The problem with Hairy Maclary: Meet the Rebel Girls putting women into picture books

Wednesday, 14 March 2018

Elena Favilli, left, and Francesca Cavallo, creators of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.

Women are half the world's population and the majority of university graduates. They are most of the young doctors, lawyers and accountants. A girl can grow up to be a prime minister, a priest, a prison guard, and yes, even a princess. There's a million and one ways to be a woman in today's world, but you'd never know it from looking at children's books. Britt Mann tracked down the people rewriting that narrative.

Once upon a time a woman named Elena Favilli and her girlfriend Francesca Cavallo decided to change the world.

Singer/superstar Beyonce Knowles is among the women featured in the second volume of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, out last month.

Favilli, a journalist, and Cavallo, a playwright, had built the world's first iPad magazine for children in their kitchen in Milan, Italy. Later they moved to California, where they progressed their project in Silicon Valley.

Favilli and Cavallo's foray into the male-dominated tech world highlighted for them just how important it was for women to have other women to look up to in life. They reckoned it would have helped them be more confident and set bigger goals.

Frida Kahlo, as photographed by Guillermo Kahlo in 1932 is an original Rebel Girl and is the subject of the second book in the Little People, Big Dreams series.

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But they were alarmed to discover – after taking a closer look – the dearth of girls in leading roles in books and on TV. They realised this problem had persisted for a long time. So they hatched a plan to fix it.

Their book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, chronicles in fairytale fashion 100 women who've shaped the course of history. Serena Williams is in there, as is Frida Kahlo. Amelia Earhart, Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton.

Favilli and Cavallo's crowdfunding campaign to self-publish the book raised more than US$1 million, the largest amount an original book has ever crowdfunded online.

Rebel Girls has since sold more than 1 million copies, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Its sequel – which features JK Rowling, Angela Merkel and Beyonce, among others – was released last month.

Rebel Girls' success has sparked a slew of similar titles: Shout Out To The Girls: A Celebration of Awesome Australian Women, also released in February, and a homegrown version, Go Girl: A Storybook of Epic NZ Women, will land in bookshops later this month

About the time the Rebel Girls revolution kicked off, Spanish author Isabel Sanchez Vegara released the first books in her series Little People, Big Dreams. Vegara, who had always dreamed of becoming a writer, started the project before the birth of her twin nieces.

'I had discovered a lot of great children's books for my oldest nephew that were full of brave and enthusiastic boys ready to conquer the world,' she writes in an email.

Georgina Beyer is a New Zealand politician and former Labour Party Member of Parliament. She was the world's first openly transsexual mayor, as well as the world's first openly transsexual Member of Parliament.

'But… it seemed to me things were slightly different whenever I looked for female protagonists.'

The adorably illustrated Little People books each champion one famous, inspiring woman.

Singer Lorde (Ella Yelich-O'Connor) is among the women included in Barbara Else's Go Girl.

'Real women are much stronger, more courageous and incredible than the ones we see in fiction,' Vegara says.

'I've never met a sleeping princess, but I've met many ordinary women with extraordinary lives.'

THE 'REBEL GIRLS EFFECT'

Tanya Gribben, a manager at The Women's Bookshop in Auckland, notes the proliferation of non-fiction depicting extraordinary women aimed at younger readers.

Writer Janet Frame is among the women included in Barbara Else's Go Girl.

'We used to have one book – Girls Who Rocked the World – that was the only one we had for that 10-12 age group. We'd sell it and sell it… and now we've got 20 [similar books] in the shop, easy,' she says.

'The publishers are only publishing them because people are buying them.'

Gribben thinks such books are a hit with readers for the same reasons as the new wave of mainstream adult feminist literature: women are more comfortable with labelling themselves a 'feminist', and there's a renewed understanding that the battle for equality hasn't yet been won.

Mums and aunties and grannies are buying these books for their kids to empower them, Gribben says.

Barbara Else is a playwright and fiction writer, and has also worked as a literary agent, editor and fiction consultant. Else won the Victoria University Writer's Fellowship in 1999, and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in 2005. Her latest book, Go Girl, will be released this month.

'I think they've seen that [equality] still isn't happening and they think, 'These are the books I would have loved.''

In writing a children's book with leading ladies, an author becomes something of a Rebel Girl herself. When Go Girl hits shelves in a few weeks' time, it will buck a trend of picture books still dominated by male characters in traditional gender roles – even in a country where our elected leader is a woman, and her partner is soon to be a stay-at-home dad.

Book publicist and reviewer Elizabeth Heritage.

Go Girl author Barbara Else cites a study published in the journal Science last year, which showed 6-year-old girls were less likely than boys to think members of their own gender could be 'really, really smart', and more likely to eschew activities requiring exceptional intelligence – a distinct change from their attitudes at age 5, when girls were just as likely as boys to think they were capable of greatness.

'None of the women in the book have limited themselves at all,' Else says of Go Girl.

'They've decided what they're interested in, what they want to work at, and they've just gone for it.'

Both Else and her editor Catherine O'Loughlin name Georgina Beyer, the world's first openly transgender mayor and MP, as one of their favourite Go Girls.

Emily Writes with her sons Eddie, left, and Ronnie, at home in Wellington.

An anecdote of Beyer burning her belongings the day she transitioned genders particularly captured Else's imagination.

'I thought, what a wonderful image that is… [that] there's a moment in your life when you think, 'That's what I've got to do.''

Libby Jackson is a British physicist and engineer who works for the UK Space Agency. She is also the author of A Galaxy of Her Own, an illustrated book aimed at children aged 8-14 detailing 50 stories of inspirational women who have been fundamental to the history of humans in space.

O'Loughlin says while the notion of a female protagonist, or a true story about a famous New Zealander, isn't new to the children's genre, demand for non-fiction that's beautifully illustrated is increasing. Among Go Girl's colourful pages, readers will also recognise the likes of Lucy Lawless, Janet Frame, Beatrice Faumuina, and Helen Clark.

'I think in the past as a nation, the New Zealand notion of hero has been stereotypically male,' O'Loughlin says.

Adam Reynolds, left and Chaz Harris, co-authors of the children's books Promised Land and Maiden Voyage (forthcoming).

'We hope the girls and boys who read Go Girl will come away with the clear and firm understanding that women can be and have always been heroes too.'

WHEN ART DOESN'T IMITATE LIFE

Queen Elena in a scene from Promised Land, by Chaz Harris and Adam Reynolds.

Last week, The Sapling, a website which promotes discussion of children's books among Kiwis, released research by book publicist and reviewer Elizabeth Heritage, examining the best-selling children's books in New Zealand in 2017.

An analogous study published by The Observer newspaper of the 100 most popular children's picture books last year showed the majority were dominated by male characters 'often in stereotypically masculine roles'.

Male characters were found in twice as many leading roles, and given far more speaking parts than females, who were missing altogether from a fifth of the books ranked. As for lady baddies: 'Only one book, Peppa and her Golden Boots, portrayed a sole female villain, acting alone: a duck who steals Peppa Pig's boots and takes them to the Moon.'

Even non-human characters were 73 per cent more likely to be males. Whether animal, mineral, vegetable or crayon, if you're in a picture book, you're probably a bloke.

Heritage's results mirrored those of The Observer's (the situation was even more dire for Māori and Pasifika representation). More than half of the 100 books surveyed had solely male main characters (such as Craig Smith's Wonky Donkey), and for 17 of those books, the entire cast were males (such as Lynley Dodd's Hairy Maclary).

In contrast, only 13 books had females as the sole main character; four had all female-casts. Thalia Kehoe Rowden, an editor at The Sapling, views the lack of female representation in children's literature as symptomatic of how products are marketed at kids. Baby bed linen and other accessories come in pinks and blues – 'depending on the year, you might get a little bit of green or yellow or grey' – while clothes and toys are still largely designed with gender binaries in mind.

Rowden, mum to a 6-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, says this wasn't the case when she was growing up. But as parents' incomes have become more disposable, so have the products they buy their children.

'A girl baby and a boy baby really don't need different pacifiers. They don't need different coloured cups or nappies,' she says.

'[But] if a brother and a sister can't share a cup… or clothes… then that's twice as many things that get sold.'

Rowden's isn't a household crammed with books espousing explicitly feminist messages. Rather, she and her husband aim to achieve some balance.

'You want to have half of the books in your house showing girls have good adventures, and half showing boys have good adventures,' says Rowden, who also pens her own blog, Sacraparental.

'My priority is books that don't give the unconscious message that boys stories are more interesting.'

BOOKS THAT LOOK LIKE ME

While it's easy to say the state of the picture book world doesn't matter compared to say, the gender pay gap or domestic violence, Rowden, who trained as a lawyer before going on to be a Baptist minister and aid worker, believes the issues are interlinked.

She cites a study published in January in which 20,000 primary school children across 20 countries were asked to draw the jobs they wanted as adults.

Findings from the UK showed girls were much less likely to want to become engineers or scientists, while jobs such as nurses, dancers and hairdressers were among their most frequently drawn.

'There are some fantastic girls out there who will have great brains to solve the problems of our world, from climate change to unkindness online,' Rowden says.

'If they are told that the only thing they can do is this subset of the world's work, that's a big problem.'

British physicist and engineer Libby Jackson, the author of Galaxy of Her Own: Amazing Stories of Women in Space has encountered this disquiet in her young niece, who recently started school.

'She loves cars and rockets and playing football,' Jackson says by phone from the UK.

'No one at home has ever said to her, 'You can't do that.' [But] she's got to school and she's already understanding that what she likes is 'for boys'.'

Jackson, who is one of the highest-ranking women in the UK space industry, notes women are under-represented in her fields. Even those who are there are often invisible.

'All the photos of Explorer 1 [the first US satellite] are of the men holding aloft a rocket… Some people will look at that and go, 'It's not for me because I'm a girl. People in this book have all gone, 'Oh, it doesn't matter.''

Emily Writes, a Wellington-based writer and author who is also Parenting Editor at The Spinoff, always hoped her kids would love reading as much as she did. But after revisiting beloved books from her childhood, she found they 'hadn't aged well'.

The mum to Eddie, 5, and Ronnie, 3, says she wants her sons to look at books and see what is possible. And she wants them to reinforce positive messages that she and her husband try to impart about freedom of expression and an acceptance of diversity.

Writes remembers the first time her son, who is fond of wearing frocks, perused Marcus Ewert's 10,000 Dresses, a tale of a child who loves the garment as much as he does.

'He said, 'They look like me.''

Since then, Writes says, the book has sparked countless discussions with friends and family members who've read it to him.

'It really taught me that a book isn't just a book. It's a way to tell an adult how you feel, or to help somebody understand who you are when you're a child and your vocabulary might be limited.'

Another favourite in Writes' household is the internationally acclaimed Promised Land, a love story of a farm boy and a prince, by Wellington-based co-authors Adam Reynolds and Chaz Harris.

The friends crowdfunded the book and its successor, Maiden Voyage, which will be released mid-year. Harris asks bookshops not to shelve Promised Land in the 'special interest' section: it's a mainstream story whose main characters just happen to be gay.

Harris says while he and Reynolds, who both experienced bullying at school, would have valued seeing themselves represented in children's fiction, it would have been just as important for their peers to see gay characters positively portrayed on the page.

'Even though there's a lot of LGBT characters around now, they're still often associated with kind of tragic endings,' Harris says.

'There's not a lot of 'happily ever afters' if you're gay or if you're queer.'

The power of representation has been reinforced by an unexpected source. The main characters, Jack and Leo, are both raised by apparently unmarried women. As such, Harris says, they've had positive feedback from single mums.

'That was something we completely didn't even think of.'

A ROADMAP OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE

If a book's success depends on how well it's captured the zeitgeist, it's likely Rebel Girls-type tomes haven't yet reached critical mass. As long as #MeToo and #TimesUp movements roar through industries and workplaces and Twitter feeds, there'll be a market for books that empower girls, and free boys to be whatever type of boy they want to be.

Vegara, the creator of the Little People series, says her books aren't part of a passing fad.

'This is a real change in how we address little readers,' she says.

'Children are sponges absorbing the world around them. We, as adults, are responsible for the world we show them.'

* Go Girl by Barbara Else is out on March 29.