Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels Book

Trites explains in the final chapter that she wrote this book because, like many literature professors, most of her students were headed into teaching. Though female equality was hardly a new idea by the 1990s, she met with surprising resistance from students who, okay, believed in equality but didn't accept that

1. It doesn't actually matter if the creators of sexist stories MEAN to be sexist
2. It doesn't actually matter if the child audience of sexist stories can grasp WHY these stories are sexist

It's still fucking sexist. Which is how I read and consume and live in the world. That idea is at the heart of my approach to everything. I am a big fan of Roberta Seelinger Trites. I don't think we've moved past that idea, by the way.

Phrases such as 'which I call "the politics of identity"' in a book published in the 1990s show just how far ahead of her time Trites has been all along. Now everyone calls it that, or rather, 'identity politics' (which has been co-opted to sound like an insult).

This is an important book for writers as much as for students in teacher training. Trites talks about the shapes of plots, the tendency for feminist stories to be metafictive, how female protagonists put themselves into the subject position (scrambling out of object position), the portrayal of mothers in children's literature with a criticism of Freud (who I hate, yay), and not a single mention of Bruno Bettelheim, which is always excellent news.