Bilbo Baggins Gets a "Makeover"

I've never been one to really pay much attention to the sex of a character, unless it's super relevant to a storyline. A character's gender is a different story, of course, as that is typically apparent in the first few pages of meeting him or her.

However, there are some rare cases where a character is quite gender neutral, the only indication of his or her sex being the pronouns that are used. Sometimes it just doesn't matter if a character is male or female. A woman in Colorado proved this point when her daughter insisted that The Hobbit's Bilbo Baggins was a girl. 

A Mighty Girl has the scoop:

Michelle Nijhuis ran into an unexpected challenge when reading her 5-year-old daughter “The Hobbit”: “My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.” So what did she do? She had the simple realization that “it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.” 

Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that: “The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy.” But when her daughter persisted, insisting that she “start reading the book the right way,” Nijhuis’ reservations quickly fell away: “The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender -- and neither does anyone else.” 

The gender disparity in children’s literature remains high -- according to a 2011 study of 6,000 children's books, only 31 percent had central female characters. And, as Nijhuis points out, “more insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say -- implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow.” 

Emboldened by the success of the swap with Bilbo, Nijhuis tried the same technique with some of her other children’s favorites: “In The Secret Garden, Dickon, the animal-loving adventurer who rescues Mistress Mary, became Mary’s best friend Diana. In the Finn Family Moomintroll books, the Snork Maiden and her brother the Snork traded genders... Friends tell me they pull similar tricks while reading to their sons and daughters: Women who farm become not ‘farmer’s wives’ but ‘farmers.’ Boy animal characters become girls, and vice versa.” 

Nijhuis encourages parents to test this trick out, so both daughters and sons “get to hear about a world as full of women as the real one -- and as free of stereotypes as we’d like ours to be. Kidlit may be catching up to our kids, but we don’t have to wait for it.” And she hopes that, “years from now, when [my daughter] has a chance to take her own unexpected journey, she’ll remember the story of Bilbo -- and be a little more inclined to say yes.” 

You can read more about Nijhuis’ experience gender-swapping classic literature on her blog at http://bit.ly/1dreLAD and check out her new article on updating classics for our times at http://bit.ly/1mYgg1c  

A Mighty Girl was founded to provide parents, educators, and young readers with a resource to help them find high-quality books starring smart, confident, and courageous Mighty Girls! If you mouse over “Books” on our main menu bar, you can open our book menu and quickly be able to find girl-empowering stories for children and teens that encourage almost any interest, or you can browse our entire book collection of over 2,000 titles athttp://www.amightygirl.com/books 

If you like the idea of giving classic stories a girl-empowering twist, you might want to start with our selection of over 150 fairy tales and folk tales, each featuring a Mighty Girl at the heart of the action, at http://www.amightygirl.com/books/fiction/fairy-tales-folktales 

See the original post HERE (FB post dated 7/21/14)

Book Publishing: Women Vs. Men

When you walk down the halls of a publishing house, you think three things:

1. Damn, that's a lot of paper.

2. Oooh free book shelves!

3. Where are all the men?

The book biz is notorious for being an industry of mostly women, with some gay men thrown in and the rare straight man off in some corner hiding from the hoards of ladies who look at him like the eighth wonder of the world.

As a result, some people blame the fairer sex's presence in the editorial world for the stastical descrepancy between male and female readers. In 2008, for example, "44 percent of women read more than ten books a year compared to three in ten (29%) men" (Harris Interactive).

It's said by some that us female editors gear our publications towards women simply because we are women, though quite frankly, it only makes sense when the majority of your readership is female. Plenty of male-oriented books are published on a regular basis, and when they sell well, we'll put out more of the like. But if they don't, then well, uhh, we won't. It's just logic.

Laura Miller from Salon.com had some interesting points to make on the subject though, also getting into the nitty-gritty as to why publishing is mostly women:

Much as I enjoyed Roman Polanski's suave political thriller "The Ghost Writer," one early scene struck me as egregiously off. The main character, a scribe-for-hire played by Ewan McGregor, takes a meeting to discuss writing the memoirs of a politician. The other attendees are the head of the book publishing company, one of the editors, the writer's agent and a representative of the politician. Five people in a room discussing a book deal, and all of them men.

