began to explore, she discovered consistent patterns working to obliterate women poets
from the record.
In early anthologies Styles found that poems which had quickly become popular in
their own time, like ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’, or ‘Mary had a little lamb’, rapidly became
separated from their authors as they entered anthologies. They were usually attributed
to the anonymous authors of oral tradition. So while generations of children learned to
say ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’, few knew it was by Jane Taylor, or that Sara Hale wrote
‘Mary had a little lamb’, or that ‘The months of the year’ was by Sara Coleridge.
The systematic exclusion of these women from the children’s literature canon accords
precisely with the ideological reasons for their exclusion from the literary canon—and
from positions of power and influence. Styles explains that ‘the colloquial domestic
writing of some women whose concern in literature for children (and often for adults) is
with relationships, affection, friendship, family life often located in the small-scale site of
the home’ (Styles 1990:203) was devalued, lost and forgotten in a world where large
scale adventures and public rhetoric were valued. So the voices of Jane and Anne Taylor
‘talking lovingly and naturally’ in their poetry collections were lost. And Dorothy
Wordsworth, with her ‘private, colloquial and domestic’ poetry (202), was relegated to a
footnote in her brother’s life.
By bringing the domestic cadences of women ‘lost from the nursery’, to our eyes and
ears again, Styles provides a climate that warms to the domestic scene and to the softer,
more direct, colloquial cadences of the female voice. She teaches us to listen with
different ears to the different voice of women’s poetry for children.
Although I’ve focused on two specific feminist reclamation efforts, fairy tales and
poetry, both are part of a much larger feminist agenda, and I don’t want to leave this
section without mentioning other ways in which feminist children’s literature critics are
gradually recovering a female literary tradition.
By revealing the constructions of gendered patterns of childhood reading, academic
feminist critics are beginning to locate the origins of ideological constructions of gender.
Two studies of nineteenth-century girls’ books and boys’ books were published within a
year of one another: Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–
1910, by Kimberley Reynolds in 1990, and Boys will be Girls: The Feminist Ethic and
British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917, by Claudia Nelson in 1991. The sudden focus on
that late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century time period is more than coincidental.
It marks a critical recognition of that period as the time when colonial and patriarchal
values were being actively inscribed in the culture. In widely circulating publications like
the Girl’s Own Paper, girls were apparently encouraged to accept simultaneously
characteristics gendered feminine—‘purity, obedience, dependence, self-sacrifice and
service’—and, an ‘image of feminine womanhood...expanded to incorporate intelligence,
self-respect, and...the potential to become financially dependent’. The result was a set of
‘contradictory tendencies characteristic of femininity: reason and desire, autonomy and
dependent activity, psychic and social identity’ (Nelson 1991:141). Those contradictions
still haunt women today.
Other critics participate in the recovery of more recent histories of the relations
between gender and reading. Lois Kuznets, in ‘Two Newbery Medal winners and the
feminine mystique: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years’ and Miss Hickory (1991) looks at how
104 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES