Magazines for Boys, Magazines for Girls: More of the Same Stereotypes

Abstract: In two studies, we investigated the prevalence of gender stereotypes in print magazines targeted at 2- to 9-year-olds, analyzing three crucial and distinct aspects of children’s magazines: the front cover, the magazine content, and featured activities. Study 1 focused on the front covers of 106 children’s print magazines aimed at audiences of either girls, boys, or both boys and girls. Content analyses revealed that magazines aimed solely at boys or girls displayed gender-stereotypic colors and more same- than other-gender characters. Front covers aimed at girls contained no speaking characters and, compared to front covers aimed at boys, displayed more words related to appearance. 

Study 2 analyzed the content of 42 magazine issues. Magazines aimed at girls were most likely to incorporate the themes of fashion and home, to instruct the reader to ask for an adult’s help with an activity, and less likely to include activities labeled as educational than were magazines aimed at boys or both girls and boys. In contrast, magazines aimed at boys were most likely to incorporate the theme of jobs. Overall, findings suggest that gender stereotypical messages are embedded throughout young children’s magazines, which are tailored in their style and content based on their target audience. (Spinner, Cameron & Tenenbaum, 2023)

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- Spinner, L., Cameron, L., & Tenenbaum, H. R. (2023). Gender stereotypes in young children’s magazines. Mass Communication & Society, 26(1), 147–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2052902 

- photograph (Clive and Lisa, 1971), (c) Museums Victoria Collections, via

Quoting Paul Auster

“It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.”
Paul Auster, Oracle Night

photograph of Paul Auster via

The Deaf Snow White. By Kanika Agarwal. An Excerpt.

The great king and his queen were married for five years and were still waiting for a child. The mother often prayed for a girl whose skin and heart would be white and pure as snow. In their sixth year, their prayers were answered and they finally got a baby girl. However, the queen died a month after the birth of the child. The king was left to care for their only daughter and put his heart and soul into it. He named her Snow White in remembrance of his wife’s wishes.

As the years passed by, Snow White blossomed into a beautiful girl fair as snow. She had a gentle heart and a soothing voice. She grew up playing in the gardens of their palace, and most of her friends were the plants, bushes and her favourite three little birds – Brownie, Bluie and Ruie. She talked to them endlessly as her father presided over his court. Days turned into months and months turned into years. In the blink of an eye, Snow White was ten years old. It was then that she started losing her hearing. Her father knew that he would not be able to care for Snow White alone now. So, he remarried – primarily to provide care to his deaf daughter. But no one knew what fate had in store for Snow White.

(..) 

Snow White started sensing that her stepmother was using her deafness to fill her father’s ears against her. She observed that her father had become sterner towards her. He once came and sat beside her to talk. She saw his lips moving: “My dear little child, you need to work harder and make sure you treat your mother and your sisters fairly.”

(...) 

Snow White woke up to the pecks of her little birds on her body. “How did you find me?” she asked. They rubbed their beaks against her nose sweetly. Suddenly, Snow White realised that someone was in the house. She peeped out of the bedroom door to find seven little people sipping wine by the fire. She was scared of what awaited her and wanted to run out. So, she tried tiptoeing, only to realise that she was too big to escape the house unnoticed.

She spoke up hesitantly, apologising to them for her intrusion and tried walking away. They moved their lips but they were too tiny for her to read. That is when she had to tell them about her deafness. While many of them did not believe her and accused her of lying, one of them, Sheram, gestured to her to sit and explain her story. Tabish and Sheram listened patiently. By the time she finished her story, her fear had turned into grief and she sobbed inconsolably.

Kanika Agarwal
 

An excerpt taken from Parita Dholakia's version of Rapunzel (via): 

The prince falls in love with Rapunzel and invites her to his palace ...

“I can’t. There is no ramp from the room to the garden.”
“We will find a way. I can carry you down,” says the prince.
“Carry me? I don’t think I would like that. I always go everywhere wheeling my own chair.”

