The Pink and Narrow

The Pink and Narrow: Commentary on Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter

By Lisa Jancarik

A couple of years ago, I thought I might just be crazy, but the pink aisles at the local big-box toy store seemed, well, pinker than they had been when I was a kid. The toys shelved there were mostly princesses, fairies or superficial fashionistas like Polly Pocket dolls.

I’ve since read Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture and realized that all the pinkness wasn’t just my imagination, after all. Orenstein’s book embraces some of the feminist arguments we’ve heard before, and I won’t list them all here. However, her chapter entitled “Pinked” specifically discusses that suspicion I’d been privately nursing for some time about the pink aisles. In this chapter, Orenstein explored the offerings at an annual toy convention, and her lament about “the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests” shown in the toys she was seeing summarized my fears.

So what if we have more princess/fairy/fashionista themes in the toy aisles? Toys are the tools we give kids to encourage creative play and to explore the world. I worried that playing along the fairy tale themes to the exclusion of everything else would narrow the scope of my preschooler’s imagination and leave her unprepared for the biggest challenges she will one day face. If play is really practice for “real life”, then all the princess-fairy-butterfly-ballerina fluff was putting my kid behind a Pantone 419-colored eight ball (Pantone 419 is familiar as “Barbie pink”).

In another part of the book, Orenstein describes making an observation that further fueled my fears about that available “girl toys” were narrowing girls’ imaginations:

…I flipped through a stack of drawings each child in [Orenstein’s daughter] Daisy’s class had made to complete the sentence “If I were a [blank], I’d [blank] to the store.” (One might say, for instance, “If I were a ball, I’d bounce to the store.”) The boys had chosen to be a whole host of things: firemen, spiders, superheroes, puppies, tigers, birds, athletes, raisins. The girls fell into exactly four camps: princess, butterfly, fairy and ballerina (one especially enthusiastic girl claimed them all: a “princess, butterfly, fairy ballerina”).

Mt flesh crept the first time I read that. Pretty much everything in the pink toy aisles is a princess, a fairy or, less commonly, a ballerina or butterfly, and it seemed that girls’ imaginations were lining up exactly without deviation. Now, there are a few caveats to what Orenstein was seeing in this single class assignment. First, a kindergarten class is a microcosm, its own world with a culture different from that of the school down the road. Second, I’ve seen in my own daughter’s kindergarten class that the girls seem to influence one another more strongly than the boys influence the other males in the group, meaning that if one girl wants to be a ballerina, her BFFs are pretty likely to also want to be ballerinas, too. In the class next door, the girls may all want to be rock stars instead. Finally, we don’t hear about the numbers of boys and girls in Daisy’s class. If there are four or five girls and twelve or so boys, then her “four camps” for the girls actually shows some individuality. Therefore, there are some limits to how broadly applicable Orenstein’s observation might be, but her point about a narrowing of imagination for girls in this age group still made me recall my own play experiences as a child.

My Barbies were fashion designers, doctors, writers and famous scientists. The neighbor kid’s Barbies were fashion models, dental hygienists or flight attendants …Gloria Steinem might have rolled her eyes at some of our ambitions, but at least nobody had wings or wands. They worked, shopped, went on vacation, raised kids and even got trapped on a desert island once (the deck by the neighbors’ pool). The last time my kid had her Barbies out, they didn’t have jobs because they were princesses. They sat around arguing over who had the nicest dress until Mariposa (the butterfly fairy for the Barbie franchise) showed up and started granting wishes for ponies and ball gowns, etc. One could argue that playing a fictional creature like a fairy shows more imagination, not less, but her Mariposa and the princesses behaved exactly the way one might expect of spoiled princesses and magnanimous fairies.

Orenstein levies much of the blame for this disturbing lack of imagination on the way Disney, Mattel and others market products to girls. Marketing is meant to identify and satisfy consumer demands with the greatest potential for profit, and plainly, someone is making a hell of a lot of money on the pink crap. However, it’s not realistic to expect toy and entertainment companies to steer away from profitable enterprises no matter how much Orenstein shakes her finger at them.

Instead, I started a conscious effort to reduce the pinkness in my daughter’s toy box last summer. I’ve cut back on the Barbie and Polly Pocket in favor of Playmobil and Lego. Lego hasn’t been a big hit, but Playmobil’s zoo and Egyptian sets have been. Plus, her kindergarten class has many more boys than girls, and this fact is influencing her toy choices, too. For instance, she has gotten interested in Matchbox cars, choosing them over other kinds of prizes for work done at home. Plus, my mother-in-law, who raised boys, doesn’t know what to do with a Barbie doll, so she encourages gender-neutral toys when the two visit.

As I’ve watched my own daughter grow and her interests broaden, I’ve begun to wonder if possibly our concerns may have been exacerbated by our daughters’ developmental stages. Toddlers and preschoolers are more preoccupied with gender identity than are older kids. Her Daisy at the time of writing and my daughter when I read the book were just exiting that age. My daughter, due to turn six soon, still likes pink, sparkly stuff, but she doesn’t seem to want it to the exclusion of everything else. She happily plays with her dinosaurs and zoo animals, too. The princess dress-up clothes get pulled out less these days, and she hasn’t so much as looked at her Barbies since before Christmas. Consequently, I’m starting to relax about the pinkness in the toy aisles. I still think Peggy Orenstein has a point about typical girls’ toys and a narrowing of the imagination, but now I can see that my own little girl is growing past the stereotypes I used to worry about.