One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

By: | December 18, 2013

tumblr_mkni969ehZ1qkb7dio1_500My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way?

I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.

And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

Despite what can seem like a profusion of heroines in kids’ books, girls are still underrepresented in children’s literature. A 2011 study of 6,000 children’s books published between 1900 and 2000 showed that only 31 percent had female central characters. While the disparity has declined in recent years, it persists—particularly, and interestingly, among animal characters. And many books with girl protagonists take place in male-dominated worlds, peopled with male doctors and male farmers and mothers who have to ask fathers for grocery money (Richard Scarry, I’m looking at you). The imbalance is even worse in kids’ movies: Geena Davis’ Institute on Gender and Media found that for every female character in recent family films, there are three male characters. Crowd scenes, on average, are only 17 percent female.

More insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say—implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow. Children’s lit could benefit from a Finkbeiner Test. (Well-intentioned kids’ media can, ironically, introduce their youngest listeners and viewers to gender barriers: The first time my daughter heard the fabulous album Free to Be … You and Me, she asked “Why isn’t it all right for boys to cry?”)

So Bilbo, with her matter-of-fact derring-do, was refreshing. With a wave of my staff I turned Gandalf into a girl, too, with similarly happy results. I started to fool around with other books and their major and minor characters, sometimes by request and sometimes not. In The Secret Garden, Dickon, the animal-loving adventurer who rescues Mistress Mary, became Mary’s best friend Diana. In the Finn Family Moomintroll books, the Snork Maiden and her brother the Snork traded genders. In the Narnia series, Peter Pevensie and his sister Susan made the pronoun switch. (That was a nice fix for the infamous line about Susan’s abandoning Narnia for “nylons and lipstick and invitations.”)

Friends tell me they pull similar tricks while reading to their sons and daughters: Women who farm become not “farmer’s wives” but “farmers.” Boy animal characters become girls, and vice versa. Sleeping Beauty goes to MIT. Their kids, boys and girls alike, get to hear about a world as full of women as the real one—and as free of stereotypes as we’d like ours to be. Kidlit may be catching up to our kids, but we don’t have to wait for it.

My daughter might forget all about the heroines and heroes she helped create. But she might not. I hope that years from now, when she has a chance to take her own unexpected journey, she’ll remember the story of Bilbo—and be a little more inclined to say yes.

Girl Bilbo art by the excellent Lanimalu, who takes commissions. Used with permission.

137 thoughts on “One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy”

  1. I *love* this idea, Michelle, and (assuming I can talk my husband into it) I’m going to steal it. Reminds me of a little of my father’s atheist reading of the Passover Haggadah — he had marked it up so that we could just skip all the parts that mention God.

    Also, my daughter has had lots of questions about Free to Be. She’s particularly concerned about the teasing tone in “William wants a doll.”

    By the way, do you know about the Ivy and Bean books? They’re pretty good about having girl protagonists without making a big deal about their femaleness.

  2. Love this, Michelle! I doubt your daughter will forget her female Bilbo. Good for her for refusing to cave and good for you for listening.

    And putting in a plug for the Oz books, not a whole lot is made of Dorothy’s gender most of the time. In contrast, Ozma is super fem. But given that Mombi transformed Ozma into a little boy (named Tip) and then “he” becomes a beautiful princess, I think we can view her gender through a somewhat less conventional lens.

    Also, I read somewhere once that (“a study showed that”) boys in fact cry more than girls. My own experiences in school yards support that. I’m talking about younger kids. I think little boys cry much more frequently than little girls.

  7. You know, the first time I read Lord of the Rings (in junior-high school), I thought Merry and Pippin were girls. It took all the way until Tom Bombadil before I noticed I had been misreading the pronouns. I was shocked. Then I shrugged and decided to keep imagining them as girls–mischievous, clever, silly, brave, adventurous, food-obsessed girls. And I have ever since. And the story is better for it. I mean, we hardly have any idea what female hobbits are like from the books. Well, I should say MOST people have hardly any idea. I know exactly what they’re like, and they’re more fun than the guy hobbits.