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- Agarwal, K. (2024). The Deaf Snow White. In: Rising Flames (ed.) And They Lived ... Ever After: Disabled Women Retell Fairy Tales. HarperCollins India.
- More: The Guardian, link
- photograph of Nikki Giovanni (1972) via

“Helpless and a cripple”: the disabled child in children’s literature

For more than a century, children described as "cripples" were part of children's literature. Othered and constructed as objects of pity, they were there for other child characters and child readers to sympathise with them. Only the child who was disabled as a result of disobedience was not an object of pity. That way, authors sent the clear message that you shall always obey your elders otherwise this horrible fate might be yours. A great many nineteenth-century books asked child readers to either pity the disabled child or to see the temporary disability as a sort of punishment and lesson since suffering would turn them into better persons.

The able-bodied characters and able-bodied readers were superior to the disabled child. A physical norm was communicated, the disabled child was a deviation from the ideal. The Romantic Child was "innocent, unspoiled", often physically attractive and rather contrasted the child whose disability was described in detail.

In Evangelical writing, the attractive innocent often served as a role model for the reader. "Daisie's Pocket Money" from 1902 is a good illustration: 

Daisie is described as ’a dear little creature, with flaxen hair and blue eyes’ – wouldn’t all readers want to be like her - and, if they couldn’t be like her physically, they could emulate her goodness. She saves her pocket money in order to pay for an operation for her friend Edith, who ‘fell and hurt her spine’ and cannot sit up. Her money, of course, is not enough but the ‘great doctor’ is touched by Daisie’s innocent appeal and visits (and cures) Edith anyway.

According to Perry Nodelman, "children's literature represents a massive effort by adults to colonise children to make them believe that they ought to be the way adults would like them to be". Hugh Cunningham sees a manipulation of the public using sentimental appeals on behalf of children, of the homeless, of the disabled. Both, in fact, children's and adult literature did this equally. Robert Pattison points out that these books are political since the child character and the child reader are used "to expose the imperfections of the world" around them and to foster the author's ideologies.

Many of these writers for children were thus doing as Peter Hollindale points out Charles Dickens did for adults, in using the child as ‘a lens or measure by which adult practices can be socially and morally exposed.’  Authors wanted to develop compassionate (and generous) children, but they wanted this to continue into adulthood; the compassionate children of today were to become the child rescuers of tomorrow. (Hillel, 2005)

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- Hillel, M. (2005). "Helpless and a cripple": the disable child in children's literature. In (eds) R. Finlay & Salbayre, S. Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood, Volume 2, (127-137), link
- photograph by Simon Pope (London, 1973-1975) via

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was born a slave and only fifteen when her master, Dr Flint, began his pursuit of her. At 40, she was purchased and emancipated by an abolitionist. Jacobs became an antislavery activist. Here are a few excerpts:



"(...) though we were all slaves, I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise (...). When I was six years old, my mother died, and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave. (...)

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences. (...)

There was a planter in the country, not far from us, whom I will call Mr. Litch. He was an ill-bred, uneducated man, but very wealthy. He had six hundred slaves, many of whom he did not know by sight. His extensive plantation was managed by well-paid overseers. There was a jail and a whipping post on his grounds; and whatever cruelties were perpetrated there, they passed without comment. He was so effectually screened by his great wealth that he was called to no account for his crimes, not even for murder. (...)

No pen can give an adequate description  of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will. (...)

I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds. I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious, it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation. 

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Jacobs, H. (2000). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Harriet Jacobs writing as Linda Brent. With an Introduction by Myrlie Evers-Williams. New York. A Signet Classic.

Language in 3.5 Million Books... Beautiful Women and Brave Men

Analysing a data set of 3.5 million books (using an AI), fiction and non-fiction, published in English between 1900 and 2008, a research team extracted adjectives and verbs that were associated with gender-specific nouns (e.g. daughter, boy) and examined whether the sentiment was positive, neutral or negative. They came to the conclusion that words chosen for women primarily described their appearance (negative verbs five times the frequency for females than males, positive and neutral adjectives twice as often in descriptions of women) while adjectives chosen for men referred to their behaviour and personal qualities. Women were mostly "beautiful" and "sexy" while men were "righteous", "rational" and "brave" (via and via).



