Women in Children’s Writing

Today, nearly everyone has heard of the Brontë sisters and most can name at least one Brontë book. (My personal favorite is Jane Eyre.) But when these women published their famous works, they did it under masculine names (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell). They were hardly the only female authors to do so. Most of us are well familiar with the name George Eliot, but even today the author’s real name, Ann Evans, is a bit less known. These women were writing in a male-dominated field. It was difficult for women to be published at all, and very hard for women to be taken seriously as authors.  

But, of course, that was a long time ago. Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and Ann Evans’ Middlemarch was published in 1872. That was long before anyone of us were born. We have no experience with that kind of thinking, right? Well, keep in mind that one of the most well-known British mystery novelists is P.D. James, and she died in 2014. She never pretended she wasn’t a woman, but she didn’t have a pen name that advertised it either. The fear that men and boys tended to avoid books written by women remained for a long time, and some writers still worry about it.

Children’s Writing Was Different, Sort of 

Among children’s writers, being a woman and a writer seemed acceptable a bit earlier, but then children’s writing was considered less serious writing overall, and still is, to a certain degree. And yet, there have been some hurdles to jump. For example, the highest award in children’s literature, the Newbery Award had been handed out for over a decade before the first woman received one (Rachel Field for Hitty, Her First Hundred Years), though that win opened the flood gates and the next nine Newbery Awards went to women. 

I began my writing career in the early 1980s, and I have seen some big changes in some of the thinking within publishing in those years. When I began writing for children, I still regularly heard the truism that girls would read any good book, but boys would absolutely not read “girlie” books and thus wouldn’t pick up a book written by a woman. As a result, some women writers dealt with that by using their initials to make their “girlie” names less obvious. Sometimes women did this because they believed the generally accepted rule, and sometimes they did it after been gently—or boldly—encouraged by agents, publishers, or writing friends. This was especially true if you wrote action-adventure or mystery books that would normally have a strong readership potential among boys.  

Award Winners Everywhere 

Over time women writers kept writing amazing books, and kids kept discovering them. And soon publishing realized that kids love good, exciting books no matter who wrote them. Today, many women win prestigious prizes for writing, in a variety of genre and for every age. For recent examples, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Jayne Anne Phillips for Night Watch, Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for Orbital, Amanda Peters won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Berry Pickers, and Claire Jiménez won the Pen/Faulkner Award for What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez. Even in a genre that resisted acceptance of women writers for many years such as science fiction, women are showing they can compete with their depth of storytelling and understanding of the world. Thus, the Hugo Award went to Emily Tesh for Some Desperate Glory. And the finalist list for the Hugos was full of excellent women science fiction and fantasy writers. 

Women Are Meeting the Challenge 

Given that, it’s no wonder women are doing well in children’s writing, considering that area of publishing was one of the first open to women writers. Children’s publishers are increasingly working to put out lists that more realistically meet the needs of children and reflect the world in which we live. That means that young readers will see more main characters who look like them, and who live experiences they can relate to. When I was a child, I read the Dick and Jane readers—and was charmed by the illustrations—but I couldn’t miss that all the exciting action went to Dick, who even explained to Jane that only boys could do athletic things. And the people around me sometimes reflected those same views. Little boys in the classroom with me quoted Dick’s lines when excluding girls from play. Books were making a difference and the books needed to change. So, they did.  

The days of books full of gender stereotypes have mostly subsided as the number of women writers speaking freely have grown. As women writers are stepping up at every level of writing, so are female characters of all ages showing the vast array of options available for children and adults regardless of gender. Things aren’t perfect. Society doesn’t turn on a dime. But it has changed so much from the days when Ann Evans decided she needed to be George Eliot so her work, her creativity, and her insights could make it onto a page and out into the world.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to Virginia Woolf and her writing on the theme of society’s underinvestment in women, on the undervaluing of what women could do, and the part those societal sentiments played in outcomes for smart, creative women. Woolf said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In other words, women needed room to flourish, room that wasn’t always available. Today we make room for women and their lived experience, their creativity, and their skill. Not perfectly. But when we write, the author chooses whether to use a pen name not based on fear of rejection for being a woman, and that alone is huge. Society and children benefit from the ways we have grown and will grow into seeing people as people with unique vision, lived experience, and stories to share. 

Related Articles for Children’s Writing

• The First 3 Questions About Writing a Children’s Book
• Writing Children’s Magazine Fiction
• Why Try Writing for Children’s Magazines?