As Michelle Obama looked at her portrait unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in February, she thought of the impact it would have on young girls and girls of colour in the years to come. “(They) will come to this place, and they will look up, and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall,” the former First Lady of the US said.
In the last few years, the idea that children across lines of race, gender and caste, among other identities, need to see people who resemble them in books, films and museums has been recognised, and has propelled a greater push for diversity in the arts.
An oft-cited 2011 Florida State University study found that “no more than 33 per cent of children’s books published in any given year contain central characters that are adult women or female animals, but adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 per cent of books.” A 2017
Publishing in recent times has seen a wave of children’s non-fiction books that seeks to redress the dearth of female role models in popular culture by relating the true stories of women who have changed the world. The most visible effort has been seen in anthologies that attempt to gather the vast history of female achievements, to say to children: Women have been instrumental in shaping every sphere of human activity including computer science, environmental studies, music and sports.
The most prominent (and bestselling) of these is the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls series. Each volume contains the stories of 100 women, whose real-life journeys are woven into bedtime tales, accompanied by striking, full-page portraits that pay homage to the achievements. The eclectic mix of women featured includes tennis champ Serena Williams, scientist Ada Lovelace and primatologist Jane Goodall. The editors deliberated on the protests that demanded they remove Aung San Suu Kyi from the collection in view of the Myanmar Army’s violence against the Rohingya people, and told a journalist that they didn’t want to pretend successful women were saints or did not make mistakes.
In some ways, the stories we tell children have traditionally lacked nuance. Rebel Girls may feature controversial women, but it doesn’t actively choose to include the problematic parts of their story. It reinforces the idea (particularly to readers unaware of the larger context) that it is well-behaved women who make history. The Margaret Thatcher tale glosses over her divisive policies, which many argue had a devastating impact on the disenfranchised. Instead, it claims she was “admired for her strength and determination”. The need for books like these is real and urgent, but these stories need to embrace that the success of women isn’t a direct outcome of inherent and uncomplicated goodness, and that their legacies are burdened with the same complexity that is acceptable in men. Among similar anthologies are Fantastically Great Women Who Made History and Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World . Rachel Ignotofsky’s Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World and Women in Sports: 50 Fearless Athletes who Played to Win are two of the strongest books to emerge from this wave.
Another of the movement’s impacts has been the launch of similar books targeted at boys, but the motivation behind the latter is to present a healthier alternative to the hyper-masculine narratives that currently dominate children’s literature. In Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different: True Tales Of Amazing Boys Who Changed The World Without Slaying Dragons , a magician named Dynamo is featured as a child who doesn’t know swimming, thrown into the water by bullies. He grew up to design illusions that enabled him to appear to be walking on water. In The Good Guys: 50 Heroes Who Changed the World with Kindness , lesser-known heroes and famous philanthropists come together to show young boys that the value of their lives can be measured by the generosity they exhibit.
Closer home, Aparna Jain’s Like A Girl: Real Stories For Tough Kids is a step forward in recording the lives of exceptional Indian women. However, the collection isn’t as well produced, with storytelling that often reads like a textbook, insufficient context and dates, and an inconsistent quality of illustrations. The singer Kishori Amonkar is referred to as a perfectionist without an analysis of the factors that mould women into that form. The highly condensed stories include more information than they can meaningfully unpack in the space. Like A Girl is still worth purchasing as an essential history lesson for children, but there’s room for the anticipated second volume to improve.
The direction children’s non-fiction is moving in is respectful of history and of the true stories that directly contradict biases against both genders, but this requires a greater representation of trans and non-binary people. The Iceberg Theory in education acknowledges that children see what is visible above the surface, and take it for the whole truth without ever learning that the story of success being shared with them rests on an underwater mountain of mistakes and failure. Going forward, there’s a need for publishers and authors to introspect about the damage that telling linear stories to children can do.
Urvashi Bahuguna is a writer based in Delhi