Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Harper Collins, 2011) was sent to me by the publisher for possible adoption in a women’s studies course. I read it very quickly (a rare feat for me) and thought I would share a few thoughts.
Orenstein is a very successful writer. Here’s a bit of her bio:
Her previous books include The New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; and the best-selling SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vogue, Elle, Discover, More, Mother Jones, Salon, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered. Her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing. She has been a keynote speaker at numerous colleges and conferences and has been featured on, among other programs, Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC’s As It Happens.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a breezy, relatively short (179 pages) and entertaining read, taking the reader through the maze of girlhood, from the dreaded princess phase, through Bratz, Disney tween sensations like Miley Cyrus, and older girls’ online diversions like Facebook. Orenstein writes self-consciously as the loving mother of a young daughter and as a feminist steeped in Second Wave liberal feminist ideals. Much of the book describes her own struggle to raise her daughter Daisy, in a way that avoids the horns of that old tyme dilemma: how to be a strong, confident girl without, on the one hand, falling prey to the worst feminine stereotypes, the kind that say only pretty and sweet and sexy girls are valuable, and on the other, rejecting femininity altogether for a masculine ideal.
It’s hard for me to judge, because, given my occupation, I may have read more of this stuff than the average reader, but I saw little in this book that I had not seen somewhere before, and I don’t mean peer reviewed journals, but in Jezebel, Feministe and other online venues. I think sometimes writers, especially those who write in a casual autobiographical way, as Orenstein does here, confuse “new to me”, with “new.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that “tween” is a marketing gimmick and not a psychologically significant developmental stage? Is there anyone on the planet who has missed all the critiques of Bella Swan as boy crazy and bland? Or who is not aware that, with the advent of the internet, “rumors can spread faster” and “The anonymity of the screen may also embolden bullies”?
Orenstein is highly critical of contemporary culture, especially its technological nature (the Internet, video and computer games, TV and film). Despite protesting that “I don’t mean to demonize the new technology”, that’s exactly what she does. Nostalgia for an earlier time, when, in her view, femininity, and the value of girls, was not so closely tied to good looks, saturates the pages of the book. Orenstein reserves her highest praise (wan though it is) for The Daring Book for Girls, which tells its young readers how to play croquet, host a horseshoe throwing contest and use Kool-Aid to dye hair.
She also writes, unselfconsciously, as a privileged, highly educated, white, married heterosexual woman. There is very little discussion in the book of the way beauty ideals are racist, classist, sexist, and ableist, an omission made a bit more surprising by the fact that she has (apparently, given my perusal of her bio) a biracial daughter (at one point, the author berates herself for buying a Barbie with “an ankh pendant and peculiar tan [as if that] made it all ok”). The unhappy marriage of nostalgia and unselfconscious privilege produces some very scary textual progeny, as in this passage:
As in the American Girl books, it seems as though the nineteenth century girl may have lived in a more repressive era — before women could vote, when girls’ sights were set solely on marriage and motherhood — her sense of self-worth was enviably internal, a matter of deed over dress. Whatever other constraints she felt, he femininity was not defined by the pursuit of physical perfection; it was about character. I wonder why we adult women, with all our economic, political and personal freedoms, have let this happen to our daughters.
Yes, because slavery was so liberating for the black gals!
A similarly surprising moment comes when Orenstein puzzles over why her daughter assumes that Lotte, the white sidekick, and not the black Tiana, is the titular character in The Princess and the Frog. It’s because Lotte swooned, wished on stars, dreamed of marrying a prince … everything but the, to me, screamingly obvious point that until Tiana, there had never been a black Disney princess.
Perhaps the most annoying tendency in the book is Orenstein’s failure to take a stand, despite all of the handwringing. She makes the case that femininity is defined more and more by looks, and not just looks, but a certain studied sexiness. That girls’ self-image is tied so closely to their appearance that they can’t even answer a question about how they feel without referring to how they look. And that the sexuality of girls (as opposed to their sexualization), their ability to feel and enjoy real sexual desire, gets subsumed by a culturally-induced focus on whether and how they are desired by others. This is not an academic study, so I guess I can’t take her to task for not asking why women have experienced educational, economic and political gains at the same time all of this other bad stuff is happening. But if this is a quasi-self-help read, then how about some help? She recognizes, “Now, this is where I should step in and give advice … about how to combat the outrageous expectations foisted on our daughters … and believe me, after twenty years of writing and talking about girls, I know what to say…”. And yet, now she has her own daughter, “it’s complicated”. And that’s where it, pretty much, ends.
