When I think of the magazines I read as a pre-teen, the word feminist doesn't exactly spring to mind.
From Twinkle to the more sophisticated Bunty, Mandy and Judy, publications aimed at girls were all about brave animals, Victorian orphans, plucky schoolgirls, ballet dancers, victims of horrendous bullying and terrifying spooky stories in which girls ended up stuck inside paintings or turned into hideous creatures. Oh, and in Twinkle and Bunty there were also cut-out dress-up dolls, which I was particularly fond of. My sister and I would cut out the ones from Twinkle and keep them in a box.
Entertaining? Yes, very much so. Disturbing? Frequently, especially those spooky stories (when I was 9 I got so freaked out by a story in a Diana annual about evil garden gnomes I actually threw the annual in the bin and couldn't relax until bin day arrived and the terrifying tale was taken away forever. I still don't like gnomes). But feminist? Well, not when you remember how many of the stories involved girls suffering terribly and sacrificing their own well being for the sake of others.
But the editor of Girl Talk, which launched 19 years ago and which is now the UK's longest running magazine for seven-to-twelve year olds, has decided that the time has come to offer little girls an actively feminist view of the world.
(Images courtesy of Girl Talk / Twitter)This week saw the release of the magazine's 500th issue, and editor Bea Appleby has used the celebration as an opportunity to push the magazine in a new direction. Worried by what they saw as the increased sexualisation of pop culture, and depressed by polls which showed younger girls valuing being "pretty" above all else, the Girl Talk team have decided to make a concerted effort to promote feminist ideals and also to make girls aware of gender issues. Of course, as Appleby wrote,
Introducing feminist ideas to pre-teens, whilst keeping things commercially viable is tricky. We’re making small steps – encouraging them to ask questions like: ‘Why isn’t women’s football on TV?’ and ‘Are items aimed at girls too pink?’ We recently ran profiles on racing driver Susie Wolff and activist Malala Yousafzai. We aren’t being radical, but we are promoting feminist values – equality, sisterhood and empowerment.
And in every issue we print our Girl Talk promise:
• I will love myself the way I am
• By working hard I know I can achieve great things
• I will accept others for who they are
• I will have confidence to stand up for my friends and other girls
• I believe girls are equal to boys
I think this is really cool - it's never to early to encourage girls to respect themselves, work hard, question gender stereotypes and to stand up for other girls.
Bunty, Mandy, Judy (Images courtesy of Vintage Comics, Comic Vine, Girls Comics of Yesterday)Advertised
So does it compare with the pre-teen mags I grew up reading in the '80s? In those comics, girls were more likely to pick on each other than show solidarity.
My favourite villain was the brilliantly named Sarah-Jane Cheetwell from Judy. Her victim was a girl called Ann, whose father worked for S.J.’s father. When Ann arrived as a scholarship girl at the boarding school where the sneaky, constantly sneering S.J. was inexplicably head girl, S.J. began blackmailing her to do her bidding, saying that Ann’s father would lose his job if his daughter defied the all-powerful S.J. Like all victims of bullying in comics, Ann was too scared to tell anyone because no one would believe her, which is a godawful message to send to kids.
When girls in comics weren't being tormented by bullies or wicked relatives, they were often suffering pointlessly, like Mandy's Hard Hearted Harriet, a Victorian orphan who discovered she was dying and so tried to make her ten million younger siblings hate her, so that they wouldn’t mind so much when she died. The thought that maybe it might be more traumatic in the long run for the kids to be cruelly rejected by their beloved sister didn’t seem to cross her mind. Every week another one of her giant clan would run away to live with a nice caring family and Harriet would sit there crying even though she could have easily lived out her days surrounded by loving siblings.
The joyful stories of S.J. and Miss Angel (Images courtesy of Books Monthly, Girls Comics of Yesterday)But even that wasn't as illogical as the terminally ill Miss Angel, who faked her own death to save her rich parents the sorrow of watching her die slowly, and then went off to run an orphanage in a stable. Even as a kid I knew it would have made more sense to NOT fake her death and help the orphans with her parents' fortune. And let's not even mention the scary stories, in which girls would be punished for minor character flaws (being late, being a bit rude to a stranger) with hideous supernatural torments, like being stuck underground on a ghostly train forever.
Last year I wrote a piece about growing up with girls comics for a book called If I Was A Child Again which was published to raise funds for Barnardo's. In it, I pointed out that despite all the terrible things that happened to girls in the likes of Mandy and Judy, and how they presented a vision of the world in which girls were important. Sure, they suffered. But they were also often brave and determined and creative, and they were always the focus of the story.
Twinkle Annual 1987 and the beloved Nurse Nancy (Images courtesy of Comicvine, Uk Comics)In a world where female characters are still sidelined (a study showed that in the 100 highest-grossing movies at the U.S. box office in 2012, only 28.4% of speaking characters were female, and I can’t imagine things were hugely better when I was a kid), Mandy, Judy, Bunty and their ilk showed that girls could be the centre of the fictional universe. Even if that universe was a little bit warped.
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So what do you think of Girl Talk's feminist stance? Can it make a difference? And what comics and mags did you read before the likes of Just Seventeen and Sugar took over?
