No Girls/Boys Allowed in My Book!

First off, I need to make an announcement: I am a very unwilling conscript in the Ongoing Gender War. I never read books like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and I don't intend to start now.

I have, however, read just about every book Dr. Seuss ever wrote – some of them hundreds of times – and I've noticed something a little odd about his oeuvre, which is that there are, like, NO GIRLS in those books.

(Okay, a few exceptions: the little sister in The Cat in the Hat and One Fish Two Fish; the snooty kangaroo mother in Horton Hears a Who; and Mayzie, the lazy bird mother in Horton Hatches the Egg. There's a spare sprinkling of girl birds/little sisters in some of his less popular stories, too – but that's about it.)

I first noticed this curious phenomenon a long time ago, back when I was reading Seuss to my son, who is now fifteen. Then I mostly forgot about it, until recently, when we started pulling out all Everest's dog-eared favorites to read to Ravenna.

You want to know how many girls there are in If I Ran the Circus? (Yes, I counted). Here are the data:

• 2 main characters, both male
• 18 other people/creatures/animals whose sex is assigned with a pronoun: every single one is a “he”
• other creatures are collectively referred to as “fellows”
• pictures depicting crowd scenes include many people that appear to be male (because they have a mustache, say, or are wearing a 3-piece suit and a bowler hat) and very few that appear to be female (because they're wearing a hat with flowers, say): the most gender-balanced crowd contains 7 female figures to 21 male figures (=3x more males); more typical is 2-3 females to 15-16 males (=5x to 8x more males).

I felt a little strange reading this book to my daughter. I have to wonder if maybe Dr. Seuss just didn't think much about (or, perhaps, of) girls.

Okay, so what?

Well, maybe nothing.

But I had another weird moment recently when I looked at the art credits in the back of Patti Digh's Creative Is a Verb and noticed that they were all women's names. We're talking well over 130 credits, for artwork supposedly sent in by “readers” – not “female readers” – of her blog, and only two names could possibly have belonged to men: there was one Tony and one T.J. The rest were all Beverlys and Kathys and Marys.

Seriously, 130 to 2?

I can only assume that either men don't read her blog (and I'm not sure why that would be – as far as I can tell, her topic is gender-neutral), or they do read the blog but didn't respond to her invitation to submit art, or they did submit their art but she didn't like it.

Something funny's going on here.

I think it's high time for some serious sleuthing, a la Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys (I read both series as a child – equal opportunity all the way!).

Essay Number Three, here we come!