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osprey_archerI just finished Louise Rankin’s Daughter of the Mountains, a 1949 Newbery Honor book in which a Tibetan girl named Momo treks all the way to Calcutta to rescue her stolen dog. A delightful book! Not only is it a fun adventure, but I’ve been contemplating an essay about Newbery Trends Across the Years, and this book provides a perfect window onto a few major ones.
Caveat to say that I haven’t read all the Newbery Honors of the 1930s & 40s yet. so further reading may modify some of my opinions. However, I’ve read enough that I think it’s fair to say that the 1960s were clearly a turning point in the Newbery books, as in American society as a whole, and in many of the same general areas.
Racial Diversity. If I say “The Newbery Awards became more racially diverse after the 1960s,” this is both true and misleading, because it tends to give the impression that the pre-1960s books were all white-bread Dick-and-Jane books about white kids doing white stuff, which is not at all true. By the time the Newbery Award was first award in 1922, the American children’s literature scene was pretty well committed to the idea of the Republic of Childhood: that is, that all children, all around the world, have something important in common just by being children, and as such children love to read about children from all different times and places. Thus, Momo the little Tibetan girl experiences the universal childhood emotion of loving her pet.
So in the first few decades of the Newbery Award, you have books set in Tibet, India, China, Central and South America, and Nigeria. There are books in ancient Mayan cities and among modern-day indigenous peoples. (The Newbery got way into Native Americans in the 1950s.) What changed after the 1960s is that decade by decade, these books became more likely to be own voices, and more likely to focus on the experience of racial minorities within the United States.
Gender Equality. Overall, women’s liberation caused greater changes in society as a whole than in the Newbery books, largely because the Newbery books were way ahead of everyone else on this one. Momo’s cross-country trek to rescue her dog in Daughter of the Mountains is the sort of plot that was more often given to boys, but she’s not the only Newbery adventure heroine, and even the heroines who don’t get full-blown adventure stories tend to be lively, interesting, well-rounded characters.
There is an ongoing Newbery dialectic about The Problem of Tomboys, but I’ll save this discussion for another post, as Rankin is not the least bit interested in the question. Is Momo bucking expectations of appropriate feminine behavior in chasing her dog across the continent? Who knows! Who cares! Sometimes the tea shop owners who give Momo aid and comfort gently suggest that she should go back home, but that’s because her parents must be worried, not because she’s a girl. Momo brushes their concern off like so many cobwebs and continues on her dog-rescuing way.
Dead dogs. The current stereotype about Newbery books is that they’re always killing off beloved pet animals and family members. As it turns out, this is also a 1960s trend. (Okay, technically it started in 1957 with Old Yeller, but Old Yeller was a weirdo outlier in its own decade. Almost all the pre-1960s books have happy endings.) In recent years, the award seems to have backed off from the animal slaughter, but the bonfire of the family members is still going strong, as witness 2022’s Red, White, and Whole.
My completely unresearched theory about this onslaught of death: post-World War II advances in medicine (antibiotics, vaccinations, etc) meant that children were much less likely to lose a sibling or classmate in real life. Therefore, adults felt that children needed to learn Important Lessons about Death from books. And how better to learn about death than the narratively contrived murder of a beloved pet!
I think it is possible for books to teach Important Lessons about Death, but the Newbery approach mostly seems to have taught that books are a source of pain and suffering, especially if they’re about animals. So that didn’t work out too well for anyone.
Fortunately, Daughter of the Mountains won its Newbery Honor in 1949, so you can rest assured that it has a happy ending.
Caveat to say that I haven’t read all the Newbery Honors of the 1930s & 40s yet. so further reading may modify some of my opinions. However, I’ve read enough that I think it’s fair to say that the 1960s were clearly a turning point in the Newbery books, as in American society as a whole, and in many of the same general areas.
Racial Diversity. If I say “The Newbery Awards became more racially diverse after the 1960s,” this is both true and misleading, because it tends to give the impression that the pre-1960s books were all white-bread Dick-and-Jane books about white kids doing white stuff, which is not at all true. By the time the Newbery Award was first award in 1922, the American children’s literature scene was pretty well committed to the idea of the Republic of Childhood: that is, that all children, all around the world, have something important in common just by being children, and as such children love to read about children from all different times and places. Thus, Momo the little Tibetan girl experiences the universal childhood emotion of loving her pet.
