Society: A Dangerous Book for Girls

HARPERCOLLINS clearly expects great things of Girls. The initial print run is more than 600,000. Even before publication, the book was being translated into 10 languages. And Boys was optioned for a movie by Disney, after a bidding war the London Times termed “fierce.” While there are no movie deals finalized yet for Girls, there is a Daring Girls anthem that you can hear on the book’s website, DaringBookForGirls.com. “It’s got a great beat,” Peskowitz reports. “‘Daring girls prevail!’”

Buchanan and Peskowitz can try all they want to convince me Girls will make the world a better place for their daughters, but I don’t think they’re even convinced themselves. In the chapter on boys in Girls, the authors write that it’s “easier to think about boys and girls as being entirely different than it is to think about boys and girls as having lots of common ground.” So why perpetuate the gender-role divide? Why answer Boys’ celebration of the “attributes of manliness” with how to write a thank-you note and press a flower? Isn’t Girls, in its retro sparkliness, a Faustian betrayal of the dream of true equality? “Ghettoizing girls, reinforcing stereotypes — we talked about that every day,” Buchanan admits.

“It would be great if boys read Girls and learned about flashlight sleepouts and how to make a campfire,” Peskowitz says wistfully. Yeah, well, sparkly took care of that.

“If we’d written our book first,” Buchanan says, “we might have just written it for kids.”





BUCHANAN’S DAUGHTER, when she was three or four, was trying to jump from the coffee table onto the couch and kept missing. Finally she said, “I can’t do it! I’m just a girl!” Buchanan, horrified by this capitulation, rushed to assure her: “You can do it! Of course you can! Girls can do anything boys can do!” Her daughter looked at her and said, “Mommy, I’m not a cat.”

Sometimes we get so caught up in Mars and Venus that we assume our kids are fighting the same battles we do. And sometimes, like the stay-at-home and working moms, we fight battles where there are none. “Our book has the real Robert’s Rules of Order for running a meeting. Knowing Robert’s Rules makes you feel smarter than the other girls,” says Buchanan, only to be politely bitch-slapped by Peskowitz: