A Certain Slant of Light

”A woman’s work is something fine and noble to grow up to, and it is just as important as a man’s. But no man could ever do it so well. I don’t want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and understanding heart, healthy in body and honest in mind. Do you think you would like to be growing up into that woman now? How about it, Caddie, have we run with the colts long enough?”...

Suddenly Caddie flung herself into Mr. Woodlawn’s arms.

“Father! Father!”

When I was a little girl, I was convinced I was a tomboy, despite the fact that I didn’t like sports, physical exertion, boys, or pretty much any of the other things that young tomboys are supposed to love. Mostly I just wanted to sit around and read all the time, but in between the Little House books and Caddie Woodlawn, my reading led to the conclusion that girls were supposed to be tomboys.

I should perhaps put “supposed” in quotes, because these are books at war with their own subtext. On the one hand, the explicit message - and this is especially clear in Caddie Woodlawn, which spells its message out the passage I quoted above (which is one of the few parts of the book I remembered all these years later) - is that tomboys have to grow up, and put aside childish things, and become good quiet housekeepers who learn all those girly things they’ve scorned.

But on the other hand, and all words about “fine and noble” callings aside, man does Caddie Woodlawn make proper ladyhood look unattractive. Caddie’s older sister Clara has been so subsumed by ladyhood that she barely has a personality. She’s the only one in the family who votes to go to England when her father inherits an estate, because only she is blinded by the glitz of the English peerage to the true beauty of the rough frontiers of America.

(Clara does not lose her entire family to a train accident, but nonetheless I think she and Susan Pevensie have something in common.)

Who wouldn’t rather be a tomboy? Tomboys are honest and brave and true and have their own opinions about things rather than just parroting out of the Godey’s Lady’s Book.

I loved Caddie Woodlawn as a girl, and I still love lots of it - there’s a marvelous scene where Caddie tries to fix a clock, for instance, and ends up getting taken under her father’s wing as his clock-fixing apprentice. The nature descriptions are marvelous. (The Indian plotlines are of their time - neither particularly noxious nor particularly progressive for the the thirties, but uncomfortable reading today. I’m sure someone has written about this at length elsewhere.)

But reading it now, what it really draws out for me is how two-faced our cultural vision of how girls are supposed to be is. For a long time, the explicit message - the conduct-book message, one might call it - was that girls should be quiet and polite and thoughtful and ladylike, while the message in books (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Caddie Woodlawn) was that ladylike girls are the most boring thing to ever bore, and girls ought to be exciting and sprightly and tomboyish.

And at some point (gradually, although it was quite common in books I read growing in the nineties), that implicit message became explicit. Girls should be tomboys. They should be fearless! and feisty! and loud! and able to keep up with the boys.

Or - if it’s a story that isn’t specifically aimed at girls - maybe only almost able to keep up. Not too fearless. Not too loud. Not so set in their opinions that it’s annoying, and God forbid not right.

Pretty much the only thing on which there is cultural consensus is that girls had damn well better be pretty.