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Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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- [00:24]
Dr. Julie Fett
Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
- [00:31]
Marshall Poe
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- [02:08]
Gina Stamm
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. New Books in French I'm your host, Gina Stamm, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me today is Dr. Julie Fett to talk about her monograph gender by the 21st century French children's literature, out this year from Routledge. Dr. Fett is Associate professor of French at Rice University, where she is a Rice Faculty Scholar at the center for the Middle East Baker Institute and a faculty affiliate at the for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. She is also the author of Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012, and co author of the textbook Les Francais published by Hackett in 2021. Dr. Phutt, thank you so much for being with us today.
- [02:51]
Dr. Julie Fett
What a pleasure. Thank you so much, Gina, for inviting me.
- [02:54]
Gina Stamm
I'm happy to have you. And so this is a fascinating topic. I really love the book. Could you tell us how you arrived at the topic and how you decided to organize this work for publication? Sure.
- [03:04]
Dr. Julie Fett
So writing this book was definitely a post tenure decision to switch fields. Time periods add new disciplines to my repertoire. I had become interested in gender thanks to my first book and couldn't think of a better place to search for the roots of discrimination than in the cradle. So I seized upon reading materials as a key facet of children's socialization and my object of study. I was driven to explore stereotypes that I saw in children's books. But as an historian and social scientist, I was especially interested in how books landed in children's hands. What were the social and political mechanisms that meant that certain books got published, got stocked in libraries, got selected for prizes, et cetera. And so when you consider that, gee, over 18,000 children's books are published every year in France, it matters who's choosing books among this massive production for children. So the adult mediator is key. Teachers, critics, librarians, booksellers, parents, et cetera. And I really wanted to focus on 21st century books to see if the representations that children today are being exposed to have equalized the past is terrain. That's more known, of course, though with published books that pass from generation to generation, the past is still in the present. And so just to talk a little bit about the book's organization, it has three sections that treat three institutions that are very important for the circulation of stories and of stereotypes, that is libraries, book clubs, and the press. And after I dedicate a chapter to each institution, there's a companion chapter that analyzes a sample of material from those sources published in the 2000s, since 2000, through a gender lens. And so part one examines the development of libraries, children's libraries, both municipal and school libraries, and then analyzes gender representations in a combined sample of 49 picture books. The second part looks at book clubs and considers an interesting situation at the nexus of publishing and public education. There's one single publisher that has a highly successful book club that is marketed to families, mainly through schools and teachers. And the third part looks at the French children's press, which would be unrecognizable to most American children. Next to our scratchy paper highlights, There are nearly 300 colorful, exciting magazine titles on offer to French children from birth to age 18. So for my sample chapter there that went along with this part 3, I chose a literary magazine for young adolescents from the respected and dominant Bayard group. And so in the book, I investigate how this institutional landscape, as well as state policies, market forces, and cultural beliefs, influence the content of children's literature.
- [06:18]
Gina Stamm
And you've touched a little bit on this in your answer here, but could you tell us about what you see as unique about the children? French children's publishing industry.
- [06:26]
Dr. Julie Fett
Yeah. So indeed, a prolific and innovative and profitable industry that is French children's publishing, with a wide range of diverse publishers, from the enormous hatchet to the tiniest of publishers run by one, sometimes two people. And I was lucky enough to meet many of these editors as well. The field is highly professionalized. There are unions for authors, unions for publishers, hundreds of book fairs, hundreds of book prizes in children's literature. And although compared to the adult literary world, children's literature is of course still struggling for legitimacy, it has obtained important recognition. Just to give you an example, in the French National Library, there's a division, a journal, and a special reading room for children's literature by itself. So that's one factor unique to France is a concept called la chine du livre, or the book chain. This is an idea that all the actors in the publishing world maintain a sense of solidarity, whereby everyone is respectful of roles of others, starting from the author and the illustrator, to the editor, to the publisher, to the distribution networks, onto the mediators, such as bookshops, librarians, teachers, and of course, parents and adult purchasers of books. So, sure, there's competition among all these agents, but they're all working together for the good of the industry. So that's something that I think is unique to France. There are also two French cultural beliefs or paradigms I'd like to highlight that the American public might be familiar with. The first is more familiar, the idea that books are cultural artifacts, not commercial products necessarily. And the second that goes along with this is the belief that children deserve quality books. I have never seen, sure, you could say that any all countries share that belief, but I have never seen so much activity of publishers striving to outdo each other in quality and investing heavily in gorgeous books that will never be bestsellers that might sell very little, in fact. So an example, another example is the Passe Couture, which is an initiative of the French state to nurture the cultural sensitivities of its young citizens by subsidizing access to cultural products such as books. So that's an example of this cultural belief that children deserve quality reading. Another feature that's unique to France is the single book price. In 1981, Jack Lang, Ministry of Culture Minister of Culture, passed a law that disallowed major discounting of books. So this had an important effect, the desired effect of protecting small book stores against large book chains and online chains. And it also protected publishers, small ones especially. The state also gets involved in publishing in France with its subsidies for unprofitable, likely unprofitable book projects. Subsidies are given by the organization called the Centre Nationale du Livre. Also, there's a lower sales tax on books and magazines in France. So this unique market and culture might lead one to expect a certain progressiveness in gender representations. And they can and do. But there are other factors that my book looks at that favor the reproduction of gender stereotypes. I hope that answered your question.
