Gender in Children’s Writing

I’m delighted to welcome my talented writer friend, Kate Lee, onto my blog today. Kate is a children’s writer who has published six picture books including the best-selling ‘Santa’s Suit’. Her short fiction for adults has won several prizes, most recently in the Exeter Flash Fiction competition. Kate supports other writers as a mentor and editor and recently completed a PhD in creative writing, with a focus on maps in children’s books – her favourite topic! You can find her at: www.kateleeauthor.co.uk @kateleestory.

Hello, girls and boys

…or should that be boys and girls? Is there a right or a wrong way round, is it simply convention, and does it matter? As a children’s author, I am super aware of the gender landscape in literature for our very youngest readers – and that there’s plenty of ground still to cover.

Male characters dominate the most popular picture books and recent research found that, in picture books featuring animals, whenever an author revealed a creature’s sex, it was 73 per cent more likely to be male than female. I recently reviewed a wonderful picture book, The Best Sound in the World by Cindy Wume. It’s an exceptional work, with beautifully presented musings on music, sound and friendship, but both the protagonist, Roy the lion, and his ally, Jemmy the lemur, are male. It would be unfair to single out one particular picture book in this regard, but it did give me pause, perhaps because it’s the work of a young, new author/illustrator. What does the absence of female characters tell children, of both sexes, about the relative importance of girls and boys?

 It’s not just gender balance, but also the qualities attributed to male and female characters that we need to consider. There’s a welcome emphasis on redefining masculinity in children’s literature, with authors offering children alternative models to consider – and root for – as they grow up. Matt Haig’s Samuel in Shadow Forest and Matthew in Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson are great examples. And, as picture book writer Ed Vere says, the important message is that ‘being gentle, sensitive or emotionally engaged isn’t a weakness, but part of being a fully rounded grown up man’. Beautifully put!

Perhaps as a response to this, when female characters take a leading role, there’s a tendency for them to be universally ‘feisty’. It’s a word I find problematic, as it is one of those words, like ‘defiant’, that only ever seem to be applied to females.

I’m all for girl characters who are fearless, funny and active as well as kind and loyal – Laura Ellen Anderson’s Amelia Fang is a particular favourite. But when writing my novel for older children, The Stone Feather, I consciously created a female character, Doe, who was by nature gentle, shy and supportive. I made sure she could speak out when events required courage, and seeing her develop confidence in her own voice as the narrative progressed was a really enjoyable part of my creative process.  But she is – quite deliberately – anything but feisty.

 I’m currently developing a younger female character, Bea, whose adventures involve making friends with a poetry-loving giant, Archie, for a chapter book called Giant Footsteps. Bea has determination in spades, and a very clear sense of right and wrong, but is also thoughtful and reflective. Archie is theatrical, impulsive and soft-hearted. Could I write Bea as male, and Archie as female? Absolutely. It doesn’t really matter. And that’s just as it should be.