two doll stories reflect the shifting ideological values of their times: Hitty, the 1930
winner, reflects the valuing of the independent woman who flourished in the 1920s;
while Miss Hickory, the 1947 winner, reflects the post-war ‘feminine mystique’,
something we now read as revealing a sadly repressed woman.
Relations between public success and childhood reading are being recounted in
several reading memoirs published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The women writing
them at the height of, or late in, their professional careers seem to be offering clues that
might be of use to librarians and teachers interested in creating a more supportive
academic environment for girls. In My Book House as Bildung, Nancy Huse reconstructs
her childhood reading of Olive Miller’s My Book House as a way of establishing a
maternal pedagogical line that influenced her choice of an academic career. And in the
children’s literature journal, Signal, Nancy Chambers has published several reading
memoirs by well-known women who are active in a range of children’s literature fields.
Among them are ones by children’s book editor Margaret Clark; author Jane Gardam;
and Susan Viguers writing about her children’s literature expert mother. All reveal how
childhood reading enabled them to enter public worlds of letters on bridges built from
private, domestic literate environments.
The tunes—to borrow a phrase from Margaret Meek (1992)—of women’s texts are
different from the ones established in the canon as being of value. What feminist theory
has revealed, especially in reconstructions of a female literary tradition, is that the
disproportionate emphasis placed on adventure, power, honour and public success
squeezed out feminine valuing of maternal, domestic voices, ideas of sisterhood and
stories about the lives of women. While only the feminist fairy tales may have found
popular readership, scholarship teaches us to value domestic scenes and colloquial
voices, and to remember our histories. It enables us to make familiar the new texts that
come our way. The scholarship enables us to appreciate their difference.
RedirectionThe second wave of feminism began in the late 1960s when a whole generation of white,
well-educated ‘baby-boomer’ women found that they were still relegated to making the
coffee and stuffing envelopes. They were still excluded from the dominant discourses.
The consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s began as means of mobilising collective
voices in order to gain inclusion. The right to be included: that became a basic tenet of
feminist theory. So feminist theory changed to become increasingly inclusive: the
feminist studies of the 1970s grew into gender studies in the 1980s. In the 1990s
another change is happening as gender studies become aligned with post-colonial and
cultural studies. Critics like Gayatri Spivak and Tinh T.Minh-ha, recognising the
similarities between political power plays and gender power plays, have helped feminist
criticism shed its Eurocentric, middle-class look. For children’s literature critics, there is
an increased awareness of the way primitives and children are frequently (t)roped
together. In keeping with feminist agendas, this new theoretical line is changing both
the readings and the text.
It is true that there is nothing in children’s literature or children’s literature criticism
as yet that is as dramatic as the acknowledgement in Marina Warner’s novel Indigo, that
FEMINIST CRITICISM: FROM SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPING TO SUBJECTIVITY 105