The openness to options comes through most clearly in the chapter on toddler beauty pageants. Orenstein notes that self-objectification and sexualization are related to higher rates of “eating disorders, depression, low self-esteeem and impaired academic performance”, “undermine healthy sexuality”, and a cause host of other ills. But then writes both that the toddler and tiara set are just doing what everyday moms are doing, only a little more enthusiastically, and that she “was starting to see the girls as their parents did — as engaging in a little healthy fun, merely playing an elaborate version of dressup.” It’s not that she abandons her critique, it’s that she papers it over with a pastiche of backtracking, pseudo-empathizing, and wistful confusion that really don’t mesh well with the dire tones of the book.
Perhaps that’s the appeal of the book to the many women who seem to love it. Identifying and describing a problem readers already recognize well, while at the same time leaving its solution up to every individual mom, possibly alleviates anxiety. And it is moms. I was shocked at how non-present the menfolk were in this book. In one chapter, Orenstein is working herself into a lather about whether to buy her daughter a Fairytopia Barbie, and her spouse’s one contribution is to say, “You’re confusing her.” It’s not that I doubt mothers have unique gendered challenges with respect to raising girls, it’s just that I would have liked to have the absence of the men at the parties, the dress ups, the shopping trips, the pageants, and in general their (apparent) failure to see the problem of raising girls as their problem too, noted and discussed.
There’s some fun stuff on princesses, actually. Orenstein goes back to the Grimms tales, and does some interesting comparisons between those and the Disney versions. The scene where she reads the original, and horrifically violent, Rumpelstilskin to her daughter is laugh out loud funny. And the emphasis on the way consumerism drives the gendering of our boys and girls culture is important (why make blue bats and pink bats? Because then every family with a boy and a girl needs to buy two!). She also drops some fun tidbits, like the fact that the whole Disney Princess empire was launched when a Disney exec saw girls wearing homemade costumes to a Disney on Ice show, and realized a marketing opportunity had been missed.
But overall, especially given my perspective as a potential course adopter, I can’t recommend this book. Feminism has come a long way since the days of nature or nurture, femininity or masculinity. Cinderella Ate My Daughter is certainly well-written, and makes for a breezy read, but assigning this book would be taking my students back, and not in a good way, to the time before feminists recognized the multiplicity of not just genders but sexes, of the complex relationships between the US and other countries (not one mention of the child labor that probably went into the making of many of those princess products), of the the way gender and sexual identities are inseparable from other aspects of identity, etc.
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Interesting review! I have 3 nieces in this princess phase. It seems like a great subject for a really comprehensive and serious work, just from the oversights you point out, though I can kind of see how this book would work for moms up for a more breezy cultural critique lite.
I cringed at your pointing out her confusing ‘new’ with ‘new to me.’ I think I do that a lot. But, luckily, I’m not a scholar. It is always sort of amazing to me how much of scholarly work is about widening the lens to take even more into account. That’s something I liked about this review.
You’re right about having seen many of these points argued before in other venues (Jezebel, Bitch, etc). Wrapping up of ‘new to me’ points with a nicely designed cover = sales. However, that said, I do have a few friends who don’t haunt feminist sites or publishers who may be able to start here. I guess the problem would be whether it would be the start of something or the whole package, which would then be problematic.
I haven’t read this book but it sounds like standard Orenstein: fast-paced and reader friendly, full of lively anecdotes but short on analysis, showing no engagement with intersectional issues (or even an acknowledgment that intersectionality exists). But I suspect the market for Orenstein’s books wants this and wouldn’t quite know what to do with a book that teased out the tangled strands of classism, racism, sexism and heteronormativity that go to make up modern American marketing to children, not because their hearts aren’t in the right place, not because they don’t care about each of those things individually but because they are used to considering them in isolation, as separate issues to be solved through separate forms of activism; a kind of thinking that, of course, books like Orenstein’s tend unwittingly to reinforce.
