Aggressive but loyal: modification and gender roles in British children’s adventure books
Issue: Vol 14 No. 2 (2020)
Journal: Gender and Language
Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/genl.38577
Abstract:
Language powerfully impacts the construction of our gender identities. In the mid-twentieth century gender stereotypes were strong, but at the same time feminism was giving rise to new ideas and becoming increasingly mainstream. What gender-related discourse prosodies did children encounter in popular literature? Did these merely reinforce the conventional stereotypes or did they contain the seeds of change? This study of British children's fiction published in the 1940s-60s seeks to answer these questions through an analysis of personality descriptors collocated with female and male characters in eight books by four prolific children's writers. Although gender stereotypes (as represented by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory) are to some extent reinforced in these books, there are also considerable discrepancies. Children were meeting a range of positive models which did not always match ‘feminine' or ‘masculine' stereotypes.
Author: Elizabeth Poynter
References :
Auchmuty, Rosemary (1999) A World of Women. London: The Women’s Press Ltd.
Baker, Paul (2010) Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language 4(1): 125–49. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v4i1.125
Baker, Paul (2014) Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.
Bem, Sandra (1974) The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 42(2): 155–62. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
Blyton, Enid (1967) Five Go Adventuring Again. Leicester: Knight Books.
Blyton, Enid (1967) The O’Sullivan Twins. London: Mayflower Books.
Brent-Dyer, Elinor M. (1955) Top Secret. London: Chambers.
Brent-Dyer, Elinor M. (2002) The Chalet School Does It Again. Coleford: Girls Gone By Publishers.
Diekman, Amanda B. and Murnen, Sarah K. (2004) Learning to be little women and little men: the inequitable gender equality of nonsexist children’s literature. Sex Roles 50(5/6): 373–85. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:sers.0000018892.26527.ea
Dinella, Lisa M. and Weisgram, Erica S. (2018) Gender-typing of children’s toys: causes, consequences, and correlates. Sex Roles 79: 254–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-018-0943-3
Feminists on Children’s Literature (1971) School Library Journal, January 1971: 19–24.
Foster, Shirley and Simons, Judy (1995) What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ‘Classic’ Stories for Girls. Basingstoke: Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23933-7
Gooden, Angela M. and Gooden, Mark A. (2001) Gender representation in notable children’s picture books: 1995–99. Sex Roles 45(1/2): 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1013064418674
Holt, Cheryl L. and Ellis, Jon B. (1998) Assessing the current validity of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Sex Roles 39: 929–41. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018836923919
Hunt, Sally (2015) Representations of gender and agency in the Harry Potter series. In Paul Baker and Tony McEnery (eds) Corpora and Discourse Studies 266–84. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738.0017
Jackson, Sue and Gee, Susan (2005) ‘Look Janet’, ‘No you look John’: constructions of gender in early school reader illustrations across 50 years. Gender and Education 17(2): 115–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025042000301410
Johns, William E. (1943) Worrals on the Warpath. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Johns, William E. (1949) Worrals in the Wastelands. London: Lutterworth Press.
Johns, William E. (1950) Biggles ‘Fails To Return’. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Karlsson, Marie and Olin-Scheller, Christina (2015) ‘Let’s party!’ Harry Potter fan fiction sites as social settings for narrative gender constructions. Gender and Language 9(2): 167–88. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i2.17330
Knowles, Murray and Malmkjær, Kirsten (1996) Language and Control in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2011.0003
Kreyer, Rolf (2015) ‘Funky fresh dressed to impress’: a corpus linguistic view on gender roles in pop songs. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(2): 174–204. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.2.02kre
Macalister, John (2011) Flower-girl and bugler-boy no more: changing gender representation in writing for children. Corpora 6(1): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2011.0003
Marr, Andrew (2009) The Making of Modern Britain. London: Macmillan.
Marwick, Arthur (2003) British Society since 1945, 4th ed. London: Penguin Books.
Moon, Rosamund (2014) From gorgeous to grumpy: adjectives, age and gender. Gender and Language 8(1): 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v8i1.5
Partington, Alan (2004) ‘Utterly content in each other’s company’: semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 131–56. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.07par
Pearce, Michael (2008) Investigating the collocational behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC using Sketch Engine. Corpora 3(1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.3366/E174950320800004X
Petersen, Sharyl B. and Lach, Mary A. (1990) Gender stereotypes in children’s books: their prevalence and influence on cognitive and affective development. Gender and Education 2(2): 185–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025900020204
Poynter, Elizabeth (2018) You Girls Stay Here: Gender Roles in Popular British Children’s Adventure Fiction, 1930–70. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rudd, David (2009) In defence of the indefensible? Some grounds for Enid Blyton’s appeal. In Janet Maybin and Nicola J. Watson (eds) Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories 168–82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Saville, Malcolm (1964) The Purple Valley. London: Heinemann.
Saville, Malcolm (1970) Treasure at Amory’s. London: Fontana.
Scott, Kathryn P. (1986) Effects of sex-fair reading materials on pupils’ attitudes, comprehension, and interest. American Educational Research Journal 23(1): 105–16. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312023001105
Sigley, Robert and Holmes, Janet (2002) Looking at girls in corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2): 138–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/007242030002004
Stephens, John (2002) ‘A page just waiting to be written on’: masculinity schemata and the dynamics of subjective agency in junior fiction. In John Stephens (ed) Ways of Being Male 38–54. Abingdon: Routledge.
Stoney, Barbara (1986) Enid Blyton. A Biography, 2nd ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Stubbs, Michael (2001) Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Suico, Terri (2017) History repeating itself: the portrayal of female characters in young adult literature at the beginning of the millennium. In Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel (eds) Gender Identities: Critical Re-readings of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Literature 11–27. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315691633-3
Sunderland, Jane (2011) Language, Gender and Children’s Fiction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Tannen, Deborah (1986) That’s Not What I Meant. New York: Dent.
Thompson, Paul and Sealey, Alison (2007) Through children’s eyes? Corpus evidence of the features of children’s literature. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.1.03tho
Torres-Yu, Rosario (2011) Childhood and family in contemporary children’s fiction: resilience, agency, and emergence of new gender norms. Kritika Kultura 16: 44–64.
Turner-Bowker, Diane (1996) Gender stereotyped descriptors in children’s picture books: does ‘Curious Jane’ exist in the literature? Sex Roles 35(7/8): 461–88. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01544132
Weitzman, Lenore J., Eifler, Deborah, Hokada, Elizabeth and Ross, Catherine (1972) Sex-role socialization in picture books for preschool children. American Journal of Sociology 77: 1125–50. https://doi.org/10.1086/225261
Wharton, Sue (2005) Invisible females, incapable males: gender construction in a children’s reading scheme. Language and Education 19(3): 238–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668677