Cinderella Ate My Daughter (3 page)

“What about Queen Esther?” asked Julie, the mother of one of Daisy’s classmates, when I questioned the picture’s subtext. “She saved the Jewish people. Shouldn’t girls try to be like her?”

Julie, a forty-five-year-old owner of a Web consulting company, was among several mothers I had asked to join me after drop-off for a chat about princess culture. Each one had a preschool-aged daughter obsessed with Disney royalty. They also knew I had my qualms about the subject, which they did not necessarily share. I wanted to know, from a mother’s perspective, why they allowed—in some cases even encouraged—their girls to play princess. Did they think it was innocuous? Beneficial? Worrisome? Healthy?

“I think feminism erred in the 1960s by negating femininity,” announced Mara, a thirty-six-year-old education consultant who was currently home with her kids. Her voice sounded tight, almost defiant. “That was a mistake. I want my daughter to have a strong identity as a girl, as a woman, as a
female
. And being pretty in our culture is very important. I don’t want her to ever doubt that she’s pretty. So if she wants to wear a princess dress and explore that side of herself, I don’t want to stand in the way.”

She folded her arms and collapsed back on her chair, as if she had said her piece. But before I could respond, she cocked her head and added, “On the other hand, I also have a son, and we really encourage his intelligence. I worry about that. A reward for her is ‘You look so pretty, you look so beautiful.’ People tell her that all the time, and we do, too. We tell
him
, ‘You’re so smart.’ ”

Dana, a thirty-eight-year-old stay-at-home mom, who had been watching Mara with a slightly awestruck expression, spoke up. “For me it’s a matter of practicality,” she said. “Having those Disney Princess outfits around the house is really helpful for the endless playdates. And Eleanor loves to swim, so she identifies with Ariel.”

I began to ask Dana how she felt about the rest of the
Little Mermaid
story, but she cut me off. “Oh, I don’t let the actual
story
in the house,” she said. “Just the
costumes
. Eleanor doesn’t know the stories.”

That turned out to be Mara’s policy, too. The issue to her was not princesses, it was plotlines. “Those stories are horrible,” she said, making a face. “Every single one is the same: it’s about romance, love, and being rescued by the prince. I
will
protect my daughter from that.”

Thinking back on my own girl’s inexplicable acquaintance with the Snow White story, I had to wonder whether that was possible. I’d believed I could keep out the tales
and
the toys but had failed on both counts. What were the odds, then, that you could permit one without the other? I had spent a lot of time with Dana’s daughter and already knew she could give a full recitation of Ariel’s story. Dana shrugged. “Well, yeah, she hears it from her friends,” she admitted. “But at least not at home.”

What gave those mothers pause, then, was the fantasy the stories promoted that a man would take care of you. Yet the tales also provide the characters with some context, a narrative arc. Cinderella may ride off with the prince, but before that, she spends much of her time dressed in tatters, offering children object lessons about kindness, forbearance, and humility. Without that backstory, what was left? What did they imagine a storyless “princess” represented to the girls?

That’s when Julie piped up. “I think it’s all about being looked at,” she said, “being admired. And about special treatment.” She rolled her eyes. “Receiving it, not giving it.”

“And it’s
fun
,” Dana pointed out.

Hell, yeah, it’s fun. Who doesn’t love nail polish with flower appliqués? Who doesn’t like to play dress-up now and again, swoosh about in silk and velvet? Daisy once whispered conspiratorially to me, “Mom, did you know that girls can choose all kinds of things to wear, but boys can only wear pants?” There it was: dressing up fancy, at least for now, was something she felt she
got
to do, not something she
had
to do. It was a source of power and privilege, much like her game of Snow White in which the action revolved around and was controlled by her.

Whereas boys… even here in Berkeley, a friend’s seven-year-old son was teased so ruthlessly about his new, beloved pink bike that within a week he refused to ride it. It is quite possible that boys, too, would wear sequins if only they could. Isabelle Cherney, a professor of psychology at Creighton University, found that nearly half of boys aged five to thirteen, when ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, chose “girls’ ” toys as frequently as “boys’ ”—provided they believed nobody would find out. Particularly, their fathers: boys as young as four said their daddies would think it was “bad” if they played with “girls’ ” toys, even something as innocuous as miniature dishes. Boys were also more likely to sort playthings based on how they perceived gender roles (such as “Dad uses tools, so hammers are for boys”), whereas girls figured that if they themselves enjoyed a toy—
any
toy—it was, ipso facto, for girls. So it seems that, even as they have loosened up on their daughters, dads continue to vigorously police masculinity in their sons. I believe it: consider the progressive pal of mine who proudly showed off the Hot Wheels set he had bought for his girl but balked when his boy begged for a tutu. Who’s to say, then, which sex has greater freedom?

I am almost willing to buy that argument: that boys are the ones who are more limited; that little girls
need
to feel beautiful; that being on display, being admired for how they look, is critical to their developing femininity and fragile self-esteem; that princess sets their imaginations soaring; that its popularity is evidence that we’ve moved past 1970s feminist rigidity. Except that, before meeting with the preschool moms, I had flipped through a stack of drawings each child in 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, fairy, butterfly, and ballerina (one especially enthusiastic girl claimed them all: a “princess, butterfly, fairy ballerina”). How, precisely, does that, as Disney’s Andy Mooney suggested, expand their horizons? The boys seemed to be exploring the world; the girls were exploring femininity. What they “got” to do may have been uniquely theirs, but it was awfully circumscribed. “Yeah, I was surprised,” the teacher admitted when I asked about it. “The girls had so little range in their ideas. We tried to encourage them to choose other things, but they wouldn’t.”