I do think Kate makes a good point that what we here in this conversation see all around us (particularly online) and consider ubiquitous, lots of other women, especially middle-aged and older women, may never have been exposed to or only so tangentially that they don’t really see the way particular instances of pop culture or marketing (examples we might find egregious) fit into feminism until it’s presented to them in an accessible form like this book. I’m active in the feminist, lesbian, and woman-oriented groups on Library Thing, all of which seem to skew to 35+ (with a good proportion of the commentariat over 50 years old) and I’m pretty certain a book like this would be popular there and that for many of the commentors, Orenstein’s arguments actually would be “new” or unfamiliar enough to seem fresh and thought-provoking*. Since becoming active in those groups, I’ve realized that I sometimes need to rethink my own position on how to present feminism and who feminists are because I found I was assuming too much based on what I thought I knew, assumptions made because I tend to interact mainly with younger feminists and mainly with feminism in an academic or online setting (the parallels with the romance blog community and general romance readers struck me hard as I was writing this). None of this makes Orenstein’s book any better or more suitable for academic use but it does suggest that there are some readers, readers who identify as feminists, who might find something of value in it.
*Yep. Just checked the LT reviews on this and find that members I know through these groups do give the book high marks and find the book “fascinating”, “thought-provking”, “sobering”, etc. This includes at least one male reader. The average review is 4 stars.
@Carolyn Crane:
Right, I mean, Orenstein is a memoirist also (one of her books is all about her infertility and the quest to have Daisy). So as a reader, I am supposed to be interested in her journey, with her daughter.
@Kate: Well, that’s the thing. She has a name, and a certain power in this niche of the bookselling market. I’m glad any book like this is getting published, actually.
@Marie-Thérèse:
Yes, absolutely. I, too, looked at Amazon and Goodreads to take the temperature of how the book was received, and you’ve described it perfectly.
The question of older feminists is one that is very much on my mind right now, as we have two women in their 60s and 70s at the head of our WST program. The director has been the same woman for 30 years, and there is an unmistakable air of Second Wave permeating the program. We just had an annual review, and the outside feminist profs who came in were just gobsmacked that we even had courses like “Women and _____” . But I think it is hard, when you have been trained (as an academic or an activist) in one way, to really embrace a new paradigm. For example, I like to think my skepticism about postmodern feminism (which had made no inroads in my traditional philosophy graduate program, even in the late 1990s, when I was there) is grounded in reason, but I am sure it has a lot to do with it being a new and unfamiliar was of looking at issues.
Thanks for the comments, folks. I passed the book along to my son’s pal’s mom when she came to pick him up form a playdate yesterday.
I have not read the book. I expected it was going to be along the message that you outline. I do think it is an important topic, and I also find that a superficial look misses critical tangential information.
I was raised in the 70s, at the height of “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never let him forget he’s a man” era. To this day, the illogic that allowed the ERA amendment to die boggles my mind. And, to be very blunt, when Obama started to rise in the polls, I said to my dh, “He’s going to win. Black men got the vote before any color woman did.” I did not say this resentfully, just with a nod to history and the very stubborn fear that men have rooted deep in their hearts and minds of women in control of their own fates.
I played with Barbies. If my daughter were still young enough to want a Fairytopia Barbie, I’d get her one. I let her be a princess at Halloween, and I understood her desire. It’s a very simple desire for power. The subsuming of that desire for power is not obvious to young girls (and perhaps not to women old enough to know better). If the power always comes from the Prince (not the King or Queen interestingly enough), then the Princess must be tapped first in order to wield it. Thus, she must do all she can (dress, manners, blah, blah) to be tapped.
But as soon as I bought the Fairytopia Barbie, we’d start talking about what FB wanted and how she’d get it without the prince
May be why my daughter had her international adventures and completed her education before she decided to settle down.
It is rather horrifying how many people don’t see that it’s the power storyline that is devastating to a young woman’s self esteem, not the clothes, or the makeup, or the external signs of prince-seeking.
Great review. Got me thinking about the subject.
@Kelly McClymer:
Oh, me too. I recall those Enjoli ads!
I don’t know how to look at it, honestly. I can see your point that maybe gender trumped race in this case. But I also think Hilary brought a lot of baggage that even Democrats didn’t want. It is hard for me even to recall this now, but at one time Obama’s campaign seemed like OWS does today — very appealing to real progressives and the youth.
That’s awesome. I was sorry that there wasn’t more recognition in her book that consumers of popular culture, even little ones, are constantly, actively, negotiating it. For one thing, the demands of mass culture generally house inconsistencies which have to be reconciled via interpretation or rejection.
Great point, and thanks for coming by to share your view.