"If the language we use to describe men and women differs, in employee recommendations for example, it will influence who is offered a job when companies use IT systems to sort through job applications."
Isabelle Augenstein

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- Alexander Hoyle et al. (2019). Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1706-1716
- photograph by Jeff Mermelstein via

Bette Davis: Reading Too Much, Getting A Divorce

On 7 December 1938, the New York Times reported that the reason for the dissolution of Bette Davis' marriage with Harmon 'Oscar' Nelson was that she read too much (via):



"Harmon O. Nelson obtained an uncontested divorce today from his actress wife, Bette Davis.
Home life with Mrs. Nelson contained little of that close communion between husband and wife, Mr. Nelson's testimony in Superior Court disclosed. He said that he usually just sat while his wife read, "to an unnecessary degree."
"She thought her work was more important than her marriage," Mr. Nelson testified. "She even insisted on reading books or manuscripts when he had guests. It was all very upsetting."
The Nelsons were married in 1932 and separated a month ago."

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photograph of Ruth Elizabeth 'Bette' Davis (1908-1989) via

"...symbolic violence, a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims". Pierre Bourdieu

I would probably not have embarked on such a difficult subject if I had not been compelled to do so by the whole logic of my research. I have always been astonished by what might be called the paradox of doxa -the fact that the order of the world as we find it, with its one-way streets and its no-entry signs, whether literal or figurative, its obligations and its penalties, is broadly respected; that there are not more transgressions and subversions, contraventions and 'follies' (...); or, still more surprisingly, that the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, and that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural.



And I have also seen masculine domination, and the way it is imposed and suffered, as the prime example of this paradoxical submission, an effect of what I call symbolic violence, a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling. This extraordinarily ordinary social relation thus offers a privileged opportunity to grasp the logic of the domination exerted in the name of a symbolic principle known and recognized both by the dominant and by the dominated -a language (or a pronunciation), a lifestyle (or a way of thinking, speaking and acting) -and, more generally, a distinctive property, whether emblem or stigma, the symbolically most powerful of which is that perfectly arbitrary and non-predictive bodily property, skin colour.



(...) Being included, as man or woman, in the object that we are trying to comprehend, we have embodied the historical structures of the masculine order in the form of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation. When we try to understand masculine domination we are therefore likely to resort to modes ofthought that are the product of domination.

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- Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, link
- photographs by Pierre Olivier Deschamps (1991) via and via

The Evils of Novel-Reading

In the 19th century, there used to be medical objections to women reading novels. "Experts" were concerned that "reading diverted needed energy from a woman's reproductive organs as well as her nervous system". Novel-reading was linked to fertility issues, a woman's reproductive cycle, headaches, hysteria, and insanity. Some suggested that women should read novels only in the morning after first waking or following any meal as the female brain needed to rest while the body was digesting. As woman's physiology made her prone to shock, excited feelings caused by novels could stun her heart.



Feeding the female brain with the same intellectual fare as the male brain was dangerous. According to Dr. Edward H. Clarke (a retired professor from the Harvard Medical School), these women graduated from school with undeveloped ovaries and were sterile when they married. Women were supposed to stop reading to ensure the future good of society.

"(...) the girl who sits for hours poring over a novel to the damage of her eyes, her brain, and her general nervous system, is guilty of a lesser fault of the nature of suicide." Charlotte Mason

Novel-reading is "one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can become devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium. The novel-devotee is as much a slave as the opium-eater or the inebriate." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

In addition, sensation fiction could lead the young woman into flirtation or conduct that "later in life may make her blush to remember".

"(...) the descriptions of love-scenes, of thrilling, romantic episodes, find an echo in the girl's physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex, which she recognizes only as a pleasurable mental emotion, with no comprehension of the physical origin or the evil effects. Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodiliy organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months, or even years, before she should." Dr. Mary Wood-Allen

Women were not supposed to be educated and certainly not to study during their menses, if they did not want to suffer "menorrhagia, dysmenorrhea, hemorrhage, amenorrhea, headache, dyspepsia, invalidism, neuralgia, hysteria, intense insanity, and premature death" (Golden, 2003).

Here an excerpt from "Novel Reading A Cause Of Female Depravity" (1797):

"Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital! such (sic) serpents are really in existence; such daemons in the form of women are now too often to be found! (...) I have seen two poor disconsolate parents drop into premature graves, miserable victims to their daughters' dishonour, and the peace of several relative families wounded, never to be healed again in this world.  

'And was novel-reading the cause of this?' inquires some gentle fair one, who, deprived of such an amusement, could hardly exist; 'was novel reading the foundation of such frail conduct?' I answer yes!"

- Golden, C. J. (2003). Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction. University Press of Florida
- The Monthly Mirror: Reflecting Men And Manners (1797) Novel Reading A Cause Of Female Depravity. Vol. IV (online)
- photographs of Audrey Hepburn (Mark Shaw, 1953) via and via and via and via

A Pocket Guide to France (1944)

I- Why you're going to France
YOU are about to play a personal part in pushing the Germans out of France. Whatever part you take - rifleman, hospital orderly, mechanic, pilot, clerk, gunner, truck driver - you will be an essential factor in a great effort which will have two results: first, France will be liberated from the Nazi mob and the Allied armies will be that much nearer to Victory, and second, the enemy will be deprived of coal, steel, manpower, machinery, food, bases, seacost and a long list of other essentials which have enabled him to carry on the war at the expense of the French. (...)



II - The United States soldier in France
MANY of you are no doubt wondering what kind of people the French are. You will soon see for yourselves. You will find that aside from the fact that they speak another (and very musical) language, they are very much like a lot of the people you knew back home. Here are a few facts about them which apply generally, but you must remember that each of them is individual, and that Pierre Ducrot is as different from Paul Boucher as you are from Joe Jones.
Frenchmen are much like us in one particular respect - they are all Frenchmen together and are as intensely proud of the fact as we are of being Americans. Yet we have many kinds of Americans - Southerners, Yankees, hoosiers, Native Sons - to name a few. (...) It's the same with France; you will find many accents and dialects among Bretons, Alsatians, Normans, Basques, Catalans and Provencals - the Southerners of France. But these people are Frenchmen all, and proud of it.
You will soon discover for yourself that the French have what might be called a national character. It is made up of half dozen outstanding characteristics:
(1) The French are mentally quick.
(2) Rich or poor, they are economical. Ever since the Nazis took over and French business came to a standstill, thousands of French families have kept themselves alive on their modest savings.
(3) The French are what they themselves call realistic. It's what we call having a hard common sense. (...) the Nazis have called the French cynical. Even in defeat the French can't be easily fooled.
(4) The French of all classes have respect for the traditionally important values in the life of civilized man. They have respect for religion and for artistic ideas. They have an extreme respect for property, whether public or private. (...) Respect for work is a profound principle in France. (...) Above all, the French respect the family circle as the natural center of social and economic life. (...) There is very little divorce in France. (...)
(5) The French are individualists. (...)
(6) The French are good talkers and magnificent cooks - if there sitll is anything left to put in the pot. French talk and French food have contributed more than anything else to the French reputation for gayety. (...)

The French also shake hands on greeting each other and on saying goodbye. They are not back-slappers. It's not their way.
In the larger cities you'll find shop-keepers who speak English (...). Many of the younger French generation (...) have picked up a smattering of English, plus slang, from the American movies, which were their favorites till the Nazis prohibited them. (...)



Security and Health
Health conditions of France closely resemble those you know in the United States except for a somewhat lower sanitary standard. Water supplies in the rural areas are more likely to be polluted but those of the large cities were generally safe before the war. Milk is not safe to drink unless boiled. (...)
Flies, lice and fleas are more common than with us, and less is done about them. (...) For your own sake keep them away. (...)



You Are a Guest of France
(...) Mostly, the French think Americans always act square, always give the little fellow a helping hand and are good-natured, big-hearted and kind. They look up to the United States as the friend of the oppressed and the liberator of the enslaved. (...)



Mademoiselle
France has been represented too often in fiction as a frivolous nation where sly winks and coy pats on the rear are the accepted form of address. You'd better get rid of such notions right now if you are going to keep out of trouble. A great many young French girls never go out without a chaperone, day or night. It will certainly bring trouble if you base your conduct on any false assumptions.
France is full of decent women and strict women. Most French girls have less freedom than girls back home. If you get a date don't be surprised if her parents want to meet you first, to size you up. (...)
Should you find some girl whose charms induce thoughts of marriage, here are a few points to think over: In your present status as a soldier, marriage to a foreign girl has many complications. (...)



