I'm a day late, but then so was the parcel.
Women and books - what more could you want?
I love this series. We are trying to raise a daughter that is unafraid to persue whatever path she wants, and these books do help, they're also really pretty which helps. My neice bought Sally the Amelia Earhart one for Christmas and she loves having it as the final book for story time. She also likes looking at the pictures of some of the other books in the series at the end and keeps asking for the Maya Angelou one. A three year old asking for Maya Angelou is a pretty cool thing, even if she is entirely unaware of what any of it means.
It was actually my husband who ordered this - and it was so nice to read it to her, espcially after I'd read her a number of fairy tales this morning where the marks of the patriarchy were quite painfully obvious. The idea of princesses being supreme is pretty fixed in her mind, though not to the exclusion of all else, she loves her Owlette outfit better than her Elsa one, but especially with books, she knows princesses are important. argh. She also wants all her clothes to be pink. Princesses when they're running around solving their own problems are one thing, but I don't know why a small children's addition of Fairy Tales would have the Little Mermaid dancing away even though it feels like being dancing on knives to try and make a prince fall in love with her. If I was teaching this stuff to my 6th form class, we'd be reading Angela Carter and I'd be explaining the importance of language choices and subverting the male gaze or partiarchal narrative - but I don't really know how to do this with a three year old aside from throwing this book away and ordering her the Maya Angelou book, and the Coco Chanel one, and the Frida Kahlo, and the Jane Austen and Agatha Christie, and the Ella Fitzgerald one and Marie Curie - perhaps just the whole bloody lot?