Dear Friends,
When I am asked to recommend books with girl protagonists, I’m always more comfortable doing so when I know my audience. Some folks have very strong feelings about which virtues and which behaviors should be modeled for girls as opposed to for boys, including in fiction. And of course, I always want to honor parents’ own best judgment about what is appropriate for their own children to read.
My personal view, however, is that virtues aren’t restricted by sex, and I like to see strong girls and strong boys as well as gentle girls and gentle boys modeled in literature. That’s not to say that there are not behaviors and virtues that tend to be noted more or even experienced more often in women or more often in men, but I don’t think that such things affect or define sex (biology does that).
My own experience is that virtues commonly considered masculine — for example, strength — are also often found in women, though perhaps in less-appreciated ways. I remember, for example, dissolving into laughter the day after giving birth for the first time when, while sitting in the hospital holding my baby, I remembered the historical idea that women were “weak.” Weak? The ones who give birth?
Such foolishness! Women have their own strength.
It works the other way, as well. For example, though gentleness is often considered a feminine virtue, a strain of gentleness in a man is one of the greatest of masculine gifts. It is, in fact, one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and so is something that is certainly appropriate for both sexes! In a man, gentleness is the choice to use masculine strength and stability to tenderly provide and care for those who are vulnerable rather than to abuse them. The ability to treat all with courtesy and care is one of the hallmarks of a gentleman.
Moral courage, the virtue that has been most on my mind in the past year, is another good example. This kind of courage, which can be displayed via humility, steadfastness, forebearance, resistance, insistence, obedience, fidelity, and in so many other ways, is something that we see in both men and women and across many different kinds of personalities.
Yet in children’s literature, sometimes there is a fad of prioritizing one type of girl (or boy) over another. (And in terms of boys, don’t miss our post on outstanding boy protagonists!) When I was a kid, for example, most new books with girl main characters featured tomboys and rulebreakers, to the exclusion of other kinds of girls. I really enjoyed these books, and I still think they are great. But books with stereotypically feminine protagonists — let’s call them girly-girls for the sake of this post, even though that’s not the ideal term — were harder to come by.
In reality, both girly-girls and tomboys are girls, and both have a lot of great things going for them.
Girls who climb trees while wearing pants, like this one:
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