Reading Girl Heroes – Why Younger Readers Need More Female Protagonists
Children’s writer Susannah McFarlane calls for more books with proactive female characters who are the main act, not the support Our girls have lost their way. They are putting themselves down, throwing their dinner up. They are doing everything too early – drink, drugs, high heels and sex. Blame it on the hormones in chicken, […]
Children’s writer Susannah McFarlane calls for more books with proactive female characters who are the main act, not the support
Our girls have lost their way. They are putting themselves down, throwing their dinner up. They are doing everything too early – drink, drugs, high heels and sex. Blame it on the hormones in chicken, the media or just the Kardashians all by themselves; our girls seem to be going off the rails.
Or are they?
Hearts in the right place
When we asked our ‘agents’ on the EJ12 Girl Hero website what they thought a hero was, their answers made me feel more confident about our girls.
A hero is a person that’s inside of you. You don’t need to dress up to be a hero.
A hero is a person who stands up for themselves and others
A hero is when someone says ‘stop that’ because a person is being bullied.
These girls are, on average, 10 years old. I think they’re doing more than okay. Yes, they’re being exposed to too much too early and, yes, too many of them probably spend too much time looking at screens, but they also have their heads and hearts in the right place. I think the women of 2023 are looking pretty good.
To make sure they stay there, they need to keep seeing real heroes and more girl heroes. They need to see women kicking the winning goal, skippering the boat, fixing the fuse, lifting the weight, flying the plane, fixing the car and running the country. That way they’ll know that doing those things are all options for them too.
Second banana
The media they watch and the books they read are an important part of that. Girls need to read about girls doing, not just being things – and doing them as the main act, not the support. They need to read stories about girls with agency, with power. That way they can see that ‘girl power’ is more than a slogan; it’s a reality, their reality.
There are, of course, books that do this across the age ranges. Older fiction particularly has many brilliant, strong female protagonists, but I’m not sure we are overflowing with them at the younger and more commercial end of series fiction, which remains dominated by princesses, puppies and fairies.
And even one of my own heroes, the greatest series fiction author of all time, Enid Blyton, can raise my feminist hackles. The Enchanted Wood is one of my – and many people’s – favourite childhood books: the magic of the Faraway Tree and the lands atop it never cease to, well, enchant but, if you read it with a feminist eye, it jars.
You discover that more often than not, Jo steps in when danger presents while his two sisters step back behind him. Jo is the decision maker, the protector but I suspect the girls could have rescued themselves. Yes, the stories are of their time, but they continue to be read, to enchant and therefore continue to send the message that girls are the second banana when it comes to action. The sidekick to the boy hero – yet we all know that Hermione would have been just fine without Harry.
Saving the world
Series fiction is a boon to getting kids to read and to not having unread books gathering dust under beds. Get kids into a series, a world they love, and they’ll read the series through, book after book – all the time building their literacy and their love of books. But we need to ensure that other things aren’t being built as well.
Sometimes it seems girls only rescue pets, while boys save the world; princesses and fairies solve emotional problems, but don’t invent incredible flying machines.
Okay, I stretch the point to make the point, but when I started writing the EJ12 Girl Hero series in 2008, I couldn’t find a series that showed a girl on the big stage, not saving puppies but the world. As a publisher I saw a gap, and as a mother of a nine-year-old daughter, I saw a need.
I wrote the first book in the EJ12 Girl Hero series to show my daughter and all girls that they could and should do anything. Besides her father and brother, there are no male characters in the EJ12 stories – a trick I borrowed from a film, The Women. In the EJ12 stories, every time a pilot turns around, a scientist shows a new spy gadget or an evil-doer was revealed, it is a girl or woman. No one has ever commented on it, but it will do its job – sneaky affirmative action in series fiction for 10-year-olds.
Let’s have more of it.
Susannah McFarlane is the author of the EJ12 Girl Hero series, available in the UK as eBooks via Amazon and Apple’s iBooks Store. She is also a publisher and the former Managing Director of Egmont Books UK. She lives in Australia.
