reproduces sexist ideas about men.

Lego Friends Video

It's heartening to see that the criticism of the Lego Friends range for girls is rolling on. The following video, produced by Feminist Frequency, draws together some intriguing Lego ads from the 1980s onward that show the company's attempts to produce a range to entice girls to enter the world of Lego. It is dispiriting to realise that the collective picture of these attempts is that girls want to make jewellery, click together simple pieces that have pre-determined outcomes and fantasise about princes.

I'm looking forward to part two of this series, which promises to take us on a historical tour of advertisements for Lego featuring boys, including Zack the Lego Maniac.

New Article on Environmentalism and Gender in Animated Film

Just this week a scholarly article that I wrote with Dr Elizabeth Parsons (formerly of Deakin University) was published by Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. It was sparked by Liz's subject "Power Politics in Children's Literature", in which we taught the films Princess Mononoke and FernGully. Liz had already given a conference paper on the topic and kindly invited me to co-write an article with her. It did feel quite strange to be writing an academic article about contemporary films, as I think the closest I'd ever gotten to the present-day before was about 1920 and, at the point of writing, I'd never written about films either. I'm grateful to Liz for showing me how to step into a new field and for the opportunity to co-write this paper with her.

If anyone is interested in this area, or perhaps the work of Hayao Miyazaki (because we all know you're not going to be interested in the saccharine-fest that is Ferngully unless you saw it as a child), here is the abstract for the paper:

Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox's Fern Gully (1992)

Informed by ecocriticism, this article conducts a comparative examination of two contemporary animated children's films, Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fern Gully (1992). While both films advocate for the prevention of deforestation, they are, to varying degrees, antithetical to environmentalism. Both films reject the principles of deep ecology in displacing responsibility for environmental destruction on to ‘supernatural’ forces and exhibit anthropocentric concern for the survival of humans. We argue that these films constitute divergent methodological approaches for environmental consciousness-raising in children's entertainment. The western world production demonstrates marked conservatism in its depiction of identity politics and ‘cute’ feminization of nature, while Hayao Miyazaki's film renders nature sublime and invokes complex socio-cultural differences. Against FernGully's ‘othering’ of working-class and queer characters, we posit that Princess Mononoke is decidedly queer, anti-binary and ideologically bi-partisan and, in accord with the underlying principle of environmental justice, asks child audiences to consider compassion for the poor in association with care for nature.

Model Girls: Setting up Girls for Judgement

Cindy Crawford’s daughter has revived discussion about the place of girls in high-fashion modelling. Ten-year-old Kaia Gerber has been chosen as the face of Young Versace and one of the launch images, in which she has been posed in a way that recalls her mother’s supermodel shots of the ‘90s, is a world apart from fleecy-clad child models grinning cheekily in the monthly Kmart catalogue.

It beggars belief that there is a Young Versace range that caters to children from newborns to twelve-years-old. I suppose there are wealthy people out there who couldn’t be seen shopping at Target for their kids, but with the scrapes that most kids get into, and their rapid growth, it’s sinfully excessive to be spending thousands on a flimsy skirt.

Yet wealthy people frittering away money is not the most significant thing to consider about Kaia’s modelling work and the visibility of young girls in the fashion industry. Unlike Thylane Blondeau's Vogue shoot last year, in which she wore a full face of make-up, leopard-print clothing and oversize heels, there is no parody of the fashion industry in Kaia’s images. This campaign is designed to appeal both to girls and their mothers (wealthy ones at least, and to foster aspirations in everyone else), and to encourage the process of girls valuing themselves according to how they look and what they buy.

Both men and women can take pleasure in aesthetic objects and the enjoyment of wearing good quality clothing, but it is women who are judged as a result of their appearance in ways that can be crippling. We know that the appearance of female politicians is far more often a subject of discussion in the media than men’s appearance— Tony Abbott’s alarming “budgie smugglers” being the exception.

A fascinating piece by Dannielle Miller at Mama Mia shows that even when women are active in areas in which their appearance should not be relevant, it is their looks that are most often attacked as a way of dragging them down and destroying their authority. Some of the female media commentators interviewed here, and in other articles on this topic, describe extremely hateful anonymous responses, not about what the substance of their opinion, but how they look. Nina Funnell, who writes about a range of women’s issues, and who has spoken out about her own horrifically violent rape, has shamefully received abusive comments suggesting that she was not attractive enough to be raped in any case.

This is what leads me to be critical of images like that of Kaia Gerber. Some might feel that the image is sexualising and is encouraging girls to “grow up too soon”. While these things might be true as well, using a young girl to advertise high fashion in the same way as women are used to advertise products begins the process of judgement even earlier. If mature women are undermined continuously because of their appearance and struggle with the results of this, then girls, who have not yet always been able to forge a self-confident identity, will not have the resources to brush such judgements aside.