This is not, to say the least, very realistic, as Jason Pinter would no doubt concur. Writing last week in the Huffington Post, Pinter, an author whose résumé includes jobs in publishing at "several major houses," recounted his difficulties in persuading his female colleagues to publish a book by Chris Jericho, a professional wrestler.

"Pitching Jericho's book to my editorial board was like pitching iPads to the Amish," he complains, despite the fact that Jericho had an enviable "platform" -- the publishing-world term for regular TV and radio gigs. His co-workers had simply never heard of the guy.

It wasn't until the 15-year-old nephew of one of the editors confirmed Jericho's fame that the board agreed to take the plunge; the book became a bestseller. For Pinter, this experience demonstrates that one of publishing's truisms -- men don't read books -- has become self-fulfilling. Few men work in book publishing, so there are few supporters in the industry for books that men in particular might like, causing fewer such books to be published or promoted and finally leading men to think that books are not for them.

[...]

It's worth asking, then, why there are so few men in publishing. Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours? (Remember that book editors seldom get to read manuscripts in the office -- that's what weekends are for.) Apart from a handful of celebrated figures, it's the rare editor who gets paid more than a secondary school teacher in a middle-class district. The profession has come to look a lot like a skilled, pink-collar ghetto, albeit garnished with a thin dusting of reflected glamor.

[...]

Book editing, by contrast, increasingly resembles those "caring professions," nursing and teaching, where the joy of laboring selflessly on behalf of a noble cause -- in this case, literature -- is supposed to make up for the lack of profits and respect. And we all know who does that kind of job, don't we?

Read the entire article HERE

Miller's article is sad but true for the most part. She raises some interesting points, particularly when she explains the responsibilities and financial ramifications of working in the book biz. Men in our society are generally encouraged to make more money and have more power and status than they would on a lowly editorial salary.

However, I'd like to mention that the primary reason for the female-dominated industry goes way back to its inception when women from wealthy families were sent to work in publishing just to give them something to do. It was at some point accepted as a career of "leisure,' though it most certainly isn't that way any longer. But some trends never die, so the gender scale has stayed women-heavy, even though the reasoning has shifted drastically (we are all broke, for one LOL).

Just some food for thought.

Women Writers: "Sugar and spice, and all things nice"

Gender has been an issue in literature for as long as books have been written. Whether it be picking apart the gender roles represented in classic novels, exploring the fact that a certain writer created a protagonist of the opposite gender, or debating the relevance of a writer's gender in a particular time period, it's always been under the microscope.

Even now, with the age of Feminism somewhat behind us, people are still raising a ruckus over gender. Take this year's literary awards, for example.

As I was browsing the Huffington Post's website today, I stumbled upon at least three posts about female writers sweeping this year's awards:

Nobel Prize in Literature: Herta Müller
Man Book Prize in Fiction: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Pulitzer Prize in Fiction: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Man Booker International Prize: Alice Munro
LA Times Book Prize in Fiction and The Orange Prize: Marilynne Robinson, Home

Initially, I was intrigued by Erica Jong's article "Big News: Women Can Write!" and I clicked curiously. But as I started reading, it made me cringe that the post had even been written in the first place. Then, when I came across a few more articles on the same subject, my cringe became an all out frown.

I'd heard some of the award results already myself (and read Strout's fantastic short story collection), but I hadn't clumped the winners by gender. Why should I? They're just brilliant authors whose literary merits are being rewarded. Everyone suddenly seems so shocked that women can actually be talented writers.

Jessie Kundart's post, for example, "Women Sweep Literature Prizes," noted:

Is it an accident, the judging panels, a mini-trend or are the tides turning? With the sweep of this year's literary awards, all eyes are on the women who won. Judges' comments are noting the detail, vividness and emotional power of their writing.

Quite frankly, I don't understand why anyone cares. No one's jaw drops when all men win these awards. There is no conspiracy here, friends. It's just a little thing called coincidence. So, let it go and pick up one of the year's best, regardless of its author's gender.

Another startling coincidence: just as this topic is being publicized, Random House publishes a new edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the most significant woman-penned classics, and no longer lists Mary as its sole author. The cover now claims "Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley).

To read more about this interesting debate, check out Victoria Rosner's post, "Co-Creating a Monster," as she asks herself "why [...] Percy [is] now getting marquee billing?"