So in the first few decades of the Newbery Award, you have books set in Tibet, India, China, Central and South America, and Nigeria. There are books in ancient Mayan cities and among modern-day indigenous peoples. (The Newbery got way into Native Americans in the 1950s.) What changed after the 1960s is that decade by decade, these books became more likely to be own voices, and more likely to focus on the experience of racial minorities within the United States.
Gender Equality. Overall, women’s liberation caused greater changes in society as a whole than in the Newbery books, largely because the Newbery books were way ahead of everyone else on this one. Momo’s cross-country trek to rescue her dog in Daughter of the Mountains is the sort of plot that was more often given to boys, but she’s not the only Newbery adventure heroine, and even the heroines who don’t get full-blown adventure stories tend to be lively, interesting, well-rounded characters.
There is an ongoing Newbery dialectic about The Problem of Tomboys, but I’ll save this discussion for another post, as Rankin is not the least bit interested in the question. Is Momo bucking expectations of appropriate feminine behavior in chasing her dog across the continent? Who knows! Who cares! Sometimes the tea shop owners who give Momo aid and comfort gently suggest that she should go back home, but that’s because her parents must be worried, not because she’s a girl. Momo brushes their concern off like so many cobwebs and continues on her dog-rescuing way.
Dead dogs. The current stereotype about Newbery books is that they’re always killing off beloved pet animals and family members. As it turns out, this is also a 1960s trend. (Okay, technically it started in 1957 with Old Yeller, but Old Yeller was a weirdo outlier in its own decade. Almost all the pre-1960s books have happy endings.) In recent years, the award seems to have backed off from the animal slaughter, but the bonfire of the family members is still going strong, as witness 2022’s Red, White, and Whole.
My completely unresearched theory about this onslaught of death: post-World War II advances in medicine (antibiotics, vaccinations, etc) meant that children were much less likely to lose a sibling or classmate in real life. Therefore, adults felt that children needed to learn Important Lessons about Death from books. And how better to learn about death than the narratively contrived murder of a beloved pet!
I think it is possible for books to teach Important Lessons about Death, but the Newbery approach mostly seems to have taught that books are a source of pain and suffering, especially if they’re about animals. So that didn’t work out too well for anyone.
Fortunately, Daughter of the Mountains won its Newbery Honor in 1949, so you can rest assured that it has a happy ending.
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Date: 2023-07-16 07:08 pm (UTC)That's pretty awesome.
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Date: 2023-07-17 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-16 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-16 09:19 pm (UTC)Okay, MIND BLOWN but also, honestly, this makes a *lot* of sense to me. Before WWII, children losing siblings, friends, or classmates would've been an ordinary part of childhood; afterwards, it wasn't, but their parents' generation *had* grown up with this and viewed it as a tragic but necessary and natural part of childhood that their children needed to learn to deal with, in the form of fiction since they no longer got it in real life - I mean obviously parents didn't want their actual kids to die but I could also see parents of the 50s-70s seeing it like "Well, if you don't learn to cope with this emotionally, you're not going to be prepared for adulthood," in a more severe form of the same thing where a lot of modern parents think of their children as woefully unprepared due to not having had the experience of going to the mall alone / doing unstructured play / having to deal with network TV schedules / [insert common 80s-90s childhood experience here].
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Date: 2023-07-17 12:26 am (UTC)But I think a book featuring a death that is specifically designed to teach you about The Tragedy of Death just hits in such a different place than, like, an actual death, that it doesn't actually teach anything useful.
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Date: 2023-07-17 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 02:54 pm (UTC)I wonder if the Newbery books were ahead of the curve on feminism because there were a goodly percentage of women writers? (Were there? That's the impression I get, but you would know better)
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Date: 2023-07-17 05:37 pm (UTC)Yes, there were definitely a lot of women's children book writers. And although I don't know the exact make-up of the Newbery selection committee, it's made up of librarians, teachers, and children's book reviews, all of which are professions in which women have historically been well-represented. I'm sure that shaped the book selections.
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Date: 2023-07-23 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-24 05:25 pm (UTC)