Review - Cinderella Ate My Daughter

So I'm not sure if it's because I'm out of school, or because I'm around them now all the time, or some combination of the two... but my interest in reading non-fiction books is growing. Especially when they're about something having to do with Girls'/Women's studies. So when I heard about journalist Peggy Orenstein's new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, I was super excited and requested it right away. So while I'm not a mom, who I think Orenstein was targeting with this book, I was still interested because I can relate to girlie-girl culture. A lot of what Orenstein talks about started developing when we were around middle school age, such as the rise of the Disney Princess phenomenon.

Orenstein did a fantastic job with this book, of explaining girlie-girl culture and looking at the things that influence how girls grow up in today's world in both a serious and humorous way. The meat of it discusses how the sexualization of girlhood teaches girls that how they

look is more important than who they are as a person. Which, many of us growing up at the time we did, can relate to. And even if you can't personally relate to it, you've heard it covered in the media at some point.

I won't go into detail on everything that Orenstein covered because I could go on forever, so instead I'll give you a list of a few tidbits that I found especially interesting:

• The term "tween" was coined in the mid-1980s as a "marketing contrivance," but "within ten years, it was considered a full-blown psychological, physical, and emotional phase, abetted, in no small part, by the classic marketing bible What Kids Buy and Why.
• "Children weren't color-coded at all until the early twentieth century"... "When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity."
• "In the late nineteenth century, industrialization shifted to source of the family income outside the home. Without the need for free labor, middle-class couples no longer felt compelled to have more than one child [...] A few years later, however, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was obsessed with the waning birth rates among white Anglo-Saxon women, began waging a campaign against 'race suicide.' [...] Baby dolls were seen as a way to revive the flagging maternal instinct of white girls, to remind them of their patriotic duty to conceive; within a few years dolls were ubiquitous."

Also, I wanted to make sure to mention the following: "Around the time the Spice Girls broke, something called 'girlie feminism' was also on the rise. [...] It held that women's traditional roles and skills (whether scrubbing floors, nurturing relationships, or knitting) had intrinsic value; that sexual equality need not require gender neutrality; that painting your nails and wearing a PORN STAR t-shirt were, if not radical acts, at least a woman's right, a viable form of self expression and personal pleasure."

For those of you that know me, you may know that this is the form of feminism that I believe in. I do love clothes, makeup, dressing up, reading bridal and fashion magazines, Disney princesses, etc., but that doesn't make me any less of a feminist. It's your right as a woman (if you are in fact, female and reading this) to do those girly things, to want social and professional equality, but to at the same time embrace your femininity.

I loved this book. I thought it was fantastic, even if I wasn't the target audience. I definitely recommend that if you have any interest in girlie-girl culture, if you have a daughter or plan/hope to one day, or you're just woman wanting to understand the things that may have shaped you growing up, that you read Cinderella Ate My Daughter. I give it 5 (out of 5) stars!