Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were Misled by Their Favorite Books

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Summary: Bright, helpful insights
Review: Everyone who is the parent of a girl or who was once a girl herself--or who simply wishes girls well--can gain insights from this intelligent book. Author Deborah O'Keefe is a fine role model for little girls who want to grow into accomplishment. She provides readers with an entertaining, solid, and useful survey of books written for girls: She explores the ways that these books teach girls how to behave and think. In the past, the subtle (and not so subtle) messages of books for girls usually tried to persuade little girls to grow into compliant women who accepted second-class citizenship. The good news is that more recent books often provide girls with role models who encourage them to grow up to be fully realized, first-class citizens. Another benefit of this book is that it can sharpen our awareness of the hidden messages in any book we read and of the impact books have on who we are.

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Summary: Looking in a Mirror
Review: GOOD GIRL MESSAGES will delight, teach, and unsettle women who grew up reading the classic stories their mothers and grandmothers read as girls. Revisiting passages from these old favorites awakens warm memories not only of the stories but of a time when the smell of baking cookies made from scratch filled the house--O'Keefe has read lovingly as well as widely and objectively. As she talks about her reading of these books and how they affected her, many of us will experience small shocks of recognition as we remember similar responses. This author opens our eyes, not only to these treasured stories but to ourselves and our growing up. What she says about Jo in LITTLE WOMEN may be disturbing because it is well observed and persuasive. Tomboy Jo, whom I wanted to be, is a more complicated character than I knew, one more like me than I'd like to admit. Seeing my heroine in ways I couldn't when I was younger is like turning from my family photo album to confronting my face in the mirror: what I see sets me thinking about the girl I was and the woman I have become. GOOD GIRL MESSAGES is not a dry academic analysis but an engaging revisiting of the past that helped shape us when we had less awareness of all the unvoiced messages communicated by those around us and in the books we loved. Women with curiosity and the courage to look unsentimentally at their childhood reading will find this book fascinating, enlightening, and enjoyable.

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Summary: Elizabeth, Jane and Jo are still models for us all
Review: This book was a boring rehash of half-baked so-called feminist literary perspective, which insults great women writers of the past and discourages anything like dissent in women writers today. If Deborah O'Keefe lives to be 100, she will never be worth the dust on Jane Austin's shoes or the frill on Charlotte Bronte's petticoat or the ink on Lousia Alcott's apron. Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre and Jo March are smart, strong, and morally good. I suspect it is the last of these qualities that upsets Ms. O'Keefe. Why is it that some people find the idea of being "good" so threatening? For most of us, being good is a virtue to be admired in both girls and boys. As for reading, check out the article by Gina Dalfong "Where Has Jane Eyre Gone?" in the June 25 Weekly Standard. By the way, I was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine but dropped it because the fiction was so dreadful...