Wondering Where All of the Female Superheroes Went

Photo by Owen Main

Photo by Jenny Livingston

My daughter's best friend moved to a new preschool at the beginning of the school year and every since then my daughter has primarily been playing with a group of boys who are very into superheroes. My husband and I were starting to get on princess overload, so we welcomed the change to more empowered role models for our daughter. I scoured Amazon for books with female super heroes because while she had a Supergirl costume and doll she received for her birthday, she didn't really know anything about super heroes besides what her friends told her, and they were only interested in the boy superheroes like Batman, Spiderman, and Superman. It was time to for her to start studying!

While Christmas shopping for my daughter, I was relieved that to find that DC has been churning out books and toys for the preschool set and has made it a point to include some females in their products (Marvel has some catching up to do!). Specifically Wonder Woman, who receives the most love thanks to Patty Jenkins' new movie starring Gal Gadot, as well as Supergirl and Batgirl. From new Little Golden Books and Step Into Reading books, my daughter has been devouring everything we can find. She especially loves The Big Book of Girl Power by Julie Merberg, which is basically a who's who of female superheroes. Awesome, right?

Fast forward to this week when I found a new book of superhero bedtime stories called DC Super Friends 5-Minute Story Collection put out by Random House that I thought my daughter would enjoy

Photo by Jenny Livingston

. The front cover features Superman, The Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Flash. The back cover features Batgirl, Superman, the Flash, and Batman. The male superheroes definitely get more love than the females, but a good mix non-the-less, or so I thought. I excitedly bought the book with one-click and eagerly awaited the book's arrival so I could share it with my daughter. When the package arrived in my mail box, I ripped open the cardboard packaging and eagerly started flipping through the pages. Thankfully my daughter was off with my husband when the book arrived because what came out of my mouth once I had flipped through all of the pages was not appropriate for her young ears. The book starts with a biography of (supposedly) all of the superheroes featured in the book. There is just one problem: when you get to the stories, Supergirl and Batgirl are nowhere to be found. They literally are not in a single story, despite being displayed on the front and back cover of the book as well as in the super hero biographies. Wonder Woman gets a smaller role in one story, but that's it.

Photo by Jenny Livingston

While my daughter still loves the book and is enjoying all of the stories despite the absence of two of her favorite characters, I have been fuming about the false advertising. DC obviously knew that the female superheroes would be a big selling point for a big chunk of their target audience, so why exclude them? It makes no sense. Every single one of the male superheroes listed in the biographies is included in at least one story, if not several. What gives, DC and Random House? Was this an accident from too many people working on the book? Were you just trying to widen your audience with the cover, not really caring that it didn't represent the contents of the book and hoping no one would notice until they had already purchased it and wouldn't want to disappoint their kids by returning it? Judging by the reviews on Amazon (mental note, always scan the reviews before purchasing a book in the future), I am not the only one to have noticed the missing female superheroes and to be upset by it.

I am genuinely heartened by new push for female superheroes. It has been long overdue. However, it's products like the DC Super Friends 5-Minute Story Collection that bring into focus how far we still have to go before there is true equity and female characters are not treated as an afterthought thrown in to appease the angry feminists. The huge success of the new Wonder Woman movie gives me hope that the companies producing these products are finally coming to their senses. What do you think? If you have any book recommendations, please post them in the comments section.

Target: Leading the Way Toward Gender Equality in Toys?

Target made a big splash recently by announcing their plans to remove gender labels from their toy and children's home goods aisles. I inwardly cheered when I saw the headline. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how big an impact those signs actually have. Don't get me wrong, I still applaud the decision, but I never even noticed that they had gender labels on the toy aisles until I saw that they were going to remove them. Toys were always obviously organized by gender, but I didn't recall the actual labels.

Photo by Jenny Livingston

So, will it make a difference? How many people actually read the signs when shopping for toys? Target isn't in control of the toy packaging or colors or any other aspect of the toys that make them gender specific. They could stop carrying toys that are marketed as gender specific, but that isn't very likely because it would eat into their profits. They could start mixing the different gendered toys together more, but that might be an organizational nightmare. 

