Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tails: Preschool and Gender

by Bronwyn Davies

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar based in Sydney, Australia. She is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

The distinctive features of her work are her development of innovative social science research methodologies and their relation to the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophies. Her research explores the ethico-onto-epistemological relations through which particular social worlds are constituted. She is best known for her work on gender, for her development of the methodology of collective biography, and her writing on feminism and poststructuralist theory.

Reviews

[Rachel]

In this book, Bronwyn Davies records preschool-aged children interacting with one another. She reads them several "feminist" books of the late 1980s, like The Paper Bag Princess and asks about their reactions to it. My main takeaways were that preschool children are often confused by feminist stories. They don't change their conceptions of gender based on a story that doesn't make sense to them. Their gendered play is shaped by their peers and when preschoolers enact play belonging to the opposite gender, they are often rejected or ignored (at least during the time Davies did her study).

I was a bit disturbed by Davies's scientific method, or rather, lack thereof. She asked many leading questions, and she herself participated in the children's play at times. Maybe it's because I don't understand qualitative research, but I don't think her study was very consistent. At the same time, I believe her insights and ideas are valuable, but I'm worried that since she was interested in gender, that she made it seem like more of an all-encompassing factor in a preschooler's conception of self than it actually is. I would be interested to read more contemporary research on the subject.

I started reading this book because of my interest in how books can change our ideas, but it didn't provide suggestions about if that's possible. I think discussion about themes a book brings up might be just as important or even more important than a book's subject matter.

[Stef Rozitis]

This book is theoretically fantastic (explaining Kristeva simply yet well). Some observations about children and how they behave are out of date which is fantastic given that this book came out in 1989 and I daresay helped change some of the narrative (so some of what she recommends is "normal" now).

I felt deeply uncomfortable with some of her interactions with children and I need to think more about this, whether at times she was helping valorise behaviours and ideas she was observing. The analysis seemed excellent to me and especially the stuff about living with complexity and contradiction in ones gender-performance.

More work needs to be done on all these issues to find a way forward again as there's been a push-back toward letting boys be dominant and even violent as if that is "natural".

[Lisa]

gender development fascinates me and should cause pause for anyone involved with the very public identification and definition of male and female. a student once commented on my sport watch by saying, "that looks like a boys watch". my reply, "it's only a boy's watch if a boy is wearing it". [UPDATE 1.1.12: having had this watch about 6 years now big and bold "boyfriend" is in style.]

[Nojood Alsudairi]

Both boys and girls hated "The Paper Bag Princess"! What are the messages we are sending to our children through tales like Cinderella and Sleeping beauty?