Will boys read books mainly about girls? They will if the book is good and we encourage them.
If you ask a girl what she's reading, chances are she'll rattle off a list of favorite books that feature both boy and girl characters. Girls read across gender lines. They're used to it. Many of the classic books written for children are about young boys and their adventures. Girls are used to inhabiting a boy's mind.
But what about boys? Do you ever shrink from reading a good book to a boy because it might be too girly?
Good books are good books. We shortchange boys and underestimate them when we don't expose boys to stories with girl main characters. And not just tough girl characters who fight and act like warriors. Regular girls. All kinds of girls.
Think Little House on the Prairie. The Diary of Anne Frank. Island of the Blue Dolphins. The Penderwicks. The Vanderbeekers of 141st St. And many, many more.
A recent article about adult men who shun all books by female authors made me think of this. Really? Seriously? These days? But perhaps it starts young, with lack of empathy and experience. Perhaps we adults unwittingly contribute to this when we self-select books out that "boys wouldn't be interested in."
Give boys and girls a chance. Sure, kids gravitate to a certain genre or favorite author, but our job is to widen their world and mix it up. Girls are certainly exposed to male values and interests. Boys could gain a lot from stepping into a female world.
Stories develop empathy. They get us into the mind and life of another person. Don't be frightened to push the border and be a champion for empathy.
As a Hungarian novelist said, when asked about rising hate crimes and discrimination: "Our society's biggest problem, beyond poverty, is a lack of empathy."
Go forth and kindle empathy!
So glad to read this one. As a girl, when I had read through all the Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon, I hit the Hardy Boys, Spin and Marty, and the kid versions of Treasure Island and Gulliver's Travels without missing a beat. I never thought about gender, and never understood why boys didn't want to read Nancy Drew, who I thought was the best of the lot. I even read the Green Berets--there's a so-called "guys" book! I wanted the excitement of the story, and it didn't matter if the main character was a boy or a girl. Yes, I still encounter men who turn their noses up at books with strong female main characters, from Jane Eyre to Olive Kittridge--even award-winning reads, not to mention the female super heroes (albeit controversial) in speculative fiction. Some guys are missing so much. Too bad, huh? More for us.
Such a necessary and wonderful post.
Great point! My parents are highly educated, literate people, and my sisters and I read all sorts of books as kids - dog books, horse books, magic adventure books, books about life on the frontier or life as a Jewish child on the lower west side before WWI or life on a desert island, etc. Our books were about boys, girls, animals, knights, magicians, fairies, you name it; many of them were wonderfully well-written and imagined.
But my poor brother's reading diet consisted amost entirely of horribly written, formulaic "boy's" genre books, usually about a boy and his underdog baseball or hockey team. It just seemed (and still seems) so very impoverished. (Although at least it wasn't Captain Underpants, or whatever it is today's boys are being fed.)
Oddly, the extreme gendering of children's literature seems to be a very recent phenomenon, perhaps analogous to the extreme gendering of children's toys today as compared to a hundred years ago, when pretty much the only "gendered" toy was the baby doll. Reading a book of/about Laura Ingalls Wilder recently, I was struck by the fact that as much of her fan mail came from little boys as little girls. Likewise E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, Rudyard Kipling, C. S. Lewis, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Kenneth Graham, Lewis Carroll, etc. - they didn't write "girls' books" or "boys' books" but children's books.