and effect relationship’ (Crago 1981:161) between reader and text—something implicit in
the Nicholls article and in a great many like it.
There are two points worth foregrounding here. One is that the emphasis on sex-role
stereotyping and sexism found most often in education and library science journals is
connected with an honest front-line attempt to create a more female-friendly climate,
especially in schools. That connection between theoretical change and political change is
true to the roots of feminist theory in the women’s movements of the 1970s. To dismiss
librarians and teachers as the ‘rags’ phase of the Cinderella story is to participate in a
hierarchical ordering of critical values. As a feminist critic, I don’t want to do that.
The other point worth keeping in mind is that current poststructuralist discussions,
especially those on semiotics, deconstruction, ideology and subjectivity, make it possible
to develop language and strategies that speak—to borrow a phrase from Carol Gilligan
—‘in a different voice’. As an academic feminist children’s literature critic, feminist
admonitions to remember our histories and value members of our communities
constantly sound in my mind.
Children’s literature offers to children the promise of inclusion in a literate community
(something regarded as culturally valuable, at least nominally). The critical apparatus
surrounding children’s books offers an intellectual understanding of what inclusion
means and how it might be achieved. In an ideal world anyway. What feminist theory
has done for children’s literature studies—and for all fields of literary study—is to insist
on the right to be included, but not just as honorary white men. As a result, not only
have our interpretations of texts changed, but also our production of them and our
access to them—as I’ll try to demonstrate throughout this article.
The current wave of academic children’s literature criticism rose in the early 1970s at
the same time as the rise of what is known as the ‘second wave’ of feminist theory in
this century. In the 1990s both feminist criticism and children’s literature criticism are
established participants in the academy with all the requisite structures in place to
support establishment status—refereed journals, professional associations, graduate
degree programmes.
Signs of the common ground between children’s literature criticism and feminist
theory are marked in two special issues of children’s literature journals. The Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly ran a special section, edited by Anita Moss, in the
Winter 1982 edition: ‘Feminist criticism and the study of children’s literature’. In that
early collection of essays there were several reviews of books of feminist literary criticism,
each sketching possible critical lines children’s literature critics might find worth
exploring. Virginia Wolf, for instance, writes about alternatives to the heroic quest in
science fiction; and Lois Kuznets about texts that value communities rather than
kingdoms.
In December 1991, The Lion and the Unicorn published an issue called ‘Beyond sexism:
gender issues in children’s literature’. By this time the lessons of feminist theory are
internalised, and critics are actively constructing a feminist tradition in children’s
literature (see especially essays by Judith John, W.Nikola-Lisa, Lynne Vallone and the
essay by Lois Kuznets discussed below). Note the switch, incidentally, from ‘feminist
criticism’ to ‘gender’ studies. That shift marks the subtle inclusion of gay and lesbian
studies into the fray. It also marks the popular use of a code word to try prevent
FEMINIST CRITICISM: FROM SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPING TO SUBJECTIVITY 99