THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION

TO PICTUREBOOKS

Edited by
Bettina Kilmmerling-Meibauer

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Title:The Routledge companion to picturebooks / edited by Bettina Keummerling-Meibauer.
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 12
GENDER IN PICTUREBOOKS
Karen Coats

The scholarly study of gender in picturebooks did not begin with literary critics. In fact, most
formalist studies of picturebooks that teach literary critics how to read the complex interactions
between words and images in picturebooks, including those by William Moebius (1986), David
Lewis (2001), and Clare Painter,J.R. Martin, and Len Unsworth (2013), among others, give almost
no attention to the portrayals of gender. While Per ry Nodelman (1988) devotes a few pages to the
differential postures of the naked child in light of artistic conventions of the female and male nude
(121-124), and Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2001) make some interesting claims that I will
discuss in what follows, most of the early studies of gender in picturebooks have been undertaken by
feminist sociologists working to understand the persistence of sex-role stereotypes. This makes sense,
given that gender criticism belongs more to cultural studies than formalist metholodogies. However,
by invoking the insights of cognitive psychologists that "perception occurs in the brain rather than in
the eye" (Nodelman 1988: 8) and reminding us that we have "to learn to see" images in picturebooks
(Williams 1961: 18), even theorists interested primarily in form have implicitly suggested the need
for an interdisciplinary understanding that focuses on the way brains process texts within a cultural
context - that is, a cognitive cultural studies that views mental activity not as rational brains process­
ing information in autonomous, detached isolation, but as minds and bodies responding to cultural
artifacts in active, reactive, and interactive ways.
Cognitive literary criticism is multifaceted, attending to all of the processes through which we
construct and manipulate mental models while reading, and how style, character, and themes evoke
emotional responses, among other things. Many of its areas of inquiry offer productive insights
that map readily onto formalist studies of picturebooks, as well as onto newer approaches afforded
through multimodal discourse analysis. However, given that my topic is limited to the depiction of
gender in picturebooks, I will focus on the concept of schemas and scripts, which offers us a way to
understand how texts participate in conveying and challenging prevalent social ideologies, as well as
a way to consider why changing the way children understand gender might be so difficult.
To begin, then, we need some definitions. A cognitive schema is an associative cluster of ideas and
knowledge about objects or situations that we acquire and develop through repeated experience,
and then use to incorporate, organize, and understand new instances that are related in some way
to a particular schema. Script is a term that describes a sequence of actions that we expect to hap­
pen based on the schema that has been evoked (Schank and Abelson 1977). So, for instance, when
Western readers hear or see the words "once upon a time;' a fairy tale schema is evoked that will
probably involve a quasi-medieval setting and certain character types, with an ensuing script that

119
 Karen Coats

follows a sequence of stasis, the introduction of trouble or a problem, heroic action, and a resolution
that involves a marriage and some sort of boon for the heroes and punishment for the villains. While
Schank (1999: 89) contends that we do not tell stories about scripts, but rather about scenarios where
expected scripts are disrupted or violated, I would argue that children's picturebooks are one of the
many cultural vehicles that instantiate schemas and scripts in their readers by setting expectations for
the way literary texts represent objects, relationships, and patterns in the world.
However, Schank's observation reminds us that schemas and scripts ultimately exist in minds, not
texts; that is, they are something we bring to our understanding of stories, and what we find there
is conditioned by them in important ways. While Schank and Abelson (1977) proved that invoking
the proper schema at the outset of a reading could improve recall and comprehension of stories,
cognitive theorists have also determined that schemas can be so strong that they lead to false beliefs
about situations, as study participants see what they expect to see, rather than what is really there
(Brewer and Treyens 1981 ). This becomes especially problematic when we realize that stereotypes are
a type of schema. Several studies have shown that people process information that accords with their
stereotypes more quickly, and remember it better, than information that disrupts existing schema
(Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2004;Johnson and Macrae 1994; O' Sullivan and Durso 1984). More
important for consideration with visual media such as picturebooks is the fact that people locate
visual images within existing schema, including stereotypes, more quickly than associated verbal text
(Lieberman, Hariri and Bookheimer 2001); this finding may indicate that images are more powerful
than words, or at least more automatic, in invoking schema and setting expectations for scripts.

