Society: A Dangerous Book for Girls

“Smarter with the other girls.”

They’ll work on that before they take their show on the road. “We’ll be doing a lot of TV,” says Buchanan. That would be grown-up TV, not kids’ TV. The secret to kids’ book publishing is that kids don’t buy books, even when the cover is sparkly. But parents and grandparents keep buying kids books, for the same reason we buy them tops and jump ropes and jacks. We’re not so much nostalgic for our childhoods as for the myth of our childhood, that idyllic time before adulthood clanked down when life should have been carefree, but wasn’t. We’re nostalgic for the childhood we wish we had, wish it so hard that sometimes we actually convince ourselves it was one long stretch of daisy chains and tag. The truth is, we remember the good times because that’s when we were happy, as opposed to the rest of it, when we were jealous of our siblings and ostracized by peers and desperately trying to figure out how to fit in.

If girls were buying this book for themselves, I’d be worried. I’d feel that 50 years of rabble-rousing and bouncing off glass ceilings has been in vain, and that we’ve failed the long line of women (Margaret Sanger, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Gloria Steinem) who truly were daring, in that they were different and bold and unafraid to say boo to the status quo. But this book is a big, sparkly vitamin pill. Well-meaning adults will hand it to girls with an inevitable air of “Take it. It’s good for you.” And those 600,000 marble-end-papered volumes will wind up as relics, sitting on dusty shelves as boys and girls fumble onward, one male flag-twirler at a time, toward the freedom to be whatever they please.



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