  10. “More insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things,”

    I’m glad you bring this point up also. These over the top super beings begin to sound a lot like propaganda instead of a good story where the heroine happens to be female.

    For me, Star Trek has some good examples. In Deep Space 9 the captain is black and competent and human with strengths and weaknesses. He is a leader but his team of staff often have answers. His race and sex are rarely, if ever, brought up and as such he makes a great role model for the future. In this imagined future, race and sex are not an issue. Society has realized that we need both men and women and moved past making an issues of it.

    Unfortunately in the Voyager series they constantly made a very big deal out of the “perfect” female captain. She and B’Elanna solve ALL of the problems. The men are useless or comic. It becomes so unbalanced that it becomes nearly unwatchable. Often the solutions to the crisis, especially when the two women start talking really fast, is techno babble and not based on actual physics. That also is a problem. Why not have lead female characters actually use real science? If we want more girls interested in science, why the techno babble for lead female roles?

    If writers really want to support women, please do put them in roles of power 50% of the time but please also make them human and believable.

    Gandolf and Bilbo are not defined by their sex so the switch works just fine. Writers should remember that when creating female heroines, otherwise it seems like forced propaganda and has an effect opposite of what is intended. Making a big deal that a woman can do X makes it seem like most women can’t do X. Just do X.

    And please, if they are going to be role models, have both the female and male lead characters get the science right/use actual science instead of techno babble.

    James
    Scientist, author, trouble maker

  11. I love this idea! I think it’s a great point that when a female heroine does exist, the reader is usually bonked over the head with idea that she’s a girl.
    The illustration however, is insulting and contradictory to the idea you’re putting forward. Hobbits are lovably chubby, short and hairy; this illustration is none of those things and is still presenting forward the subtle idea that female antagonists must be attractive as well as smart. Yes, both male and female heroes tend to be sexualized, but females more so than men. By presenting this illustration with this otherwise wonderful idea, you’re subliminally continuing the idea that a strong, smart woman must also be cute to be a heroine. The way in which this illustration is untrue to Tolkien’s hobbits just seems to convey that if girls want to be strong and successful, they must also be pretty.

  12. I babysat a friend’s son last night, and he picked a Seuss book I didn’t know for me to read him at bedtime, “Oh, the Place You’ll Go”. But I wondered how a girl would feel, with rhymes in it depending in the word “guy”. I’d be tempted, if I had a daughter, to photocopy the book and alter a few of the verses.

  13. I agree that it’s a great idea. I do this with some books for my little one but it never would have occurred to me to do it with a long book likeThe Hobbit.

    And, boy, I hear you on Free to be. I still have a soft spot for it because it was part of my childhood, but it hasn’t aged well. I wonder what would come out of a similar project for the 2010s.

  14. Tolkien points out that the -o ending in Westron nouns is feminine. Bilbo’s actual name in his native tongue would be “Bilba” (and Frodo’s “Maura”), changed because -a is feminine ending in most Romance languages, and carries that connotation in English.

    So, as published in real-world languages, Bilbo technically *does* carry a girl’s name (at least from the perspective of his fictional native tongue).

  15. First of all, great idea! I really love it. So many literary characters would benefit from a sex-change.

    James: While I agree that it’s often a good idea not to make a big deal out of gender and I’m sorry that you felt the men were left out. But I will give you another perspective: I’m a woman (and a scientist!) and I grew up watching Star Trek Voyager. While, for some inexplicable reason, Harry Kim was my favourite character, I idolised Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine. I found them to be amazing characters. I haven’t watched the show for many years and I’ve read a lot of opinions: Janeway is inconsistently portrayed and Seven of Nine is the writers’ idea of the perfect woman and not a well-rounded character. But I don’t care! I remember being 10 and seeing amazing women on TV saving the day.

    Also, Geena Davis references a study showing that if there are 17% women in a group, men will think it’s 50-50 and if there are 33% women, men will think the women are the majority. It’s a big deal when Janeway and B’Elanna save the day, but not when it is Kirk, or Spock, or Scotty, or Picard, or Sisko…

    Maybe you should consider that.

  16. When I was a little girl reading Lord of the Rings, Merry was *always* a girl. And when she and Eowyn took out that Nazgul together, it was glorious!

  17. @Peter Walker I’d like to point out that female hobbits are named after plants and flowers as a rule. Bilbo and Frodo are not names derived from Westron. there are two male naming conventions, one to name male hobbits “high sounding”, i.e. Westron, names such as Meriadoc which is mostly followed by the OldBuck/Brandybuck line and names that are “nonsensical” such as Bilbo which is used more by the hobbits outside of Buckland.

  18. Hi Michelle!,

    Having never read any Tolkien I’ll be sure to start the right way from the get-go when the time inevitably comes. So much literature is ripe for a gender shift. Who knew Snow White was a boy (Perhaps we’ve suspected as much after seeing the Prince on screen).

  19. I must admit that I’m sort of disappointed that girl-Bilbo in the illustration isn’t short and shout, like hobbits are supposed to be. If there’s anything rarer than a good heroine, it’s a good short, stout heroine.

  20. I’ve always hated the Hobbit due to it’s lack of female characters. I’ve refused to see the movies and was loath to introduce it to my daughters.

    This hack may have saved the book for me. What a great trick!

  22. The Hobbit is my favorite book of all time (I have no interest in seeing the movies) and I read it for the first time when I was 5 years old. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I noticed there were almost no female characters. This never bothered me, and I was just recently wondering why. I think I have the answer. It didn’t matter. Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin, Smaug were never characters that needed to be male or female, they simply were, and I think that may be why the switch for your daughter was so easy. I never felt angry or threatened by their lack of femininity, because they had the best and worst of both genders each. I appreciate what you have done for your daughter, but does it really matter if Bilbo is a boy or a girl to make the message the same? That someone small can do great things when it is least expected of them? I really don’t think it does. There are wonderful female characters out there in literature, and they are of a strong and growing number. Appreciate them for what they are, and for when they exist. Don’t feel the need to change them when it is fine for a woman to empathize with a male character, they don’t need to be something they aren’t. Please understand I am not saying what you did for your daughter was wrong, especially when it was her choice, but gender-swapping is not the answer for making children feel happy. Let them have the message without it being about boy vs girl and they will grow up (hopefully) without thinking there is something they can and can’t do because of their gender. I grew up to be a sword fighter, not because Bilbo was a girl, but maybe, perhaps, because he wasn’t. Food (maybe a seed cake) for thought.

  23. The sexism in H/LOTR was the only thing that kinda bothered me (other than the fact that I love dragons).

  25. I’ve done this with Pooh. You can turn any or all of them into girls. Works great, and suddenly women have a role in the world besides fussy, dull mama (Kanga).

    I find that Free to Be . . . ages well, though I too knew a child (she was 5 at the time, in the mid-80s) who said it hadn’t occurred to her that it ISN’T all right to cry. I told her she was lucky and that lots of kids, especially boys, were told not to cry even when they felt sad. A good learning moment. For her part, my daughter has a whole dialogue with Carol Channing:

    “No one smiles doing housework except those ladies you see on TV.”

    yes they do

    “Your mommy hates housework”

    no she doesn’t

    “Your daddy hates housework”

    I don’t have a daddy

    “I hate housework, too. And when you grow up, so will you.”

    No I won’t.

    I applaud her attitude, though I also point out to her that for someone with such a housework-positive attitude, she is mighty reluctant to help clean the house.

    I do think that as a child, I got the wrong message from “When We Grow Up”–it implied to me that girls weren’t going to be the engineer actually steering the train, just the ones blowing the whistle. Boo on that. If that’s a case of Free to Be… being outdated, it must have been outdated immediately, because I got it the year it came out.

  26. I do the same thing for my son and daughter. Remember to remember swap villains too though.
    It’s just as important that they grow up knowing that the ‘bad guy’ can be a ‘bad girl’.

  27. After I read this I got curious, so I looked in Winnie the Pooh. It turns out that Piglet and Owl are male. I don’t know how I missed that. They were females in my mind.

  28. Omg I thought I was the only one who thought Merry was a girl! Merry stayed a girl for me all through my childhood, and was my favorite character.

  29. I remember being so glad that Princess Leia in Star Wars was represented as a central leader. It was a breakthrough for the era. The children would act out Stars Wars and tell me the story. The female role was important. She had decision-making power, even as they acted out the story. It was remarkably different than my childhood role-playing.

  30. Several commenters have raised the fact that it is easy to gender-swap fictional characters who are written as male into female, because no big deal is made of their gender – unlike far too many characters written as female.

    Someone even suggested that this means we shouldn’t bother changing them, but I disagree.

    It is because, in our culture, being male is regarded as the default human state. The author feels no need to describe the masculine traits/credentials of their male characters, as they can be confident in assuming that their readers will fill those in for themselves, having been overwhelmed since birth with what amounts to propaganda emphasising that our culture is a cis-white-hetero-dude one.

    All other people are expected to aspire to that narrow model of humanity – even medical textbooks describe female differences as ‘atypical’!

    Also, it isn’t just fictional characters written as female that their inventor feels have to be specially described, in case their audience don’t know enough about over half the human race to fill in the blanks – look at the reaction when a fictional character is played on film by a non-white actor, or a gay one! Readers get furious when a character’s race, not described in the book, is depicted as anything other than white.

    And the gender divide in children’s literature is particularly awful. Even when there is a mixed group, the boys ALWAYS outnumber the girls, and the girls are NEVER automatically deferred to. Every picture-book I have picked up where the protagonist is an animal and having exciting adventures, the gender is (quite unnecessarily) male. Even before they can read, little girls are being taught the lesson that real people are male, and that female people don’t belong in the foreground.

    Thank you, Michelle, for listening to your daughter, and re-gendering Bilbo – and then noticing that this makes her simply a human being.

    Until more authors stop assuming that ‘human being’ = ‘boy/man’, more of this subversion is required!

  32. I love this idea! I will definitly do the same some day.
    You might want to read “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyale” to her. It was one of my favorite books as a kid. A sea-faring adventure for a girl that breaks out of 19th century social roles. Its really fantastic.

  34. regender.com is awesome. I just recommended it on my Facebook. My selection was Wikipedia’s article on Aesop’s Fables, but you can try it on anything where there are likely to be pronouns and names.

  35. How many times in the news do we hear about “the first woman CEO”, or whatever she is, where the most important thing you pick up from the story is the fact that it was a woman being given the job rather than a company getting a new CEO, etc.? The event becomes the gender of the person rather than the supposed thing that she (or he, is more rare cases of this overstatement of gender) is doing or getting.

  36. As a fan fiction writer, I love the concept of gender swapping when it is done well, though often it becomes a plot device rather than just another character trait or whatever you might consider gender to be. I’ve begun using the idea myself.

  37. Great post! Two thoughts occurred to me:

    When I was young, I read (I was almost never read to, because I hated it) Andrew Lang’s (color) Fairy Books, which are a lot less sanitized, and their heroines have more agency.

    Can’t recall if “short” comes into play, too, but for a stout heroine, there’s Summer from Mary Brown’s Pigs Don’t Fly. It’s not a book for young kids (there’s an almost-sex-scene in it), but I first read it as a tubby teenager and it made an impression on me. Deals with the heroine being overly plump in a realistic but satisfying way.

  39. @Elsa

    You do bring up some very good and important points. And a slightly different perspective than mine. I respect your points and agree with a lot of them. I too heard the NPR story regarding mens and womens perceptions in the work force and was saddened to hear those results. I also know that the folks making the risky bets that caused major banks to fail as well as those that were involved in the (fraudulent) bundling of low grade mortages and reselling them as A grade were almost all men. This was also on NPR. I get that my sex has some weaknesses and that studies show that a balanced board room is a more productive board room.

