Photo by John Weir
There is a crisis, as I see it, among the younger generation of girls in our society. Younger and younger, they seem to slough off their identities as children and strive to be the wrong kind of women. Mini skirts, huge sunglasses, hair extensions–these Lindsay Lohan Paris Hiltons often haven’t even hit puberty yet, and are wearing high-heels and carrying around metallic purses.
Where are they getting this from? Well, the media is all over the Britney/Lindsay/Parises of the world, and young girls are certainly listening. Even the Hannah Montana craze is like a slightly toned down version of the whole media message, but nice enough for moms and dads not to mind.
When I was younger, I was annoyed that there weren’t enough good books for me to read. I hated all the babysitter crap, the dewy eyed high-school romance books, and the millions of books about horses. (Why does everyone assume little girls love horses? Clearly, unicorns are far superior.) Most of my friends ate this stuff up, blasting through entire series in the blink of an eye and gushing about the love lives of their favorite fictive babysitters.
And it’s gotten much, much worse. The top selling books these days are, as I heard one bookseller explain, “Sex and the City for kids!”
What’s the solution to this? Geekdom.
Growing up, I had an idea I was a geek, but I didn’t know what to make of myself. If I had someone older help me through, I might have managed a little better and gained a little more confidence. I needed a role model that told me learning about the space-time continuum was cool, that memorizing the lineages of Hobbits was a perfectly respectable past-time and that, yes, unicorns are awesome. As it was, I took the long, hard road.
The thing is, girls need to understand that “girl power” has nothing to do with having a Coach bag and a Blackberry. It’s about being confident, about being strong and smart and beautiful from the inside out. Finding the right book, the right author, the right story, can change a girl’s life forever. I’m confident of that–heck, it happened to me.
For me, Madeline L’Engle was that voice. In the third grade I started with A Wrinkle in Time and the rest is history. L’Engle’s Meg Murry (and consequent other heroines) were role models for me–often slightly geeky girls with glasses who just “didn’t fit in” and yet, in the end, are capable of the near-impossible. L’Engle inspired my imagination, bolstered my confidence, and helped me to see that yes, I could do great things, too. Not to mention that her books helped me realize something else: women can write. We can write beautifully, meaningfully, artistically. We, too, can dream the big dreams.
As parents, teachers, friends, cousins, uncles, aunts… well, we really should do what we can to impact young girls’ lives. People are always willing to criticize the youth of today, but how many of us have been proactive in working to change that? So often, growing up, it’s the things we can’t do that define how we see ourselves (I’ll never be pretty enough, smart enough, skinny enough, fast enough)–showing someone what they can do, well, that’s magic. Real, pure, magic.
Some suggestions to start?
- Madeline L’Engle
- J.K. Rowling
- Garth Nix
- C.S. Lewis
- Susan Cooper
- Patricia C. Wrede
- Lloyd Alexander
There are dozens and dozens more (there’s a great Amazon list here with some more contemporary titles, too). And how about some graphic novels while you’re at it, too? And hey, if there’s a writer that impacted you, feel free to comment away.
The Aldersgate Cycle 
August 19, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Bruce Coville. I loved the Bruce Coville novels… especially ‘Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher’. I read ‘The Hobbit’ twenty times… and though I didn’t come across ‘Thieves & Kings’ as a child, I would have adored it if I had.
And, oddly enough, I loved an adult fantasy novel called ‘Blue Moon Rising’. Really, I have such fond memories of it, though I know that it wasn’t a stunning example of fantasy…
August 19, 2008 at 9:01 pm
For the slightly older set, perhaps Young Readers, Charles DeLint is a good choice. I agree with all your other choices/suggestions, with the addition of one Astrid Lindgren book called Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. That was one of my very favorite books growing up, and Ronia’s tomboy made me feel much better about being the tallest girl in class, all gawky and awkward. I have it if you’d like to peruse…it’s a quick read.
August 20, 2008 at 11:36 am
Do you find it kind of threatening to be a girl in geek culture, though? I’m a pretty geeky person, and it’s always been frustrating to me how misogynistic and objectificational some of the geek culture can be of women. There’s the obvious examples – scantily clad, big-boobed superheros, or the elf on the cover of WoW, for instance – but it’s not just marketing. I’m a mac tech, so I float back and forth between the IT department and the Art department wherever I work, and the IT department, in every case I’ve run into, has a deep stockpile of dirty jokes, sexist jokes, sexually objectifying stories, etc, etc, etc. I imagine being a woman in that environment would be very threatening. Just curious.
August 20, 2008 at 12:27 pm
@Jason YES. You know, I’ve posted about that many times before, being a quasi-feminist geek myself. However I don’t think it’s just a symptom of geekiness, I think it’s something that extends from all sorts of cultures. One could argue at least the women, scantily clad as they are, are at least on par with the men as far as power is concerned (in WoW at least).
What I love about being a geek gal is that I can define my freedom and myself whatever way I want. I can dress like a steampunk, or a stormtrooper, or Katamari damacy or, well, myself. And my point here is to show how many books are out there that can empower women.
I mean, what’s worse: a bootylicious WoW avatar or a skanky Carrie Bradshaw wannabe? The truth is misogyny exists everywhere, from the highest corporate tables down to burger joints. And I think empowering girls, encouraging them to be smart, unique, and strong, is a great place to start… to me, fantasy/sci-fi books are a great place to start (but maybe let’s skip the conventions for a few years!).
August 21, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I suppose the snag, though, is that the reason why people (such as yourself, I presume) become strong women (and strong men, if one takes that beyond the mere implication of holding a position of power, to holding a position of moral strength), is because they become what they choose to become, you know? I mean, in a world, let us say, where woman are force to be engineers and Star Trek fans, instead of a world where they are forced to be housewives and Danielle Steele readers, is that world better? Not really. Human progress isn’t people joining any one life path, it’s people joining their life path. But I suppose that’s more esoteric than anything else. Practically, I think there is a great danger in drawing absolutes, is all – this group is good, whereas this one is bad. Geeks are bad as much as good, that’s all.
August 21, 2008 at 8:35 pm
@Jason True, true. Anything taken to the extreme, of course. I just will say I’d much rather see my daughter (when I have one) reading L’Engle than CosmoGIRL any day. In some ways, the crap on the newsstands is even more impossible to achieve than SF/F!