Of course, girls are not buying the 24/7 princess culture all on their own. So the question is not only why
they
like it (which is fairly obvious) but what it offers their parents. Julie may have been onto something on that front: princesses are, by definition, special, elevated creatures. And don’t we all feel our girls are extraordinary, unique, and beautiful? Don’t we want them to share that belief for as long as possible, to think that—just by their existence, by birthright—they are the chosen ones? Wouldn’t we like their lives to be forever charmed, infused with magic and sparkle? I know I want that for my daughter.

Or do I? Among other things, princesses tend to be rather isolated in their singularity. Navigating the new world of friendships is what preschool is all about, yet the DPs, you will recall, won’t even
look
at one another. Daisy had only one fight with her best friend during their three years of preschool—a conflict so devastating that, at pickup time, I found the other girl sobbing in the hallway, barely able to breathe. The source of their disagreement? My darling daughter had insisted that there could be only
one
Cinderella in their games—only
one
girl who reigned supreme—and it was she. Several hours and a small tantrum later, she apologized to the girl, saying that from now on there could be
two
Cinderellas. But the truth was, Daisy had gotten it right the first time: there
is
only one princess in the Disney tales, one girl who gets to be exalted. Princesses may confide in a sympathetic mouse or teacup, but, at least among the best-known stories, they do not have girlfriends. God forbid Snow White should give Sleeping Beauty a little support.

Let’s review: princesses avoid female bonding. Their goals are to be saved by a prince, get married (among the DP picture books at Barnes & Noble:
My Perfect Wedding
and
Happily Ever After Stories
) and be taken care of for the rest of their lives. Their value derives largely from their appearance. They are rabid materialists. They
might
affect your daughter’s interest in math. And yet… parents cannot resist them. Princesses seem to have tapped into our unspoken, nonrational wishes. They may also assuage our fears: Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty may be sources of comfort, of stability in a rapidly changing world. Our daughters will shortly be tweeting and Facebooking and doing things that have yet to be invented, things that are beyond our ken. Princesses are uncomplicated, classic, something solid that we can understand and share with them, even if they are a bit problematic. They provide a way to play with our girls that is similar to how we played, a common language of childhood fun. That certainly fits into what Disney found in a survey of preschool girls’ mothers: rather than “beautiful,” the women more strongly associate princesses with “creating fantasy,” “inspiring,” “compassionate.”

And “safe.” That one piqued my interest. By “safe,” I would wager that they mean that being a Princess fends off premature sexualization, or what parents often refer to as the pressure “to grow up too soon.” There is that undeniable sweetness, that poignancy of seeing girls clomp off to the “ball” in their incongruous heels and gowns. They are so gleeful, so guileless, so delightfully delighted. The historian Gary Cross, who writes extensively on childhood and consumption, calls such parental response “wondrous innocence.” Children’s wide-eyed excitement over the products we buy them pierces through our own boredom as consumers and as adults, reconnecting us to our childhoods: it makes us
feel
again. The problem is that our very dependence on our children’s joy erodes it: over time, they become as jaded as we are by new purchases—perhaps more so. They rebel against the “cuteness” in which we’ve indulged them—and, if we’re honest, imposed upon them—by taking on the studied irony and indifferent affect of “cool.”

Though both boys and girls engage in that cute-to-cool trajectory, for girls specifically, being “cool” means looking hot. Given that, then, there may indeed be, or at least
could
be, a link between princess diadems and Lindsay Lohan’s panties (or lack thereof ). But in the short term, when you’re watching your preschooler earnestly waving her wand, it sure doesn’t feel that way. To the contrary: princess play feels like proof of our daughters’ innocence, protection against the sexualization it may actually be courting. It reassures us that, despite the pressure to be precocious, little girls are still—and ever will be—little girls. And that knowledge restores our faith not only in wonder but, quite possibly, in goodness itself. Recall that the current princess craze took off right around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and continued its rise through the recession: maybe, as another cultural historian suggested to me, the desire to encourage our girls’ imperial fantasies is, at least in part, a reaction to a newly unstable world. We
need
their innocence not only for consumerist but for
spiritual
redemption.

Sound far-fetched? This is not the first time princess obsession has cropped up during a time of societal crisis. The original European fairy tales rose from a medieval culture that faced all manner of economic and social upheaval. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book
A Little Princess
was published in 1905, a time of rapid urbanization, immigration, and spiraling poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. Little Shirley may actually be the ultimate example of girlish innocence conferring adult salvation (with the comic pages’
Little Orphan Annie
a close second). A mere six years old when she starred in her first film, with her irrepressible, childlike optimism she gave Americans hope during a desperate era: President Franklin Roosevelt even reportedly proclaimed, “As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” Imagine! Her cinematic formula—which typically included at least one dead parent so adults in the audience could project themselves into that vacant role—put her at the top of the box office for three years running, beating out Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and Gary Cooper. She remains the most popular child star of all time. She also became the first celebrity aggressively marketed to little girls. During the height of her fame, there were Shirley Temple songbooks, handkerchiefs, jewelry, handbags, sewing cards, coloring books, soap, mugs, dresses, hair bows, records—anything that could carry her image did, and the appetite for her seemed endless. Like the Disney Princesses, the first Shirley Temple doll was released independently of a movie—in time for Christmas 1934. Within a year, it accounted for a third of all doll sales. Another doll, released to coincide with both a film and Shirley’s eighth birthday, was, according to the company that manufactured it, “the biggest non-Christmas toy event in history.” Though I doubt parents in that era were (consciously or not) trying to prolong girls’ innocence through those dolls, they were surely celebrating it—perhaps, after a fashion, even feeding off it: if Shirley herself gave the country’s morale a boost during hard times, perhaps her likeness, cradled in the arms of a beaming daughter, gave heart to individual families.