8
Feminist Criticism: From Sex-Role Stereotyping
to Subjectivity
Lissa Paul
‘A Cinderella story: research on children’s books takes on new life as a field of literary
study’: that was the headline for an article on the rise of academic children’s literature
criticism, published 13 February 1991, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (the
newspaper for American universities, similar to the Times Higher Educational Supplement
in Britain). Although the article, by Ellen K. Coughlin, nicely sketches several of the
current poststructuralist, including feminist, lines in children’s literature criticism, it is
the headline that is arresting. The teasing, metaphoric association with the rags-to-
riches image of Cinderella stories inadvertently discloses the uneasy relations between
children’s literature, feminist theory and the academy.
Cinderella herself is, after all, the subject of a great deal of feminist critique. Most of us
—women, children and feminist critics, I imagine—don’t want to be seen valuing riches.
Or princes for that matter. The implication in the Cinderella reference in the headline is
that as ‘the province of library schools and education departments’ (Coughlin 1991:5),
children’s literature criticism ranks low on the academic hit parade. Now associated with
high-order poststructuralist theory and with English departments, children’s literature
criticism moves up in the respectability ratings.
If the destabilisation of hierarchical orders is one of the mobilising features of feminist
theory then there is probably something hypocritical and arrogant about
disenfranchising librarians, teachers—and children—from the ranks of stakeholders in
the field of children’s literature studies. It is not coincidental that librarians and
teachers tend to be women and that the education of young children is not regarded as
the serious business of scholars (a hold over from the New Criticism).
A pair of articles in Orana, an Australian children’s literature journal, neatly
problematise the gender equity issues as raised often by critics from education, library
science and psychology. In ‘Sexism and children’s literature: a perspective for librarians’
(1981), Christine Nicholls recognises that ‘sexism is a type of colonialism’, but she then
goes on to suggest that solutions to the problem include the use of ‘white out’ and the
abandonment of books no longer in accord with contemporary definitions of gender
equity. Hugh Crago (a psychologist and a fine children’s literature critic) offers a
sensitively worked out corrective. In ‘Sexism, literature and reader-response: a reply to
Christine Nicholls’, he reminds Nicholls (and the rest of us) that responses to texts are
subject to large fluctuations, especially in fluid forms like fairy tales where versions,
translations and illustrations all contribute to shaping the interpretative possibilities of
texts. He also foregrounds the idea there is really no such thing as ‘the one-way cause