Feminism for beginners

by Sadaf Ahsan on November 27, 2009

Illustration ¬© Quentin Blake

Popular young adult fiction today seems to be dominated by dependent teenage girls in need of charming, beautiful boys to save them from themselves and their mundane lives (think Twilight’s Bella). Whatever happened to the strong female lead—the girl who could save the world single-handedly and still be home in time for dinner? Maybe you need to revisit your childhood to find her.

The Classics: Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Little House on the Prairie, Pippi Longstocking

From Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte, there is an endless supply of classic stories that will never go old about young, brave, smart women who discover life, love and themselves. Follow Louisa May Alcott’s story of the four March sisters in Little Women, or Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, about a young, red-headed orphan whose countless misadventures in Avonlea amount to nothing less than a good read. And of course there’s Mary Lennox, who explores The Secret Garden with her cousin Colin and her friend Dickon while making new friends and discovering a place that is only theirs.

The Adventures: The Wizard of Oz, Nancy Drew, The Golden Compass, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Hunger Games, Harriet the Spy, Coraline

Because of mysteries and adventures like the Nancy Drew series, I explored the mysteries beneath my kitchen table with a magnifying glass as a child. Mysteries never grow old, and while Tom Clancy and Simon Kernick rule the male-centric mystery reads of today, following the adventures of Nancy Drew and her fearless fellow spies was once a requisite part of being a girl. And then, of course, are the adventures that quite literally take you to another world. With their brothers, Susan and Lucy Pevensie (who discovered Narnia in the closet) explore the land of Narnia, only to eventually become the queens of a land they helped defend in battle. Phillip Pullman’s Lyra Balacqua encounters Gobblers, witches and bears in The Golden Compass. And possibly two of the most iconic female leads to exist in fiction, Dorothy and Alice, explore Oz and Wonderland and encounter unique characters like The Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, and the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man.

Magic and Fantasy: Matilda, Harry Potter Series, Ella Enchanted, The Old Kingdom Series, 1-800-Where-R-U, The Mediator, A Wrinkle In Time

Arguably, the genre of fiction that’s the most fun to read is the kind you can get lost in, the kind that makes you feel like if you flick a tree branch at your bag of potato chips, they will indeed come flying towards you. For this, we can thank books about supernatural girls and boys who attend schools of witchcraft and wizardry, or live in magical towns full of secret witches and necromancers. Matilda, one of, if not the most essential book of any girl’s childhood, follows a young girl who reads too much, deals with a dysfunctional family and the villainous Ms. Trunchbull, and tries to figure out what do with her newfound powers. Meg Cabot, of course, is well known for writing young adult fiction for girls, especially books about ghosts, ghost whisperers and psychics.

The Girl Next Door: The Babysitter’s Club, Charlotte’s Web, The Boxcar Children, Amber Brown, Awake and Dreaming, Speak, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Stargirl, All-American Girl, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

Not to be forgotten are the girls next door, the characters who we as readers find in ourselves, perhaps more than our own friends and classmates. The Amber Brown series and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants are books about girls who deal with everyday problems, from divorce to best friends to crushes on boys. These books also deal with heavier issues, helping girls realize they are not alone. For example, Laurie Halse Anderson’s critically acclaimed Speak follows Melinda, who is raped at a party and tells no one, then falls into a lonely depression and social isolation at school and eventually finds herself mentally unable to speak to anyone. Similarly, Kit Pearson’s Awake and Dreaming centers around Theo, a girl who lives in poverty with her young, abusive mother, but escapes into her own imagination.