Opponents suggest this move will make it more confusing when shopping for gifts, or argue that they want their children to play with toys based on their gender. While I do believe it's a parent's right to  decide what toys their children play with, the research seems to be pretty clear that the current state of gendered toys is not encouraging the development of well-rounded children. In their research, the NAEYC concluded "that girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous. The toys rated as most likely to be educational and to develop children’s physical, cognitive, artistic, and other skills were typically categorized as neutral or moderately masculine. We concluded that strongly gender-typed toys appear to be less supportive of optimal development than neutral or moderately gender-typed toys."

I recently read this opinion piece in the New York Times in which the author, Alice Robb, explained how the gender segregation of toys developed from the 1970s through the 1990s and my own childhood toy consumption made a lot more sense. My parents still have the Little People® dollhouse I used to play with as a child in the early 1980s and my daughter loves to play with it whenever she visits. 

   

Little People® dollhouse circa 1983
 Photos by Debbie Livingston

Flash forward thirty years and my daughter received a very different Little People® dollhouse for her birthday.

Little People® dollhouse 2015 Photo by Jenny Livingston

Granted, Little People® added a bathroom and some cutesy sound effects like a flushing toilet, ringing phone, and a few catchy tunes (the reader can decide whether these are actual improvements or not). The point is, nothing about the 1980's dollhouse codes it as female-only beyond the general idea that dollhouses themselves are for girls. The 2015 house, however, practically screams "FOR GIRLS ONLY!" Most people meandering down the toy aisle at Target do not need a sign to stop them from buying it for a boy. That being said, even the 4-year old boys at my daughter's birthday party were begging for us to open it so they could check it out, in case you needed any proof that gender specific colors is a learned behavior. 

After I got too old for my Little People® dollhouse in the mid-1980s, I graduated up to a Barbie™ dollhouse. Like practically every little girl of my generation, I was obsessed with Barbie™. And not Barbie™ with a career—did Barbie™ even have a career in the 1980s? Maybe as a fashion model, but if there was a doctor Barbie, no one in my circle of friends had it. No, I'm talking about pink corvette driving Malibu Barbie™. I even had Barbie's Dream House, which looked a lot like my daughter's dollhouse with a pink roof, white walls and lots of pink accents.

My mother still has some of her old Barbie™ dolls from the early 1960's and while I'm not claiming that era of Barbie™ was even remotely a feminist icon, there is an astounding lack of pink in my mother's Barbie™ collection. 

A few years ago, before I was even pregnant with my daughter, my mother and I sorted through my Barbie™ stash as she wanted to make room in her closets. Did I want to keep anything to pass on if I ever have a daughter, she asked me. My gut reaction was, of course! I wanted to keep all of it! This was my childhood we were talking about. Plus, these dolls could be worth something some day. 

I paused before responding. My next thought was, would I want to encourage my daughter to play with Barbie™ as I did? And the answer was, no. Not that I would refuse to let my daughter play with Barbie™, for all her unrealistic body shape and highly sexualized clothes, at least modern Barbie™ dolls have some career options beyond marrying Ken. I have other dolls based in history and literature to pass down to my daughter, but I ended up tossing all of the Barbie™ dolls.

It's now a couple of weeks after my daughter's second birthday and I am beginning to realize the extent of the battle that lies ahead of me for my daughter. As there seems to be no rapid end in sight to the hyper gendered toys and I recognize that she will be bombarded with media telling her what she should like and who she should be, it's up to me to make sure she is exposed to a balance of toys and activities so grows into a well rounded human being fully capable of deciding for herself what she likes and who she wants to be. If pink ends up being her favorite color, it's fine with me as long as it's because she really does love it and not because she has been told girls love pink. 

The good news is my daughter has me and my husband for parents. I was obsessed with pink and Malibu Barbie™, but my parents made sure to balance that influence with more educational activities and I grew into the feminist mom that I am today, ready to do the same for my daughter.

