Crescent Shadows On-Line Newsletter of the Hudson Valley Pagan Network, Inc.

While reading stories to her daughter, Ragan discovered a discrepancy. Where were the girls and women in the stories? She started to change the pronouns when she could as she read to her daughter. Then she read If I Ran the Zoo and reached the part about hens roosting in each other’s topknots. She became angry when she reached the part that said, “Another one roosts in the topknot of his. / And another in his, and another in HIS….”. A male hen? So after her daughter was in bed Ragan started looking through the books. And didn’t like what she found.

There was lazy Mayzie who convinces Horton to hatch her egg. All male crowd scenes. Stuck up Lolla Lee Lou. Vain and silly Gertrude McFuzz. Or a nobody like Sally in The Cat in the Hat. Over 90 percent of the characters were male and when major characters were female, they were mostly negative. The rest were beautiful and usually needed rescuing. What were we telling our children?

In most oral traditions there are heroines as well as heroes. In anthologies someone collects the stories and writes them down. Then an editor selects, translates and edits the stories. Men have done most of this work and they’ve picked stories they like. So Ragan went through libraries searching for positive female protagonists. She reviewed over 30,000 stories from around the world. She discovered courageous mothers, clever young girls, and warrior women; who rescue villages, rule wisely and outwit their antagonists. She discovered Little Red Riding Hood goes through the woods a second time, meets another wolf and takes care of him herself.

Some would think gender doesn’t matter as long as there are good role models. If this were the case then there would be a fifty-fifty balance. Girls are hungry to be a part of the story. And I feel boys need to see girls are just as capable of saving the day.

- Kat Dunlap

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Last Updated: June 8, 2003
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