The So-Called Sneaky Feminist Agenda Finds its Way onto YA Bookshelves

As the landscape of young adult (YA) fiction continues to change in the 21^st century – and the marketcontinues to thrive – attention to the role this body of literature has on gender formation has never been higher. While it’s still significant that it was the Harry Potter series and not the Hermione Granger series, and that even in the 21^st century Rowling, like many female authors before her, chose to write under initials in order to mask her gender (thus appealing to her target audience of boys), the worlds of YA fiction are much more female-friendly than they once were. Of course, not everyone is happy about that.

Armed with old myths about gendered reading practices and skewed statistics, some have bemoaned the fact that women now ‘dominate’ the YA scene, resulting in alarmist pieces like Sarah Mesle’s article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ‘YA Fiction and the End of Men,’ and Robert Lipsyte’s New York Times article, ‘Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?’ In his article, Lipsyte complained that ‘boys’ aversion to reading’ was increasing and that males ‘were being treated as a sideshow’ in the literary market. He complained that YA authors were catering to a target audience of girls, and that this existing bias toward female-orientated books was compounded by the fact that such ‘novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominantly female characters.’ Punctuating his prose with this other apparently horrific f-word, Lipyste reflects nostalgically on the yesteryears of the publishing industry, noting that ‘children’s literature didn’t always bear this overwhelmingly female imprint.’ Apparently progress toward gender equality can be a painful pill for some to swallow.

Of course, Lipyste’s argument is almost laughable and ignores the numerous ways in which the literary world is still stacked in favor of men. For example, the vast majority of books taught in the public school system are written by men. And his tirade simply fuels a myth that ultimately serves as ‘a self-fulfillingprophecy’: the notion that boys will only read books focused on male characters. As Alison Flood notes in a piece for The Guardian, this tired cliché that teenage girls can identify with narratives about boys while teenage boys cannot (or will not) identify with narratives about girls, has been the problematic rationale Hollywood has been using for years to excuse its ‘systematic exclusion of female characters from cinema narratives.’

Lipsyte and others aren’t completely wrong in noting a shift within the YA publishing market, but the scale of that shift is obscured behind hyperbolic rhetoric. For example, The Atlantic ran a piece titled ‘Why Do Female Authors DominateYoung-Adult Fiction’ after NPR released a reader poll for the top teen novels in which 63% of the titles chosen as finalists were penned by women. Meghan Lewit concluded: ‘If the results of the NPR poll are a reflection of the reading populace, the YA world is a place of relative harmony compared to the battle of the sexes being waged in adult fiction,’suggesting that female YA authors are not hitting the ‘literary glass ceiling’plaguing the rest of the market.

But the problem with the conversation surrounding this shift toward more female presence in the young adult literary realm is that it is grounded in shock, awe, and dismay.

It's interesting how a slight predominance of female authors on a list immediately makes people think ‘female dominance.’ If the numbers were reversed, we would perhaps say appreciatively that the list was close to being gender balanced. We expect to find male dominance everywhere – anything else is an unusual occurrence, and as such it stands out. And this affects how we view the world far more than we realise.

Elizabeth Vail, author of ‘The Legacy of Katniss, or Why WeShould Stop ‘Protecting’ Manhood and Teach Boys to Embrace the Heroine,’ took her fellow journalists to task for calling the presence of a female protagonist one of the newest ‘tropes’ to hit YA fiction. She argued, the ‘last time I checked, half the population on earth is female. So saying ‘having a female protagonist’ is a trope is on par with saying ‘having a human protagonist’ is a trope, or ‘having a protagonist who inhales oxygen and ingests organic matter to live’ is a trope.

Further, the statistics being used to make proclamations about women’s supposed takeover of the genre are slightly misleading. A study of the award winning YA books since 2000 did reveal that women penned slightly more of those texts than men (56 per cent versus 42 per cent, with the remaining 2% per cent being co-authored by a male-female writing team), but even within those critically acclaimed texts, 49 per cent of the protagonists were male, while only 36 per cent were female. And even if we were to focus on authorship alone, as the researchers note, we can hardly call a figure like 56 per cent ‘female dominance.’

And while the data seemingly paints a positive picture concerning gender representation in youth literature, it doesn’t actually paint a very comprehensive picture. Other studies have shown that when youth literature is analyze more broadly, this slight female edge – if it can truly be called that – quickly dissipates. A study of 2014 newreleases found that as children’s ages decrease, so does the presence of female characters. While 65 per cent of the literature aimed for 12-18 year olds had female protagonists, in texts marketed to 9-12 year olds, this figure drops to 36 per cent. Studies of children’s literature present an even bleaker picture. A study of nearly 6,000 children’s books published between 1990 and 2000 revealed that ‘males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters.’ The gender imbalance even extends into texts in which the characters are animals, with male animals starring in 23 per cent of the books per year while their female animal counterparts are at the center of only 7.5 per cent of the annual releases.

Regardless of these statistics, perception can be a powerful thing. And since many of the most popular YA texts of the past decade have featured female protagonists, the idea that women are ruling this literary scene may linger on for some time. And while it’s fine to praise characters like The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, the many accolades she has received for being a strong female character, positive role model, or feminist heroine often eclipse the fact that such exemplar female characters have existed in the genre for well over a century. Before the likes of Hermione and Katniss there were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1932), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling (1970), Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat (1989), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (2013), and countless others celebrated female characters.

So why attend to this literary legacy – to the strong young women tucked into the pages of young adult novels? It’s just escapist fiction meant for teens, and it can’t possibly wield that much cultural influence if it’s only reaching a subset of a specific age demographic, right? Wrong. Part of the reason YA literature is getting all this attention is exactly because it is not just being read by tweens and teens. Adults are rapidly consuming these texts also. Marketing research indicates that approximately 55 per cent of the people who buy literature designated for 12 to 17 year olds are adults and 28 per cent of these purchasers are buying them for their own reading pleasure. Similar to the panic caused by the slight shift from male to female lead characters, the increasing number of adults reading YA texts has caused critics to make apocalyptic predictions about the death of literacy. In an article for The Los Angeles Times, Susan Carpenter notes: ‘It used to be that the only adults who read young adult literature were those who had a vested interest – teachers or librarians or parents who either needed or wanted to keep an eye on developing readers’ tastes. But increasingly, adults are reading YA books with no ulterior motives.’

This apparently is bad news because in 2014 various publications ran articles shaming adult readers for their juvenile reading practices. Writing for Slate, Ruth Graham’s article titled ‘Against YA’ ran with the subheading: ‘Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.’ A month later, Vanity Fair featured the scathing commentary of The New Yorker’s literary critic, James Wood, who criticized Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning novel, The Goldfinch – a novel focused on a 13 year-old boy who survives a terrorist attack – calling it ‘further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.’ The hits kept on coming with critics from the New York Times, The Daily Review, and The New York Review of Books ‘decrying the demise of adulthood’ and urging the adult readers of YA fiction to ‘grow up.’ Unsurprisingly, these criticisms were matched with a wave of pieces defending the genre and adult consumers’ affection for it. So, the moral of the story: everyone’s reading YA literature, or talking about those who are reading YA literature, so the genre’s reach is not to be underestimated.  Therefore, it’s not surprising that the apparent literary gains of female authors and the visibility of female characters is getting such attention.  Because we wouldn’t want to stray too far away from the all-boys-club of the literary world, right?

Excerpted from Ames & Burcon's How Pop Culture Shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life:  From Toddlers-in-Tiaras to Cougars-on-the-Prowl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.