    Perhaps I have some biases that I’m not consciously aware of? It was good for you to point that out.

    However, I do have a rebuttal to one of your concerns.

    Other intelligent women here have brought up the “sex appeal” aspect of women heroines. I see 7 of 9 very differently than you do. Perhaps part of our difference perspective is not just our sexes, but also our ages. I am a bit older and was not a child when I watched the show. Frankly, 7 of 9 is physically stunning – loads curves and piles of sex appeal. I see her LATER introduction into the program as kind of a cheap shot . . . as adding sex appeal in an attempt to appease male viewers who were less thrilled with the program since it was beating us over the head by constantly pointing out that the female leads were female.

    Yes, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Picard, and Sisko are all males and I fully agree that we as a society need to do a much better job and have women role models on avg 50% of the time. The more recent of those men often reported to superior women. Not the same thing as having the lead character be a woman but at least it is a nod in the right direction. At least there was a world where ones sex wasn’t their defining characteristic. And that is my point.

    Kirk and the rest were given lines that were at least somewhat based on physics as we knew it at the time. Giving women leads techno babble that is often not based on science does not really promote women in science. I’d really love to see a strong female leader supported by writers that make an effort to get the science right. There are plenty of women science journalists that do an excellent job of understanding and then explaining science – Hollywood should hire some of them.

    In my opinion, neither of those Star Trek men you listed were defined by their sex – the audience was not constantly beat over the head with the fact that they were male. I think it goes past social norms of male leaders. My litmus test is this: could we reverse the sex of the lead character and not significantly effect the plot?

    Bilbo, and Gandolf pass that test, in my (possibly biased as a male) opinion.

    With the exception of Kirk for the 60s, these Star Trek men could have been women and the story line would remain virtually unchanged. Some of them should have been women; it took to long to have a women captain.

    I do not think the same reversibility is true in Voyager and certain children books and toys aimed at girls. I see that as a problem. I sometimes see a pattern of “Oh look, it is technically possible for a single abnormal women or girl to do X” – I believe that this is actually damaging the cause. A cause I think all of us are here support.

    Your mileage may vary. However, I do think we are all trying to go to the same party and that we both raised some important and valid points.

    Dr. James

  40. I regularly refer to any unknown-gender person, animal, or fictional character as female. It is surprising how often it surprises or confuses people. My daughter just assumed it was normal for many years.

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  42. Brilliant idea. And I wonder what female characters would make for a good switch into male. I think it’s a great idea to be able to go back and forth.

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  45. An excellent and thought provoking piece. However, why is the girl hobbit wearing a skirt with frilly petticoats, and why is she conforming to the classic tall and slender ideal woman body shape instead of being a true Hobbit?

  47. I like the idea of a female hero. It would have been a great coup if Jackson had brought Rose along on the Ring quest rather than Sam! But changing Bilbo’s gender neutralises a lot of the Hobbit humour which relies on Bilbo’s domestic habits such as dusting the mantelpiece. He is, to use a sexist term, a bit of an “old woman” until he goes on his quest and finds his true identity.

  48. Hi everyone – thanks so much for your thoughts, recommendations, stories and other comments – changing kidlit pronouns is something I’ve done more or less on a whim, and your ideas have made me think much more deeply about why I do it and what I hope my daughter will learn from it.
    About the illustration – I’m all for realistic representation of diverse body types, and I hope one of the many talented fanartists out there will draw a female hobbit who resembles 50-year-old Bilbo (perhaps someone already has – if so I’d love to see it). But I’m partial to the drawing above, maybe because it’s what I think my daughter might look like as a teenage hobbit. I like her determined expression. And since my daughter, despite her precocious feminism, won’t leave the house without at least one layer of frilly skirts, I think this hobbit’s journey skirt is just right!
    Thanks again to all of you – I’ve loved hearing all your ideas. Michelle

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