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Susan Lehr, ed. Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The Construction of Gender in Children's Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.
Susan Lehr's rather eclectic collection of essays, Beauty, Brains, and Brawn, addresses the representations of gender in children's literature ranging from author profiles to scholarly textual analyses. Some essays examine the relationship between the child identity presented in the text and the child reader's search for identity; others address gender issues particular to a genre such as historical fiction, series books, and fairy tales and fantasy. Charlotte Huck's introductory remarks pronounce the book's overriding theme to be a call for "adopting more egalitarian gender attitudes" in the construction of children's books (x). At least, Huck believes that each writer in this text would "attest" to this statement and that each reveals the "complexities of the task"(x).
Although this "eclecticism" is beneficial in that it carries multiple perspectives and meets the reading needs of a more general audience, the text's structure lacks physical and thematic continuity and makes for difficult reading of a text that would not otherwise be so troublesome. The writing is informative, engaging, and easily understood.
The book is divided into five distinct parts: "Children at the Crossroads: Tough Boys, Fragile Girls?," "Images of Children in Illustrated Books," "Teaching the Past without Corsets and Chastity Belts," "Challenging Gender Stereotypes," and "The Politics of Gender: Teaching the Whole Child." These parts are numbered in the table of contents, but are not signaled correspondingly in any way within the text itself. So, readers are tossed from one focus to the next without warning; thematic movement is blurred.
Where most readers would expect an editor's preface to highlight the arguments presented in individual essays and...