The transmission of gender scripts and schemas through picturebooks

The concern with the automatic recognition of the fairy tale schema and script in terms of gender
is well-known; the cast of characters I invoked earlier will almost always be further specified with
a passive young female valued for her physical beauty, an evil and ugly older female, and an active,
skilled male. The question for feminist theorists is how children acquire such uneven binary gender
schemas and scripts, and whether and how they might be changed. It should come as no surprise,
then, that serious consideration of the representation of gender in picturebooks began with the work
of feminist sociologists during the heyday of second-wave feminism. Linguist Mary Ritchie Key
published a provocatively titled piece in 1971, "The Role of Male and Female in Children's Books:
Dispelling All Doubt," wherein she reported that in children's books through the 1960s, male charac­
ters were more often featured in active roles that included cleverness, adventure, and earning money,
while females were portrayed as victims, onlookers, or caught in situations where they were unable
to achieve their goals without help. John Stephens (1996) notes similar characteristics in his list of
schema clusters for masculinity and femininity; he adds such qualities as transgressive, independent,
and analytical on the side of masculinity, and obedient, self-effacing, and emotional as characteristics
invoked through a schema for femininity.
More often cited in the education and social science literature is "the Weitzman study,""Sex-Role
Socialization in Picture Books for Preschool Children" (Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, and Ross 1972);
in fact, many of the studies since that article appeared include "an update" or "a change" in their
subheading as an implicit nod to its landmark status (see Collins et al. 1984; Williams et al. 1987;
Kortenhaus and Demerast 1993). Rather than focus on the picturebook as an artistic form,Weitzman
and her colleagues saw it in the ways that many literary critics see it today, as a purveyor of ideology
to a particularly impressionable population:

Picture books play an important role in early sex-role socialization because they are a
vehicle for the presentation of societal values to the young child. Through books, children
learn about the world outside of their immediate environment: they learn about what other
boys and girls do, say, and feel; they learn what is right and wrong; and they learn what is

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 Gender in picturebooks

expected of children their age. In addition, books provide children role models - images of
what they can and should be like when they grow up.
1972: 1126

This might be read as a statement of faith regarding the power of literature in young children's
lives to help them sort the enormous amount of social information they receive daily into usable
schemas and scripts.While Weitzman et al. acknowledge that the link between literary representa­
tions and social norms may not be as direct as they assert, and that in fact literature may represent
alternative values, they still believe that picturebooks communicate images that not only reflect
existing conditions, but also have the potential to produce effects on individual identities and
expectations. Their study of Caldecott winners from the '40s, '50s, and '60s revealed that images
of males were overwhelmingly more prevalent than images of females; in fact, in one five-year
sample of winners and honor books, boys were pictured over ten times more frequently than girls.
But, like Key, they also noted a difference in the activities and attributes of female characters and
the aspirations they were encouraged to have. In general, they found that "the girls and women
depicted in these books are a dull and stereotyped lot" whose "future occupational world is pre­
sented as consisting primarily of glamour and service" (1146). Consider, then, the schemas shared
by the researchers themselves that underwrite this conclusion: they view careers in glamour and
service as limiting and devalued activities, unworthy of aspiration by anyone, and most especially
by girls.
The most inclusive (though narrowly quantitative) study of representations of gender in pic­
turebooks to date surveyed an impressive 5,618 picturebooks published throughout the twentieth
century (McCabe, Fairchild, Grauerholz, Pescosolido and Tope 2011), finding that males were rep­
resented twice as frequently as females in titles, and 1.6 times as often as central characters. Greater
degrees of parity were achieved during social activist periods such as 1900-1929 and 1970-2000,
while disparities were greatest during the gender traditionalism of 1930-1969. They also found that
the boy/girl ratio of central child characters was more equitable when the characters were human
rather than animals.
The sheer number of the books surveyed in this study argues for its validity, but I decided to
put it to an informal test to see how we were faring in the twenty-first century which is, arguably,
seeing another wave of feminist activism. My wholly unscientific study was conducted at a local
bookstore that featured an entire wall of picturebooks faced out on display. In each of the three
separate bays, there were approximately 20-28 books. In the first bay, I was encouraged to see I
Am Jazz (Herthel and Jennings 2014), a picturebook biography of a transgender child, as well as
two books about nontraditional families. But of the remaining twenty-five books in that section,
nine had human boys as protagonist, while only three featured girls. Seven showed ambiguously
gendered animals, but upon reading, I discovered that only one was female. The other two bays
delivered similarly disparate results, with human boys represented twice as often as human girls, and
male animal characters outnumbering females by even greater ratios. While John Stephens asserts
that "processes whereby the cognitive instruments of schema and script are textually modified have
played a central function in positive representations of cultural diversity" (2011: 12), it is arguable,
with these vast disparities still in evidence, that a similar positive transformation is taking place with
regard to gender. While close readings of particular books certainly reveal challenges to certain
attributes in a schema cluster, in order for gender schemas and scripts to be challenged or disrupted
on a societal level, sufficient numbers of stories with girl protagonists are required to normalize a
broad range of female experience, and they must be widely read. As we noted earlier, schemas exist
in minds, and are only represented in texts that children engage with; hence a few books that seek to
disrupt existing schemas are more likely to be dismissed as irrelevant data points, or played up as sites
of humor, as in, for instance, Naughty Mabel (2015) by Nathan Lane and Devlin Elliott. This book
challenges the prevalent picturebook animal schema by presenting its main character, a dog, as a girl.

121
 Karen Coats

It violates the girl schema by having the very active Mabel behave in outrageous ways, including
clearing a fancy party by loudly passing gas. It also violates the 'bad behavior leads to punishment'
script when Mabel receives no rebukes for her behavior, and instead is welcomed into her human
parents' bed after the party. However, it still evokes certain visual stereotypes with regard to gender,
as Mabel wears a bathing suit in the pool, spa attire with cucumbers on her eyes while relaxing, and
a pink tutu, necklace, and high heels to the party. Stephens suggests that the reason picturebooks can
function as something of a bellwether for cultural shifts in attitude is because "such modifications
are an expression within story worlds of wider transformations of social mentalities" (1996: 12). If
this is true, and I am not convinced that it is, the schemas we hold for gender are not necessarily
seeing such wider transformations of social mentalities, for reasons I will elaborate in what follows.

The development and persistence of gender schemas

I suggest that greater parity in representations of boys and girls is needed to normalize female expe­
riel}ce because that is what the ubiquity of books about boys has done for our understanding of
childhood gender; it has made boys, and the schemas that attach to their behavior, the norm. Formal
and informal studies have shown that when an animal character is ungendered in a picturebook,
most parents and children gender it male in their reading (Arthur and White 1996). Nikolajeva and
Scott (2001) suggest that the likely reason that most of the books in their formalist study feature boy
protagonists and that "in those that have girls, the protagonist's gender is in many cases not essential"
is because

picturebooks usually address the reader at an age when gender identity is not relevant yet;
Maurice Sendak's Max, Babro Lindgren and Eva Eriksson's Sam and the Wild Baby are not
really boys, while John Burningham's Shirley orTove Jansson's Susanna are not really girls -
rather, they are merely children, genderless and often ageless.
108

Such a claim is problematic given what cognitive theor ists tell us about the development of gender
identity. Since 1966, developmental psychologists have been testing Lawrence Kohlberg's strong cog­
nitive claim that children develop a sense of gender identity - that is, the ability to label themselves
and others - by around three years of age, and achieve gender constancy by age seven, with an aware­
ness of gender stereotypes quickly following. What newer research indicates, however, is that gender
constancy emerges as early as five and a half years of age, and that, in contradiction with Kohlberg's
claims, children's awareness of social gender stereotypes is well in hand before they have achieved
gender constancy (Coddington and Wiebers 2002) . Certainly, then, the specific gender portrayals in
children's picturebooks do matter insofar as they are informing very young children's gender schemas
and social scripts . Moreover, Nikolajeva and Scott note being able to find only one exceptional pic­
turebook where a "very male-oriented story is subverted by its illustrations" (2001: 108) . Combined
with the research cited earlier that indicates the power of pictures to more readily invoke schema
associations, this suggestion that gender schemas are typically preserved and reinforced at both the
verbal and visual levels may account for the earlier acquisition of gender stereotypes (Turner-Bowker
1996; Hamilton et al. 2006).
In fact, very young children are "gender detectives" (Martin and Ruble 2004: 67), actively seek­
ing clues from their culture as to how gender is performed and valued. Cognitive theorists have
observed that children's early intellectual achievements involve sorting things into categories that
depend initially on a single trait, and that these traits are emotionally linked to the object's relation
to the self. Anatomical sex differentiation is a category distinction that is thus rendered important to
children's self-concept through their interactions with others, who inform them repeatedly of their
gender and instruct them in the use of pronouns and socially normative behaviors. What is initially a

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 Gender in picturebooks

self-oriented categorical distinction of boy/girl develops into a cognitive schema that accretes modes
of appearance, emotion, and behavior into a developing understanding of their own and others'
gender identities.
Not all categories develop into cognitive schemas, however.We do not, for instance, sort people
into left-handed and right-handed and develop expectations for appearance based on that physical
distinction (Fine 2010: 210). Psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bern (1983), who developed the idea of
gender schema theory, argues that social categories develop into cognitive schema when

(a) the social context makes it the nucleus of a large associative network, that is, if the ide­
ology and/or the practices of the culture construct an association between that category
and a wide range of other attributes, behaviors, concepts, and categories; and (b) the social
context assigns the category broad functional significance, that is if a broad array of social
institutions, norms, and taboos distinguishes between persons, behaviors, and attributes on
the basis of this category.
608

Bern's point is that while sorting things into categories is an inescapable cognitive process, schema
formation depends on the social and cultural context; despite the claim of Nikolajeva and Scott,
gender differentiation is nearly always salient in picturebooks. Girls and boys are visually coded
by the color of their clothing, and the presence or absence of features such as jewelry or even
prominent eyelashes, which female animals have and male animals, apparently, do not. They are
also coded by their size, with males almost always being larger than females.Charlie is older, taller,
and wiser than Lola in Lauren Child's sibling series (Child 2000-ongoing), and Gerald the male
Elephant is larger and taller than pink, female Piggie in Mo Willem's early reader series. The silent
Sally is shorter (and thus presumably younger) than her unnamed brother in Dr. Seuss's The Cat in
the Hat (1957). What these brief descriptions indicate is that multiple codes are in play that invoke
and reinforce our gender schema; we expect boys to be bigger, for instance, and we expect girls
to be quieter. Bern's hope as a feminist is that this schematic division is contingent and thus open
to intervention. If children could be enabled to learn about sex differences without the associated
cultural norms and signifiers, such as "division of labor, [...]personality attributes[...][or even]
the angularity or roundness of an abstract shape" (603), that accrete to those differences, then per­
haps our schema would be more accommodating of variations within and between genders.And
in fact, the books mentioned do in some measure challenge signifiers traditionally associated with
gender - Piggie is the braver of the pair and more apt to solve problems, for instance, and Gerald
is in fact quite round and emotionally dependent on Piggie. Still, the male character has a proper
name, while the female does not.
However, the problem with sex-associated traits is that they are more often presented as natural,
inevitable, and ideal traits that have no inherent connection to gender distinction, which is what
seems to underlie (and give the lie to) Nikolajeva and Scott's assertion of gender neutrality. Max's
aggressive behavior and his coronation as King in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is part of a mas­
culinity schema, as Nedelman (2002: 4) points out, such that when he and his students transformed
Max into Maxine, they found that they responded differently to her behavior; the behavior that
in Max was naughty and annoying, albeit normal for a boy, was considered brave and worthy of
emulation when performed by Maxine. The "jeer pressure" (Fine 2010: 218) that Morris Mickle­
white is subjected to when he appears "in drag" in Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (2014)
reminds us that gender schemas are neither neutral nor easy to change, but that within them gender
is a socially policed, performative act. As Judith Butler (1993) describes it:

To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that "imitation" is at the heart of
the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that

123
 Karen Coats

presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is a constant
and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations.
127

These idealizations are realized in and through cognitive schemas and scripts.While Bern argues that
anatomy and reproductive capabilities should be the only things that differentiate gender, Butler goes
even further to suggest that even these two attributes are the result of a series of socially negotiated
performances. Picturebooks like Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), with its discus­
sion of artificial insemination, And Tango Makes Three (2005) by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell,
and IAm Jazz (2014) by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings do not violate schema for laughs, and thus
deconstruct naturalized connections between gender, reproduction, and anatomy, revealing ways
that they could be performed differently; in so doing, these books function to disrupt the reproduc­
tion and gender constancy schemas that readers bring to them. Peter Stockwell (2002) suggests that
schema disruption occurs when "conceptual deviance offers a potential challenge" (80) to existing
knowledge. Schema disruption requires a response; a reader must refresh or completely restructure
his or her schema, or enlarge it to accommodate the new information. At their best, this is what
stories can do: present conceptual information that forces readers to confront and reconsider their
expectations, with the result of modifying schemas and scripts that have limiting social and intel­
lectual effects.
In their different ways, both Bern and Butler argue that the host of associations that make the
binar y gender schema salient and functional are the result of social forms processed through cogni­
tive structures, and in this they differ from both social constructivists and biological essentials. Social
learning theory posits children as passive recipients of whatever messages their culture feeds them;
ergo, picturebooks and other artifacts of children's culture matter enormously in the construction of
gender identity, and can, over time, change our attitudes about gender.
Biological essentialists, which include a new crop of neuroscientists, argue that "infants have,
quite literally, made up their minds [about gender) in the womb, safe from the legions of the social
engineers who impatiently await them" (Moir and Jessel 1989: 20); in this view, gender is always
already salient in terms of what children are naturally drawn to, so that picturebook representations
only matter insofar as they aff1rm and reinforce what is considered socially good about each gender's
inherent proclivities, which amount to relationships and empathy for girls and system-building and
physical activity for boys (see Fine, 2010, introduction).
Picturebooks like Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (2014),Jacobs New Dress (2014) by
Sarah and Ian Hoffman, and M y Princess Boy (2010) by Cheryl Kilodavis, which all feature boys who
want to wear dresses, focus on a re-evaluation of the boy schema. The gender-normed secondary
characters in these texts visually and verbally espouse the majority view of how boys and girls should
dress. The characters of Morris, Jacob, and Dyson, respectively, and the fact that these books even
exist, may suggest a shift in social mentalities, as Stephens proposes, but at the very least they chal­
lenge readers to rethink gender performance as a rigidly defined binary system. Books that present
such views are thus to some degree acts of faith on behalf of social constructivists; they operate out
of the belief that picturebooks can make a difference in terms of social learning, dispelling stereo­
types with regard to gender and supporting children whose subjectivities are not comfortably seated
within hegemonic norms and well-established schemas. But they also have something to offer with
regard to gender schema theorists. One of the premises of schema theory is that the rigidity with
which children hold to categorical distinctions "wax[es) and wane[s) across development" (Martin
and Ruble 2004: 68).Trautner et al. (2005) found that:

