Special Interest Page

Culture/Gender Page

Sometimes I ask my students: should books, especially those for young children, present the world as it is, or as it should be?

When I was child, most of the pictures in my books, including the Dick and Jane readers, showed white middle-class families, where Daddy went to work and Mother stayed home, usually with two children, almost always one boy and one girl, and sometimes a baby.

The house was white and surrounded by grass, trees, and a white picket fence. The little girl and the mother wore dresses, and the mother wore high-heeled shoes even for doing housework. They depicted a world as it "should be," at least in someone's estimation.

Even though I was a white middle-class child, my world did not look like this. My mother often wore pants and beat-up sneakers, and so did I. Our house was white, but it did not have a picket fence, nor was it as spacious or neat as the houses in my books. Furthermore, the town was surrounded by woods that looked nothing like those park-like literary landscapes known as "forests." Because the families and places in my books did not look much like mine, I concluded not that the books were inaccurate, but that we were not what we were "supposed" to be.

If I felt left out of books as a child, children whose lives are even farther from the norm than mine was, must feel even more left out when they fail to find characters or places like themselves in their books. Fortunately there is much more variety in children's picture books today. Unfortunately, some of the books that present different ways of living continue to cause controversy because they do not present life according to someone's concept of what "should be." John Steptoe's Stevie (New York: Harper, 1969) often provokes questions about presenting a model of "bad" language to children. Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies, (Illus. by Diana Souza. Boston, MA: Alyson, 1989) which depicts the life of a child with lesbian parents, raises strong feelings and provokes intense debate, and is not found in the local public library. The Quitting Deal (New York: Viking, 1975) by Tobi Tobias, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, depicts a mother trying to quit smoking and a daughter trying to stop sucking her thumb. It depicts life as it is, rather than as it should be, and in doing so makes many people uncomfortable. This book is very different from the Little Golden Book of my childhood, We Help Mommy, with its little brother and sister who never quarrel, and who help mommy with her chores in an already immaculate house.

One fondly remembered childhood book that showed a life something like mine, was Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal (New York: Viking, 1948). Sal's mother wore a skirt, but with practical flat shoes, and she actually looked much like my mother, while Sal looked a lot like me. She didn't have perfect blonde curls, but raggedy hair that went every-which-way, and she wore overalls, with one strap always falling off the shoulder. The kitchen with its old wood stove looked just like my Aunt Neely's, and best of all, the wild places with blueberries and bears and big rocks and stumps, looked just like places I knew. Blueberry-picking and worrying about bears were a big part of my life.

Oddly, when I read this book to my children in the 1980s, both my son and daughter thought Sal was a boy. "Why?" I asked, puzzled. "Because he's wearing overalls!" they both said, even my daughter in her Oshkoshes. Somehow, despite changes in society, conventions in books and television have not kept pace, and children continue to internalize old stereotypes.

I've had students comment that Sal's mother was negligent to let her child out of sight on a mountain where there were bears. The happy ending to this book, certainly presents life as it "should" or "could" be, not as it might be, yet for me as a child, this book came closer than most to presenting life as it is, and the ending was reassuring to a child who had a great fear of bears.

Should books present life as it is, or as it should be? And, if "as should be," whose idea of what should be? I suspect that what the best books give us, and what we need, is a little of both, even though we do not always agree either on "what is" or on "what should be."

Created June 11, 1997 and is continuously revised

SCILS, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey