A UK campaign titled Let Books Be Books has received the support of authors, a newspaper, and bookseller Waterstones. More than 4,000 people have signed the group’s Charge.og petition.
A UK CAMPAIGN titled Let Books Be Books has received the support of authors, a newspaper, and bookseller Waterstones, and the related petition has garnered more than 4,000 signatures. The Let Books Be Books petition on Change.org, which asks publishers to take off “for girls” or “for boys” phrasing from regular books as well as activity and sticker books.
Katy Guest is the Literary Editor of the Independent, one of the U.K,’s most widely-read newspapers. On March 15 she published a piece titled, “Gender-specific books demean all our children. So The Independent on Sunday will no longer review anything marketed to exclude either sex.” In that column, Guest writes:
“Happily, as the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, there is something that I can do about this. So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.”
The online campaign called Let Books Be Books petitions publishers to ditch gender-specific children’s books. Both Parragon (which sells Disney titles, among others) and Usborne (the Independent Publisher of the Year 2014), agreed that they will no longer publish books specifically titled “for boys” or “for girls.”
Katy Guest writes, “There are those who will say that insisting on gender-neutral books and toys for children is a bizarre experiment in social engineering by radical lefties and paranoid “femininazis” who won’t allow boys to be boys, and girls to be girls. (Because, by the way, seeking equality of rights and opportunities was a key plank of Nazi ideology, was it?) But the ‘experiment’ is nothing new. When I grew up in the 1970s, and when my parents grew up in the 1950s, brothers and sisters shared the same toys, books and games, which came in many more colours than just pink and blue, and there was no obvious disintegration of society as a result.
“Publishers and toy companies like to say that they are offering parents more ‘choice’ these days by billing some of their products as just for boys and others as just for girls. What they’re actually doing, by convincing children that boys and girls can’t play with each other’s stuff, is forcing parents to buy twice as much stuff.”
Good books do not have pink or blue colors, the award-winning author Anne Fine said, as she argued gender-based marketing is “nonsensical” and sets society back 50 years.
Fine, the former children’s laureate and Carnegie Medal winner, said narrowing children’s horizons because of their gender is “extraordinary,” limiting their lives in a “horrible, horrible way.”
Arguing the “pinkification” of girls was a “serious matter,” Fine said society had gone “so far back it’s astonishing” taking gender relations back to “before the revolution.”
Fine also said in an interview, “I’m astonished when I come across seemingly intelligent women who do not see it as a problem. I really don’t think they realise how much socialisation is involved in it.
“If children are taught to think this gender only does this or only likes that, then you have narrowed both sexes horizons to an infinitely greater extent than women’s choices were hampered even before the revolution.”
The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the subject, as well, in a piece published on March 19.
Catherine Pearlman, a social worker who works as an assistant professor at the College of New Rochelle and writes the periodic “Family Coach” column for Speakeasy, told the WSJ that there is a “gender divide” across many children’s items like books, toys and clothes. But, Pearlman said, “I don’t think simply deciding not to review any book with a gender line solves the problem.”
Pearlman went on to suggest, “Maybe it would be more powerful to review a book and point out how much more interesting it could have been if marketed to both boys and girls. Also just shunning ‘princess for girls’ books doesn’t eliminate the fact that so many girls love those stories. If they connect to reading through those stories what a shame to try to take that away.”
Rachel Kahan is an Executive Editor at William Morrow. Morrow isn’t a children’s book publisher, but Kahan posted the Independent article written by Katy Guest on Facebook.
Kahan said via email “This is a challenge to writers and publishers and ultimately to consumers to defy the dismal (and dismally old-fashioned) idea that books have to be marketed to one gender only because boys can’t identify with or enjoy stories about girl characters and vice versa.”