a developmental pattern emerges that can be characterized by three ordered steps. First,
there is a phase of learning about gender-related characteristics, mainly taking place dur­
ing the preschool years. Second, the newly acquired gender knowledge is consolidated in a

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 Gender in picturebooks

rigid either-or fashion, reaching its peak of rigidity between 5 and 7 years. Third, after that
peak of rigidity, a phase of relative flexibility follows.
366

These steps offer a way for social learning to intervene in a cognitive schema. By positioning their
characters in elementary school, picturebooks can showcase both rigid views and more expansive
ones, thus hitting readers right at the zone of proximal development, that is, the point between what
they can understand on their own and what they can come to understand with the help of these
stories. When Becky tells Morris that boys do not wear dresses, Morris responds with "This boy
does" (Baldacchino 2014: n. pag.), indicating not that he has completely undermined the binary
gender schema, but that he has undergone what is known as schema accretion with regard to boys'
dress options, "where new facts are added to an existing schema, enlarging its scope and explana­
tory power" (Stockwell 2002: 79); the hope is that readers will do likewise with their own gender
schema.
Gender schema disruption and accretion is nothing new for women, who have been actively
seeking to dispel limiting stereotypes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But while
there is a long tradition in children's literature of girls transgressing gender norms by behaving as
tomboys (Abate 2008), there is no similar tradition for boys behaving in ways that have traditionally
been coded feminine. In fact, Eve Kosofsky Sed gwick (1991) has coined the term "effeminophobia"
(20) to highlight the fact that when boys behave in ways culturally construed as feminine, they are
considered pathological, whereas girls engaging in activities generally associated with masculinity
are often celebrated. With the exception of such standouts as Munro Leaf 's The Story of Ferdinand
(1936), which features a young male bull actively resisting the aggression and violence expected of
his gender, and Charlotte Zolotow's William's Doll (1972), which tells the story of a boy who wants
a doll to nurture and care for, most picturebooks invoke gender schema not only through modes
of appearance, but also through modes of behavior and activity. Even Morris Micklewhite does not
challenge the boy schema articulated by Stephens (1996) when it comes to his behavior; his desire to
wear a dress is not because he is focused on building relationships through empathy and identifica­
tion with the girls in his class, nor does he demonstrate care, a desire to please others, or an ability to
share. Rather, he behaves like a competitive, independent, rapacious, active person, who also wants
to wear a dress. Most of the images show him alone and physically separate from his peers, which
may serve to highlight the fact that he is a bullied and lonely victim, if not for the picture where
he sits triumphant atop an elephant in a world that he has imagined for himself; his ideal imaginary
world, like Max's, only includes creatures over which he is sovereign. By contrast.Jazz clearly empa­
thizes and desires relationships with other girls, and is often shown in close physical contact with
family members and peers, or joyfully involved in group activities. In fact, the only time where she
is depicted as sad and alone, off to the side of activity, is when she is forced to dress like a boy; her
transition from boy to girl implies a full embrace of the traditional girl schema.
The strongly normative gender schemas and scripts that children acquire in early childhood are
thus invoked through both verbal and visual representations in picturebooks, even in texts that seek
to disrupt those schemas; the best these texts seem to be able to do is facilitate schema accretion,
allowing children to choose which schema - boy or girl - they wish to perform. While Stephens
concludes that schemas and scripts in diverse picturebooks can "function as transformative instru­
ments" (2011: 34), it seems that with regard to gender, there are still binaries that matter.

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