Thank you, Target, for making your toy aisle signage gender neutral. I hope you next step is to ask what else you can do to help.

Good-bye Gilbert Blythe

His death didn't make a huge splash in the media, not like bigger actors. But for many of us born in the 70s and 80s, the passing of Jonathan Crombie felt like the death of our first love. He will forever be Gilbert Blythe in my mind, and despite the downright horrible screenplay (in my opinion) for the final Anne of Green Gables series, I can't help but be sad that he will never be given a chance to reprise the role.

From the very first chapter of Anne of Green Gables, I was obsessed. I went on to read just about everything Lucy Maud Montgomery ever published and getting to visit Prince Edward Island in the midst of reading the Anne of Green Gables trilogy was one of the biggest highlights of my young life. I wanted to be Anne Shirley, to be at the top of my class, to marry my childhood sweetheart, to live in the beautiful gardens and houses she always seemed to inhabit, to have that one bosom friend. In Anne I recognized my own drive for perfection, that same deep seeded certainty of right and wrong that drove our loved ones crazy. But she also had an imagination and confidence I could only envy, especially since those were some of the traits Gilbert loved best about her.

As I look back now, I am glad Gilbert was my first crush and can only hope my own daughter finds, if not Gilbert, someone as safe as Gilbert to invest her heart in for the first time. Besides being a only a character in a book, Gilbert was safe. Smart, funny, loyal, and forgiving, Gilbert accepted Anne for who she was and never tried to change her. He supported her dreams and waited patiently for her even when she rejected him. He can't be blamed if he wasn't perfect (who is?), but he came pretty close.

If you consider that Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, Gilbert is pretty remarkable in his feminist tendencies. After all, he encouraged Anne's education and both her teaching and her writing careers in a time when women were expected to stay home and take care of their homes unless they didn't have a man to provide for them. This more equal relationship is one of the many ways the series has remained relevant through the years.

Jonathan Crombie, I will miss you. You brought Gilbert off the page and into the flesh, and for that, I will forever be grateful.

The Sexism of Sesame Street

My daughter is finally getting to the age where she is starting to watch television. I am convinced that until recently, when I thought it was time to introduce her to some children's programming to her, she thought the only thing the television showed was sports, my husband's passion. The first thing I pulled up to show my daughter was Sesame Street on Netflix.


Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I love Sesame Street. As a mom, it's one of the few toddler friendly shows that doesn't either grate on my nerves or bore me. And yet, I have a bone to pick with the show. Less than a quarter of its muppets are female, and certainly none of the most beloved ones are. 
Last week my toddler daughter recently decided she wanted to pick out the diaper she wanted to wear. We looked at all the characters they featured: Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Ernie. It then dawned on me that every single muppet featured on them was male. I couldn't help but recall the furor over the lack of Black Widow marketing from Marvel and wondered why is no one upset about Sesame Street? This is a show geared toward children as they first become consumers of media, heralded as the gold standard of children's programming, and it's basically sidelining 50% of of its viewers. Is it a case of the age-old thinking that girls are willing to consume male-centric media, but not the reverse? The same thinking that leads movie studios to pour money into male-centric big-box office movies and "chick flicks" have to fight to be produced?

I stewed on it and then thought, I can't be the only one who has noticed this. Sure enough, Bitch Magazine featured an article about it . . . way back in 2009 and PopMatters brought it up even farther back in 2006. For the most part though, I found very little evidence of fury I myself have begun to feel. 

Sesame Street seems to be trying to rectify their failings, introducing three female muppets since 2006, starting with Abby Cadabby. But I couldn't name any of these characters before my search and they certainly haven't established themselves in America's hearts like their classic male counterparts. They aren't exactly Miss Piggy, who was recently honored with a Sackler Center First Award from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Miss Piggy, it seems, is an anomaly in the muppet world, where even on her own franchise, The Muppets, she is all alone in a sea of male muppets.

Seseme Street, if by some miracle you are reading this, help a mommy out and give my daughter some better female muppets to watch!