Churchgoers
Throughout the history of France, the Church has filled a very real compartment in the lives of Frenchmen. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, the superb craftmanship and the sincere religious feeling of the French combined to erect some of the most magnificent monuments to God ever created. (...)



V - In parting
We are friends of the French and they are friends of ours.
The Germans are our enemies and we are theirs. Some of the secret agents who have been syping on the French will no doubt remain to spy on you. Keep a close mouth. No bragging about anything. (...)
You are a member of the best dressed, best fed, best equipped liberating Army now on earth. You are going in among the people of a former Ally of your country. They are still your kind of people who happen to speak democracy in a different language. Americans among Frenchmen, let us remember our likeness, not our differences. The Nazi slogan for destroying us both was "Divide and Conquer". Our American answer is "In Union Is Strength".



A Pocket Guide to France DOWNLOAD

An ABC for Baby Patriots (1899)

Mary Francis Ames (1853-1929), born Mary Frances Leslie Miller, authored and illustrated children's books in Great Britain and Canada as Ernest Ames or Mrs. Ernest Ames (literally via).



"Hundreds of mighty tomes have been written about the great colonial years when Britain ruled the waves but perhaps none summed it up so succinctly as this ABC for Baby Patriots first published in 1899. It provides an extraordinary view of the Victorian values and attitudes that made Britain great."
Bloomsbury Publishing




C is for Colonies.
Rightly we boast,
That of all the great nations
Great Britain has most.




"(...) it is 'empire' that shimmered to the schoolboy and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the schoolgirl reader of British children's literature from the 1850s onward. It was empire that flushed pink British pride into a world map shown to be one-quarter 'British' in 1897, at the time of the Diamond Jubilee celebration of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




E is our Empire
Where sun never sets;
The larger we make it
The bigger it gets.




"'Empire' is rooted in the concept of 'supreme and extensive political dominion ... exercised by an emperor', and then later 'by a sovereign state over its dependencies' (OED). The personal element of the British emperor - 'Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India (as of 1876), Defender of the Faith' - was sometimes obscured in British children's literature of 'the period of high imperialism', and even in children's games and puzzles, where Britannia replaces the body of the emperor/empress."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




"'English' schoolchildren found it relatively easy to identify with the shimmering, overdetermined category of 'Britishness' promulgated within the idea of empire, but non-English readers found themselves distanced, and internally split, by the category: 'subjects' of empire on the one hand, objects of empire on the other."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




"Regardless of readership and address - child or adult, colonizer or colonized, imperialist or imperial subject - the question underlying writing for children and the matter of empire remains at heart one of interpellation, the calling into being of the child as sovereign or as split subject, hailed into complex social identifications by the seemingly simple but structurally complex, and continuing, literature of empire."
Wallace & Slemon (2011)




I is for India,
Our land in the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast.




"Children, especially in the Victorian era, are not often involved in politics and care little for the subtle dynamics of empire. However, much as in adult literature, children’s literature provides unique insight into the culture of a period for the literary theorist. Written by adults, children’s literature becomes a natural vehicle for the worldview of the adult members of a culture to be transmitted to the new generation."
Griffin (2012)




K is for Kings;
Once warlike and haughty,
Great Britain subdued them
Because they'd been naughty.




L is the Lion
Who fights for the Crown...



M is for Magnates
So great and so good,
They sit on gold chairs
And eat Turtle for food



N is the Navy...




O is the Ocean...




P is our Parliament




Q is our Queen!
It fills us with pride
To see the Queen's coach
When the Queen is inside!




R is the Roast Beef
That has made Englad great...
S is for Scotland...




T is the Tub...
U is our Unicorn...




V's Volunteers...




W is the Word
Of an Englishman true;
When given, it means
What he says, he will do




Y as a rule means...
Y is for youngsters...




Z is the Zeal...




- Griffin, B. R. (2012). Tales of Empire: Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature. University of South Florida Scholar Commons, online
- Wallace, J.-A. & Slemon, S. (2011) Empire. In: Nel, P. & Paul, L. (eds.) Keyword for Children's Literature, 75-78, New York University Press



- Images via