I've just finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans" to help with a translation I'm working on.
It seems to me that if they'd given the young princess her own diamond pencil and gold slate and sent her off to school with her brothers instead of having her sit at home on a plate-glass stool looking at her pretty picture book, she'd have been a lot better equipped to write things down when she was forbidden to talk in later life, and would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Evidently, however, being beautiful and pious was much more important than being clever in these fairy tales. I'd like to think all has changed now, but a glance at the recent Target toys catalog that was delivered to us shows pretty clearly how we're shaping our children from early on. Girls: pink pages, princesses, castles, ovens, pink ovens that look like princesses' castles. Nourish, look beautiful. Be a little bitchy to other girls now and then if you have a bit of an edge. Boys, blue pages, guns, spaceships, building sets. Build, discover, destroy.
It seems to me that if they'd given the young princess her own diamond pencil and gold slate and sent her off to school with her brothers instead of having her sit at home on a plate-glass stool looking at her pretty picture book, she'd have been a lot better equipped to write things down when she was forbidden to talk in later life, and would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Evidently, however, being beautiful and pious was much more important than being clever in these fairy tales. I'd like to think all has changed now, but a glance at the recent Target toys catalog that was delivered to us shows pretty clearly how we're shaping our children from early on. Girls: pink pages, princesses, castles, ovens, pink ovens that look like princesses' castles. Nourish, look beautiful. Be a little bitchy to other girls now and then if you have a bit of an edge. Boys, blue pages, guns, spaceships, building sets. Build, discover, destroy.
1 comment:
You'll be happy to hear we have seen through all this oh-so-subtle marketing and managed to get our girl interested in pirates, vikings, planets and dinosaurs. Not a pink oven or ironing board to be seen!
Post a Comment