Seventies Something
by Judith Warner (columnist)
New York Times, Nov. 1
I never thought there was going to be any sort of nostalgia for childhood in the 1970s, a time of skyrocketing divorce, “latch key kids” and newly liberated adults who sometimes behaved rather badly toward their much less with-it offspring. Yet now, with middle age encroaching upon the girls who cut their hair like Dorothy Hamill and carried lunchboxes that sported the face of the original Bionic Woman, the seventies are coming back to life, and looking a whole lot better in retrospect.
Last month, American Girl introduced Julie of 1974, the latest doll in the company’s “historical” line, with a set of accompanying books, written by the children’s author and seventies girl Megan McDonald and filled with fun facts about Shirley Chisholm, the ERA, Title IX, Billie Jean King and the etymology of Ms. This week came The Daring Book for Girls, the work of two almost-middle-aged writers whose goal, they told me, wasn’t just to complement the mega blockbuster The Dangerous Book for Boys, but also to offer an escape route out of the high-pressure, perfectionist, media-saturated and competitive world of girlhood in our time. The way they do it: by offering up an alternative kind of girl culture that looks and sounds a whole lot like…life in the 1970s.
The Daring Book for Girls teaches the art of playing jacks and handclap games, roller skating, darts, jump rope, gin rummy and daisy chains. There’s fun and old-fashioned feminism: “Putting Your Hair Up With a Pencil” and “A Short History of Women Inventors and Scientists.” Instead of email, instant messaging, group weigh-ins or slumber parties organized around “America’s Next Top Model,” the authors offer instructive chapters on “Clubhouses and Forts,” “Writing Letters,” “Telling Ghost Stories” and “Fourteen Games of Tag.” There’s “How to Negotiate A Salary,” “Every Girl’s Toolbox,” “Public Speaking” and “Finance: Interest, Stocks and Bonds” (favorites of mine). My daughter Julia--a target “tween”--went wild over “Reading Tide Charts,” “Vinegar and Baking Soda” and “Making a Willow Whistle.” “We looked at what we ourselves enjoyed doing,” said author Andrea J. Buchanan. “We asked ourselves: what should girls know?” added co-author Miriam Peskowitz. “And we went from there.”
Unlike The Dangerous Book for Boys, which harkens back to a prelapsarian state of boyhood that some have dated to the 1950s and others to Edwardian England, The Daring Book for Girls can’t be too backward-looking. After all, the 1950s weren’t really a heyday for girl power. The 1970s, too, Buchanan and Peskowitz acknowledged, had their frustrations and limitations for the girls on the very cusp of social change. But the era of their girlhood, the authors believe, was, overall, less toxic. “Girls have more opportunities now,” Peskowitz said. “But the culture is more horrid. Girls jump into womanhood at nine. It may have been more fun in some ways to have been a girl in 1963 or 1973 without the pressures.”
The Dangerous Book for Boys spent 20 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and is slated to become a Disney film. If the Daring book does anywhere nearly as well, then it could mark the start of a pop culture re-imagining of modern girlhood--one, perhaps, with an emphasis on doing rather than seeming, on growing rather than shrinking, and on exploring rather than shutting down.
That would be nice. If only.
If only, with its faux-antique binding, black and white etchings, and Girl Scout Handbook-like straightforwardness, Daring didn’t have the persistent feel of a reliquary. If only my own tween’s enthusiasm for it (“Will you help me put up my hair with a pencil?”) weren’t a sign that it’s not going to play well with the Hannah Montana crowd. If only my own admiration for it wasn’t, pretty much, the kiss of death: the Geek seal of approval. (“Girls,” I breathed, misty-eyed, in the car recently. “Just think: one day you’ll have a lot of homework and we can all go to the library together and share a table!”)
Peskowitz, who has a Ph.D. in ancient history and religion, may find it a thrill to apply her professional knowledge to teaching girl readers about “Queens of the Ancient World.” Other mothers may find similar ways to communicate the passions of their lives--poetry, or chemistry, or camping--to their girls via the Daring book’s pages. Yet, while all this will undoubtedly strengthen individual mother-daughter bonds, I wonder if it will have any wider effect. What power can any of us--moms and daughters, adrift in the cultural mainstream--have against the hugely seductive, hypnotic machine that has brought us Paris, Miley, Lindsay and more? Not much--unless there are a whole lot more of us out there than I think.
A family counselor I heard speak last Spring said she believes that young girls today who get caught up in skinniness, fashion, popularity, pop culture and boys are, essentially, “underemployed.” Their brains, she said, need to be engaged by things larger than themselves: things like hobbies, sports, art, music or community service. If they’re not, there’s a vacuum, and all kinds of wretched stuff comes to fill their minds instead. I thought of this woman’s words on Halloween, catching glimpses trick or treating of the tweens dressed in this year’s much-talked-about “bawdy” attire or simply in costumes that were more fashion-y than fun. These girls were striking. There was a self-consciousness to them, an inward-turnedness, that was joyless, and disturbing. It was way too adult-like and way too heavy a thing for their young and (invariably) skinny shoulders to bear.
I don’t know exactly how we can relieve them of the burdens of toxic girlhood. We can’t--and shouldn’t--raise them in a total media vacuum. We can’t simply preach at them, or badger them, or cloister them or dress them in the kind of puppy-dotted turtlenecks that are now showing up in some nostalgia-stoking holiday catalogues. The only thing we can do is provide some sort of inspiration--of a kind of womanhood that makes them want to connect to the better aspects of the girlhood we once knew. And then, give them the space and the time to make it their own.
