Why do we make princesses of our daughters? Though sons suffer the weight of their own set of parental expectations, these are nothing like the standards of purity and proper comportment we expect from our daughters. Are girls different somehow? Is this inequity a legacy handed down from centuries of doctrinally inspired societal thinking that promoted female chastity over all other womanly virtues? Is it a byproduct of the sophisticated corporate advertising which preys on girls by convincing them that they aren't real girls unless they have the right toys, play with the right dolls? Cinderella Ate My Daughter is one mother's effort to find an answer.
Ms. Orenstein, an author and journalist, explores, here, the rise of what she calls "girlie girl culture," or the princessification of young girls. From beauty pageants with five-year-old contestants to the line of Disney Princesses with whom girls are enticed to form an affinity, the reader is hauled down the rabbit hole that is the odyssey of raising a young daughter in the 21st century. She charts how girlie girl culture gained momentum after 9/11, as troubled parents turned to cocooning their daughters in the safety implied by fairies and magic, this while pointing out how much the corporates have influenced what is necessary, what is cool, what is desirable. Between tours of toy stores and interviews with the minds behind the products that fill them, Ms. Orenstein explores all of the psychological, social and biological influences that have converged to encourage young girls to remain innocent, immature, princesses for far longer than girls of prior generations. The picture that emerges is both knotted and devoid of immediate solutions.
This is not a polemic. Ms. Orenstein does not rail against Disney for its marketing prowess, nor does she blame the toy stores for proliferating such products. She appears to be a realist, recognizing that parents and executives alike are only trying in their own ways to fulfil the desires of girls to be girls. And it is here that Ms. Orenstein is at the peak of her powers. For as much as she has investigated cultural and commercial trends, she understands that every one of these efforts is an attempt on behalf of people to understand what girls want and, through the exploitation of parental bank accounts, to give it to them. And so Ms. Orenstein shifts her focus to the latest research into girl psychology. This isn't just an exploration of nature versus nurture,, or how much of what girls want is innate (internal) or how much is welded onto them (external); this is an examination of gender, how it differentiates us, how it impacts us, how it drives us.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter cast a wide net, but the balance its author strikes between the commercial and the biological marks this as a success. Ms. Orenstein is notably short on solutions for the questions she's raised, but I prefer no solutions to the half-baked and sometimes dangerous theorizing typical of many investigations of parenting and its trends. More over, it's refreshing to read a piece involving commercialism and not have the author heap knee-jerk blame onto big corporations for every societal ill. Every human being has agency. And though it's regretable that corporations are able to market to children too young to have fully developed that agency, corporations are, in the end, only trying to sell an ideal product for maximum profit. This is too light to be scholarly, but heavy enough to have gravitas. (3/5 Stars)
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