Returning to Pippi and Her Ilk

In honor of International Women's Day, I am reposting this item from six years ago. It is the first of five posts I wrote about strong young women in film and literature, including Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm), Scarlett O'Hara, Emma Bovary, Becky Sharp, Emma Jean Lazarus, Veronica Mars, and, of course, Buffy.

MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2013

Strong Young Women Part 1: Pippi Longstocking

It started for me back in the third grade, with Astrid Lindgren’s 1950 novel, Pippi Longstocking: I love spunky, tough, resourceful young women. 

That’s one of the reasons I loved The Hunger Games. But I have to say, Pippi could kick Katniss from District 13 to Villa Villekulla and back again. Could Katniss lift a horse? No. But Pippi could do it with one hand.

We writer/librarian/teacher/reader types pride ourselves in our literary broadmindedness. With tens of thousands (give or take) of new titles being published every year, we like to think that we are living in a golden age of Anything Goes. That is partly true…and partly not. Would Pippi Longstocking be published today? I mean, other than as a self-published ebook?

Pippi owns a number of handguns, which she fires into the ceiling for fun and gives them freely to her friends. She uses the kitchen floor to roll out cookie dough, and eats raw eggs. She is impudent and disrespectful to adults, and has no respect for any rules or laws. She physically attacks policemen, and suffers no consequences for her actions. She has no math skills. She is functionally illiterate, and has no interest in reading. She is a heavy coffee drinker, and lives on (mostly) cookies and caramels.

Send a manuscript like that to Random Penguin, and see how fast they reject it.

Of course, many of today’s kids’ books contain elements that would have made them unpublishable fifty years ago. LGBT characters, references to certain body parts, and anti-government sentiments, for example. But let’s not pat ourselves on the back for our “open-mindedness” just yet. The only reason Pippi Longstocking is still in print is because she has been grandmothered in as a “classic.”

Today, we require certain approved behaviors in our heroines. Some of my own female characters have been criticized for being bitchy (Sweetblood and The Big Crunch), unrepentant and unpunished (How to Steal a Car), physically violent (What Boys Really Want), and dishonest (all of the above). It is true, and I hold Pippi Longstocking and her ilk to blame.

Next up: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm