The article we were asked to read for our literacy class, "10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism and Sexism" is quite eye-opening. After reading it, I decided to go through the many children's bookds I have at home to check for possible stereotypes and it didn't take long before I had many examples. In the book, Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion, I noticed that in the illustrations, the mother in the story is always wearing an apron and is often holding a mop and/or a broom, implying that woman do all the cleaning around the house. The father, on the other hand, is shown wearing a suit and tie (the copyright date of the book is 1956!). Also, in the illustrations showing the town, of the many workers on the street (those driving trucks, building houses, workers paving the streets, flaggers, etc.) are all men. These illustrations seem to imply that only men occupy these types of professions.
The Big Red Bus by Ethel and Leonard Kessler is also guilty of showing men and women in stereotypical roles. This is a story about a boy taking a bus with his mother to buy a new pair of shoes. The illustrations show that the bus driver is a man, the crossing guard is a man, the butcher is a man, etc. Also, the men on the bus are reading newspapers (not the women) implying that only men care about current events?
I am now looking at children's books through a different lens. As a teacher, it will be important that I carefully review the books I read to my students to ensure they don't perpetuate these types of stereotypes.
I too was shocked to go through my children's books, and children's books that were my mothers with a lens of looking for stereotypes. Some were more blatant than others, while some were much more settle. It was interesting that the books you read had very stereotypical male and female roles. While I found lots with that I also found ones with racial stereotypes as well. I found one that was in my grandmas collection of children's about a police man that titled, "I want to be a police man when I grow up". The police man was white and the person he was arresting was black. Wow. Then all of the little boys and girls that surrounded the police man to idolize him were white.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I was very surprised to re-read all of the books I grew up with only to find many stereotypes in them. It is important to either use it as a teachable moment and address it or simply not have them in the classroom.