Thursday, May 05, 2011
From Peter Rabbit to Curious George, Study Finds 100 Years of Gender Bias in Children’s Books
A Florida State University sociologist has led the most comprehensive study of 20th century children’s books ever undertaken in the United States and found a bias toward tales that feature men and boys — even male animals — as lead characters.
Janice McCabe, assistant professor of sociology, led the study of nearly 6,000 books published from 1900 to 2000. While previous studies have looked at the representation of male and female characters in children’s books, they were often limited in scope.
“We looked at a full century of children’s books,” McCabe said. “We were surprised to find that books did not become consistently more equal throughout the century. They were most unequal in the middle of the century, with more male-dominated characters from 1930 to 1969, than those published in the first three decades of the century and in later decades.”
Daniel Tope, also an assistant professor of sociology at FSU and one of the study’s co-authors, said there is a connection between the historical ebb and flow of the women’s movement and gender representations in children’s books.
“Following the onset of the women’s movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, greater gender parity for central characters became more normative,” Tope said. “This suggests a historical link between gender politics and gender representations in print.”
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