Society: A Dangerous Book for Girls

“The cover of Boys has gold lettering,” Peskowitz says. “When HarperCollins told us the lettering on Girls would be silver, we were disappointed. But then they said it would be sparkly.”

“All girls go through a sparkly phase.” Buchanan grins.

“I’m sure the neurobiologists,” says Peskowitz, “have some way of explaining the sparkly thing.”

Girls is sparkly inside, too. Like Boys, it’s a sequence of brief chapters: three pages on knotting friendship bracelets, four pages on slumber-party games, two pages on making a cloth-covered book, four pages on female pirates. There are lots of illustrations and diagrams — how to do a cartwheel, how to make a cootie catcher (those origami fortune-telling things), how to put your hair up with a pencil. There are lists of “girl classic” books (A Little Princess, Anne of Green Gables) and women inventors and “modern women leaders.” There are recipes for shortbread and fudge. It’s all done in a twee, vaguely British tone — “Bandanas are often sold under the nondescript name ‘All Purpose Cloth,’ or APC. A bit of a boring moniker, perhaps, but, oh, so true” — that mirrors the quaint, old-fashioned illustrations of girls in mary janes and dresses jumping rope and swinging on swings. It’s meant as … well, I’m not sure. Sugar-coated empowerment, I guess. But even the authors don’t seem quite certain what they’re up to.

“We have the things girls like to do,” says Buchanan, “but we don’t limit them to girly things. We walk a fine line between the stereotypes of girly-girl and tomboy.”

“We’ve had several decades of rapidly changing ideas about what it means to be male and female,” says Peskowitz.

“It’s ever-shifting,” Buchanan puts in.

“It takes some time to figure this out,” Peskowitz allows. “We’re not saying there’s just one way to be the 21st-century girl.”

The authors are quite clear, though, that Girls is meant to teach girls to stand up for themselves. Take the chapter on “How to Negotiate a Salary.” It quotes JFK (“Let us never fear to negotiate”), suggests girls research the going rates, and advises them to smile and be friendly.

Uh-huh. That’s how Rupert Murdoch made his.



IN PERSON, NEITHER Buchanan, 36, nor Peskowitz, 43, is sparkly. Peskowitz is professorial, which is to say bright and sincere and didactic. Buchanan is more easygoing. They were both musical prodigies, which means they spent much of their childhoods doing the exact same thing over and over again, which means hey, sure, hopscotch would look like fun.

Peskowitz grew up on Long Island playing cello, and majored in music and comparative religion at Oberlin before earning post-grad degrees from Duke. Buchanan is a Navy brat, born in Newfoundland, reared in Bermuda and California, a pianist who went to the Boston Conservatory and had a recital at Carnegie Hall. (“In the smaller venue,” she says modestly.) Peskowitz has two daughters; Buchanan has a daughter and a son. Both women have spent their professional lives pondering gender issues. Buchanan edited a twin-set of essay collections, It’s a Boy and It’s a Girl, in which women writers ruminate on raising children of each gender, as well as a collection, Literary Mama, of reading “for the maternally inclined.” Peskowitz has authored several books covering topics like religion and gender, plus 2005’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, which argued that the stay-at-home mom vs. working mom dichotomy is a labor issue, not a catfight.