Sexist Texts

"You're certainly not up to a man's work, so you'll start as a scrubwoman. "

--From a Science Research Associates third-grade reader

"Oh, Raymond, boys are much braver than girls."

--From a Harper & Row fourth-grade reader

Since the beginning of public education in the U.S., male-chauvinist piggery has been rearing its snout, mostly unnoticed, in the millions of textbooks that teach children reading, writing and, more subtly, the roles they will later play as adult men and women. In reaction, feminists around the country have, for the past few years, been mounting a headlong attack on publishers and school boards. This fall, through a combination of legal actions, political pressure and cogent research papers, the liberationists are beginning to win a few skirmishes, though not the war, against sex stereotyping in schoolbooks.

Since federal funds help to pay for textbooks, it is argued that school boards using sexist texts may be sued under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which forbids sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs. The first such suit was brought last May in Michigan by a group called the Committee to Study Sex Discrimination in the Kalamazoo Public Schools. After studying twelve readers for Grades 1 through 6, the committee filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The complaint alleges, among other charges, that 80% of the leading characters in the reading series are boys or men, that the pronoun "she" is not introduced in the pre-primer series until the third volume, that women are "portrayed predominately as mothers, nurses, librarians, storekeepers..."

HEW has still not acted on the complaint, hoping that the problem can be solved by voluntary compliance. Houghton Mirflin, the publisher of the readers in question, has already had its consciousness raised enough to cooperate with the Kalamazoo school-system task force, which produced a 154-page handbook as an antidote to its textbooks. The handbook will go to teachers this week; it gives page-by-page, line-by-line suggestions to them for changes when they discuss the stories. For example, it is recommended that after reading a certain story, the teacher will say: "Let's read the story again, substituting Nan for Dan. Isn't it just as much fun?" Or the teacher might pose the following problem after another tale: "Suppose Ben's mother worked as a policewoman and was gone most of the day. How might he get her to take him to the zoo?" Houghton Mifflin is considering making a number of these changes in the next edition of their readers.

Similar pressures are being exerted in localities from coast to coast. New Jersey's Women on Words and Images, an offshoot of a local chapter of the National Organization for Women, has sold 20,000 copies to date of its anti-stereotyping booklet, Dick and Jane as Victims. The 57-page study analyzes 2,760 stories in 134 schoolbooks and concludes that boy-centered stories outnumber girl-centered stories 5 to 2, that positive traits are monopolized by male characters, and that the books show 147 different career possibilities for boys but only 26 for girls.

Meanwhile, local NOW groups in California are pressuring the state's educational authorities to comply with a new law that forbids California public schools to use any instructional materials containing any sex bias. NOW is working as part of a task force reviewing textbooks that the state board of education will purchase for use next year. Books that contain sexual stereotyping will be automatically rejected.

Publishers are facing comparable pressures in Brookline, Mass., Detroit, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta and New York City. Major textbook packagers such as Ginn, Silver Burdett, Houghton Mifflin, Harper & Row and Scott, Foresman have all been singled out. And there are indications that some of them have begun thinking about costly reform projects to eliminate stereotyping, just as they have already expunged, in some cases, editorial sins against blacks.

No Real Dent. For its authors and editors, Scott, Foresman has prepared a detailed leaflet called Guidelines for Improving the Image of Women in Textbooks. Among these guidelines are suggestions like "Avoid constructions implying that women, because they are women, are always dependent on male initiative." For example, rather than stating "The ancient Egyptians allowed women considerable control over property," a historian is requested to write: "Women in Egypt had considerable control over property." Macmillan and several other major publishers are revamping their textbooks, but no real dent has yet been made in their backlists, where sexism infects thousands of titles from readers to math books.*

While adults were worrying about the effect of male-chauvinist reading on their offspring, the children themselves, some of them anyway, seem already to have absorbed the feminist lesson despite their biased primers. The first-grade daughter of a Berkeley family in which husband and wife share the housework recently noticed, while looking at her primer, a picture of a mother cooking and a daddy reading the paper. "Why is she working and he's just sitting there?" the girl asked. Then she looked again and said: "I know. It must be her week to cook."

* One celebrated male author read by millions of parents has thrown himself zealously into the job of excising sexist references from his work: Benjamin M. Spock, M.D. Spock is, for example, changing the pronouns "he, him, his" to "they, them, their" or adding "she, her, hers" for the 202nd printing of Baby and Child Care.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.