Of course, for the past hundred years or more, girls have been able look to images of adult women in the media for an understanding of how they themselves should aspire to be and other girls can serve as the fashion and beauty police to ensure conformity. It is another level of pressure and expectation to have fashionable images of girls that are clothed and stylised as women, something that a 10-year-old cannot be, even if the image of Kaia from the neck-down looks as if she is a woman. The use of teen models often sells an unobtainable ideal of youth to women. However, selling womanhood to girls will surely only foster the same kind of degradation of girls' achievements in light of their looks as women already experience.

Transgendered Girls, Toys and the Great Girl Scout Cookie Boycott

There have been quite a few stories about transgender girls in the news, not least of which on the controversy front has been the story of an American Girl Scout who opposes the inclusion of transgender girls within the organisation and is calling for a cookie boycott in protest.

I first began thinking about transgender girls after reading a Boston Globe article about twin boys, one of whom is now a trans girl. Without denying the existence of transgendered children and adults, I found some of the ideas presented in the article problematic. My feelings were especially pronounced in light of the recent discussion of the new Lego "Friends" range for girls and the gender segregation of toys.

The article about the Maines twins begins as follows:

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Though Wyatt went on to express a clearer sense that he was a girl, as she identifies now as Nicole, it bothered me that toy preference was being used as a marker of gender dysphoria. While clearly identifying with the accoutrements of the gender the child feels that they truly are means feeling an affinity with the stereotypical markers of that gender, such associations suggest that there is likely something significantly unusual about a child who strays outside accepted norms with the toys or clothes that he or she likes. Though we need to support transgender children, we also don't want to encourage rigid separation of children's play according to gender by suggesting that if boys like typically "feminine" toys or girls like typically "masculine" toys that it indicates something wrong.

A 2010 research paper that sought to consider whether there is an innate preference in infants for particular colours and shapes, suggested that all children prefer dolls to cars at 12 months (this was measured by how much the infants looked at a particular toy). Once the boys in the study were about a year older, however, they seemed to prefer cars over dolls, whereas girls retained their preference for the dolls. The authors conclude that these difference "may arise from socialization or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors." So, essentially, as boys get older they are gradually encouraged by their parents and the media they consume to ditch the dolls and start their Matchbox collection.

Clearly there is a percentage of children who have gender identity issues who need to be better accommodated and treated (some of the stories of trans boys and girls on the Mermaids website, the UK organisation for gender-variant children, are sad reflections of intolerance). Nevertheless, all children are being affected by the increasing gendering of childhood play, which seems to pathologise difference and diversity. Though Nicole's interest in Barbies and tutus was indicative of something more, it should not be a cause for alarm if a boy wishes to play with dolls or if a girl is more interested in a chemistry set than setting to work with a replica iron. UK toy store Hamley's has recently removed the "gender apartheid" of its separate boys' and girls' floors for toys (coded pink and blue) in a way that will hopefully allow children more scope to choose toys that interest them, rather than confining them to a limited selection according to what boys and girls are supposed to like.

I would suggest that the insistence of pushing children into their "right" gender also contributes to the bigoted attitudes that transgender children experience from their peers and adults. If you've not yet seen it, the video of an American Girl Scout, Taylor, expressing concern about Girl Scouts USA's decision to allow trans girls to enter the movement, shows her received ideas about the threat of transgendered people.



As a fan of Girl Guide history, I'm in support of the concept of a girls' and women's only organisation that encourages leadership and self-reliance, and, like Taylor from California, I would be disappointed to see boys being admitted. Nevertheless, Taylor is reproducing discriminatory attitudes about transgendered people that cannot see beyond strict binaries of biologically male and female. Taylor's YouTube video, which has sparked no shortage of discussion on feminist sites, is also embedded at a site called Honest Girl Scouts.

The site is purportedly run by current and former women of Scouting who disagree with the organisation's apparent conduct of sex education and support of a woman's right to choose (or pushing "pro-lesbian, pro-abortion role models"). In some ways the site is laughable ("FACTOID: Did you know that radical feminist Betty Friedan, founder of NOW (National Organization for Women) and NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) was on the National Board of GSUSA for 12 years?") but in others, especially the use, and perhaps production, of Taylor's video, it is disturbing. Specifically, it appears as if they have used a girl as a conduit for their discriminatory views.

On the Bitch magazine Facebook page, where the cookie boycott story was posted, Taylor was quite often attacked and was labelled a "creep". I would argue that the real creeps are those who are behind these campaigns to discriminate against gays and lesbians and transgender men and women in Scouting. It is a shame that such an articulate and intelligent girl has been encouraged to put forward these views, and that an organisation that is attempting to be progressive is being fractured by those who cannot fathom why reducing discrimination for this minority of children is a good thing.

Scouting was originally founded to accept children of all religious persuasions, so, despite some worrying statements at time from founder Robert Baden-Powell, at heart the aim was to be open to all kinds of young people. Perhaps girls might have even remained part of the original Scouting scheme in England if Edwardian social norms had not been so concerned about girls being too "boyish" and the presence of girls "softening" boys. I would hope that the society in which we live - a century after Scouting began in America in 1912 - will not reproduce outdated notions of what each gender should be by supporting the opposition to trans girls being part of Girl Scouts America.