It's A Girl!
Tuesday, 05.16.06 @ 12:08AM 
Time for a book review! This is my third, so I’m well on the way to having a career in literary criticism, if I live to be 100. Its a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters is the first book I signed up to review, because I have some experience in the area, being as I have two daughters. Princess is nine, and Gothgrrl is celebrating her eighth birthday this weeknd. Her birthday is in June, but no one ever comes to her parties during school vacation, so we are having the party in May this year. Such is the logic when you are raising kids. Its a lot of learning as you go. Like I've said before, I was an expert in child rearing, right up to the time they handed me my first kid. Then all bets are off, and I became as confused as the next parent.
Its a Girl is an anthology. Lots of stories and essays here, by many different writers. Its a project of Literary Mama, a group of writers who happen to be mothers. The book focuses on the particular experience of raising daughters. The cover reminded me of something I’d seen before... Yeah! I have a photo like that, of one of my daughters’ friends. Princess and Gothgrrl dressed her up. Its a similar illustration of the complete dichotomy in our perception of the world. We split girls into categories; “girly-girl” or “tomboy”. I have one of each, but truth be known, there is plenty of “girly-girl” in Gothgrrl, and plenty of “tomboy” in Princess.
Oh yeah, the book. In the introduction to Its A Girl, we look at the way mothers (and those around them) react when told they are going to have a girl child. Often people will tell you that raising girls is more complicated. Sometimes they are rude enough to be sad about it. Mothers are often just plain concerned for what they cannot put into words. This book puts it in those words.
But the concerns of writers in Its A Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Its a Girl writers ask the same question about their daughters, but what prompts it is not fear of the unknown, but fear of what they know all too well.
The first section deals with gender angst. Am I woman enough to raise a girl? Am I feminist enough to raise an independent woman? Am I secure enough to raise a confident daughter? Is my girl too girly? Is she too tomboyish? Can I exert any control whatsoever over any of that? It all comes down to a question of balance between a) raising your daughter to change the way the world sees gender roles, and 2) teaching her how to bend and manipulate herself to cope with the way the world already is.
Tough Girls, by Rebecca Steinwitz, is about the choices we most make between girly-girl toys and clothing. The world is divided into boy and girl things. But can we really force our choices onto our daughters?
... she wanted sneakers with pink flowers. I had my usual pang of frustration, but I bought them, because part of bringing up a feminist girl is letting her make her own choices.
The second section deals with beauty. Way more to stress about here, plastic surgery, eating disorders, little girls pressured to look and dress like women. We want our girls to follow their hearts. We want them to appreciate and care about themselves. We don't want them to think that how they look is more important than their character. So much for what we teach them; the rest of the world is telling them that how they look is the defining aspect of their being.
Personally, I had convinced myself over my lifetime that attractiveness was a combination of looks, personality, wisdom, and the way you treat people. That illusion was shattered bigtime when I found myself suddenly single in my mid-40s. My experience since then tells me that it doesn’t matter how wise, interesting, or caring you are if your butt is big or your hair is grey. Normally, this revelation wouldn’t be a problem, but I have two impressionable daughters who can’t help but see me fretting over my hair and weight. Never mind that they are ten times prettier than they need to be, they are learning well how to fret. After several episodes of Princess asking me if her butt looked big in these jeans, she finally got it right yesterday when she asked, "Mama, does my butt look good in these jeans?" Yes!
The third section is about bonding with our daughters, and by extension, our mothers. Mothers and daughetrs have very complicated relationships, because we want to be like our mothers, and we want to be different. We want to bond and we want to be independent. We want our daughters to reflect ourselves, but we also want them to have it better or BE better.
Daughter Dread, by Vicky Mlyniec revisits the concern over finding your child is a girl.
Why this daughter dread?
My best guess was that I didn’t want to deal with the staggering emotional complexity of raising a daughter.
Having a boy would just be so much easier.
On Wanting a Daughter, by Sheri McDonald Strong affected me, not only because I could relate to the international adoption story, but mosty because of the journey she takes in learning to accept her strong-willed non-conformist daughter. I am working on maintaining the same type of acceptance with Gothgrrl, and appreciating the gift that she is.
Oh yeah, you’ll like Its A Girl if you have a daughter. Or even if you don’t! If you are not a mother, or even a woman, you’ll learn a LOT about the workings of the female mind by reading this book. Edited by Andrea Buchanan. Available at Amazon.
Previously on Miss Cellania: Literary Mama
Thought for today: The mother of a girl must plumb the depths of the girlhood she’d thought she had safely escaped-but this time through the eyes of her daughter, whose experience is neccessarily different. -Andi Buchanan
Reader Comments (2)
We thought we were going to have a girl until it turned out to be a boy. We would have named her Angelica. I still wish we had had a girl in addition to the child we actually had. Maybe in my next lifetime.