Reading

[mmcirvin]

Jorie is starting to read books. For several months she'd been able to recognize an increasing number of printed words, but found reading at any length exhausting. Sometimes we'd work our way through a page in Hop On Pop; I'd point to the words with my finger and she'd read them with a little coaching, but she'd tire of it after a few pages and insist on my reading the rest of the book myself.

Over the past week, though, some switch flipped in her head and she's started grabbing the book away from me and plowing through the whole book herself. Go, Dog. Go! and Put Me In The Zoo have been mastered; the repetitive vocabulary of these old Beginner Books means that any new words she learns to read get reinforced elsewhere in the text. Sometimes she does start making it up from a partial memory of the text; I try to get her back to reading the actual words by pointing to them, and she says "Stop pointing, it ruins the book!" and then goes back and reads the sentence.

Comments

[secretagentmoof]

My niece is a big fan of "Open Me, I'm a Dog" by art spiegelman; it seems to be the "There Is a Monster At the End of This Book" for the current generation.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One problem with the 1960s and older books, especially for a girl, is the gigantic unexamined gender bias; the principal characters are almost always male. Often there's a boy-and-girl duo and the boy does 100% of the talking. You see it even in books from the era written by women. Starting in the Seventies things started to get a little better, but it's slow in coming.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I was just thinking about this because of this discussion (http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/05/reading-dr-seuss-can-be-dangerous.html), which gets immediately mired in the usual dramatics in the comments. My attitude is, I'm going to keep using the books but call Jorie's attention to the problem when I can. (Her cousin Greta is already a fierce feminist on these grounds.)

[kate_nepveu]

Every time SteelyKid asks me to read _The Places You'll Go_, I sigh, because it's a book written in the 1990s and the "you" is explicitly male. Fuck you, Dr. Seuss, for making me edit on the fly and screw up rhyme schemes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I brought up the subject with Jorie this morning, and she immediately mentioned the way Hop On Pop introduces "Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown" and then Mrs. Brown is never seen again, while Mr. Brown has a series of absurd adventures. (Hop On Pop is better than average for Seuss, though; girls get lines in several places.)

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

Starting in the Seventies things started to get a little better, but it's slow in coming.

As an ardent feminist mother of a daughter for whom I want a more equal world, I am consistently amazed at how ingrained it is, though. I do remember as a child of the seventies noticing that there were no girl Muppets save supporting-character Prairie Dawn, though I do not recall as a child being alarmed at the imbalance in Dr. Seuss. Possibly also because I was a girly-girl rather than a tomboy and would not have been interested in reading about or identifying with girls killing dragons anyway.

But I say "ingrained," because when I was aware of "Blue's Clues" but hadn't watched it, I assumed Blue was male. It simply did not occur to me--as a man-hating unshaven feminazi adult--that a neutrally-named cartoon character who was a main focus of the show would be female, because they just never are.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When Blue gets a voice in the "Blue's Room" puppet segments, it becomes more obvious.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...In the early days, I think Fran Brill (who did Prairie Dawn, the early character Little Bird, and, much later, Zoe) was the only female Muppeteer.

Starting sometime in the Eighties, they started sporadically trying to come up with a breakout female Muppet character, and the number of regular female Muppets started to increase. I think they got a hit with Abby Cadabby, who is very much a girly-girl character (and also has a fantasy hook: she's a fairy-in-training who is constantly causing reality-warping magic accidents).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Of course, the Muppet Show cast had Miss Piggy, who, for all her virtues, was pretty much the exception that proved the rule: The Chick, as TVTropes would say. Early on she was the butt of a lot of fairly misogynistic jokes, leavened mostly by her tendency toward violent revenge.

[acw.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, when you get to chapter books the problem is solved. There are a million very fine juvenile novels from the last thirty years or so with very strong girl protagonists. Patricia Wrede's dragon series is a good example, and then of course there's Tamora Pierce.