(Untitled)

[cdk]

So I'm thinking about children's literature. There are five books I absolutely must have for my son - Fox in Socks, Winnie the Pooh / The House at Pooh Corner, Little Fox Goes to the End of the World*, Never Tease a Weasel, and Dominic. I own four of the five, and need to order a used copy of Never Tease a Weasel soon, because I don't know what

Comments

[thespian]

well, Mrs. Mallard is pretty active in Make Way For Ducklings. None of the ducklings are gendered, either, though Jack and Mack are probably boys.

While Ducky in Ducky is identified on the back cover as a he (a publishers decision, and one that always vexed me), Ducky tells the story in first person in the story, and at no point identifies as either gender. Also, it is science!

(You are actually pretty good to go with most Eve Bunting stuff; one of the reasons the gendering on the blurb on the paperback of Ducky bothered me is there was no reason. Ducky is gender free - Ducky is a freaking rubber duck. While certainly not all girls, she has written a lot of books about girls, and even if the story is about a boy, if there is a girl they are active, just not the protagonist.)

Aside from issues of attaching gender issues to toddlers books, I would say that the book I give pretty much ever toddler I know, when I have a chance, is There's a Monster at the End of This Book. You can never introduce a child to meta fiction too early these

[cdk]

Oh, good. Make Way... was the one book I came across while writing this post that I couldn't say off the top of my head whether it fit. Glad it does. And I TOTALLY forgot about There's a Monster...; it's on the must have list as well, and I've no idea how I forgot about it. There are a lot of books I remember having as a very young child, but that and Little Fox are the only two I remember reading.

[mothwentbad]

There's A Monster at the End of This Book came to my mind in the same way, too. It's not negotiable.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is pretty necessary. The two title characters are male, but it's essential reading all around and pretty fair to its mainstay female characters - Suzie, mom, Roz the babysitter. Teacher is sort of left generic. None of them are flowery passive doormats or anything.

[cdk]

Yeah, I may have to give Calvin and Hobbes a pass if I want him to get to read any collections of newspaper comics. It's my fault, really, for not already owning a copy.

[mothwentbad]

There's The Land Before Time, but that's not a book. So... I don't know.

[hwrnmnbsol]

Stellaluna.

[hwrnmnbsol]

Also: books by Virginia Lee Burton, including Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow, and Maybelle the Cable Car. Of course, in each of these cases, the female characters are pieces of heavy equipment, not biological females, so this may not meet your baseline test.

[cdk]

I'm thinking it's more about the pronoun than it is about the equipment. And I'm delighted to learn that there are children's books about heavy equipment that meet my test!

[hwrnmnbsol]

In hindsight, these three books probably go a long way towards explaining why I am the way I am. I have almost no memories of my early life, but I remembered these books when I rediscovered them as a new parent.

[dawn_guy]

There's a good start on the feminist SF wiki. The lists are missing lots of books, including one of my favourites for exposing and questioning societal assumptions early: Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess.

[cdk]

That is a good start, thank you! And the Paper Bag Princess looks great, I'll definitely be picking that up.

I did a quick search a few days ago, and came across a very similar list, but it was both more extensive and less useful, and seemed to have a real strong focus on "and even though she was a girl, she still succeeded!" type books, and that message kind of bothers me, too. I see now that the problem with my quick search was not using the phrase "non-sexist." Apparently that's the phrase of choice when describing the sort of reading list I'm after; perhaps I'm over-reluctant to label Fox in Socks as sexist.