Unsubtle Anti-Feminist Cautionary Lessons From My Childhood Books
Before I had access to the first three waves of feminist literature, fictional plants and animals offered me antiquated warnings on growing up female.
Have you ever reviewed the messaging in a stack of books you read as a child to unpack the sense of doom you felt growing up in the eighties? My brain still pages through these long overdue check-outs from the library of how to be a girl. Before the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Rebecca Walker, Kate Bornstein, and Naomi Wolf took hold in my heart, I had these suspect texts and their unsubtle anti-feminist lessons.
Look appreciative when a man teaches you something basic.
Some adult found it astonishing that I could add, so they got me Anno’s Counting Book by Mitsumasa Anno to further my terribly surprising masculine accomplishment. Besides, if you are raising a female child you must empower her with mathematics so she doesn’t realize her head is full of cotton balls, which is the nice way of saying menstrual pads. The story…