- [10:21]
Gina Stamm
It did. And in terms of quality, while some publishers and critics divide the children's literature market into high and low brow, you argue that that doesn't represent the real landscape or how gender norms are reproduced. Could you explain this a little bit? Sure.
- [10:36]
Dr. Julie Fett
The three institutions that I studied were chosen intentionally to evaluate what the French would generally agree on as quality children's literature. I put that in air quotes. Since 1968, when the French children's literature industry experienced a renaissance in many small, innovative houses that it still exists today were founded, the publishers I studied and interviewed have come to disdain, let's say mass market publishers like Hachette. I'll use that example again for producing what's usually referred to in French as supermarket books, that is cheap books sold in grocery stores or hypermarkets next to canned goods and paper products. And so this, this kind of self differentiation was engaged to help publishers distinguish themselves as quality book publishers. Also avoided is anything smacking of the moralism and didacticism that emanated from Catholic publishers and presses of the 19th century. So when I question about gender stereotypes in reading material for children, quality publishers as well as many critics and researchers, claim that only supermarket literature traffics in stereotypical representations, often citing the fact that it is the mass market publishers that still offer Those tacky books, pink books for girls in blue books for boys. That's a classic example cited to help this distinction between quality and mass market. They also tend to claim that their books are modern, creative, and free from any gender bias. So by choosing libraries, this book club and highbrow magazines for examples, my goal was to push against this facile and artificial binary.
- [12:38]
Gina Stamm
And the first institution that you address in your book is the library. And how have library acquisitions and some of the factors that determine them, perpetuated some gender norms?
- [12:50]
Dr. Julie Fett
So, in general, librarians are our champions of access to information and freedom of expression, Right? And yet they constantly have to make choices of what to stock, what to promote in displays, what to feature on their thematic bibliographies that they're developing. This is the bread and butter of librarianship, rendered more and more challenging with the prolific production in children's literature, at least in France. And in this sense, librarians can be seen as gatekeepers. By choosing one book for a shelf or a display or a recommended list, a librarian is not choosing another book. And what governs these choices? Well, I found that very little governs these choices. And while that may make for a lovely, varied, individualized, decentralized mosaic of books available to children in libraries across France, it also means that there are no real standards, no standards collectively set, at least, so books containing stereotypes are. Are widely found on library bookshelves. Since I've been interested in professionalization in my past research, I also make the argument about librarianship that despite any good intentions and awareness of gender representations, librarians, just like teachers, are disempowered by institutional structures and by inadequate training in children's literature. So they don't have much agency to customize the supply, this massive supply of books to their constituents. They don't have agency or time.
- [14:35]
Gina Stamm
And could you tell us a little bit about what you learned from your survey of libraries? But actually, if you could preface that by talking a bit about your methodology in surveying libraries, because that was very interesting.
- [14:46]
Dr. Julie Fett
Yeah, thanks. So I took surveys of library books by following a well established method in social sciences, particularly particularly in the fields of education, literacy, and information science, called colloquial shelf sweeping. The technique is to take a random sampling of books on shelves, whether it be something like every 20th, 25th book or 25th author. And I did this in two libraries. Since I had traced the history of children's libraries in France, I wanted to make sure I covered both municipal and school libraries, each having a very specific history to themselves. So I actually chose a school library in my hometown of Houston, a French school library, not only because of practical research constraints, but because of a large expatriate community in Houston. Because of this large community, the school's robust collection was in no way a disappointment of French picture books. In fact, French school libraries outside of metropolitan France, I explain in the book, are often much better stocked than those in country. And secondarily, I chose a local municipal Library in the 5th arrondissement in Paris and performed a shelf sweeping there as well. And then I combined those two samples. While I began the chapter distinguishing them slightly. I had decided that together 49 books would be better analyzed as an ensemble. And so to the second part of your question. In terms of findings, pretty grim. Female characters are much fewer in number in all three samples, the library, the book club, and the magazines. But in particular, I could talk here about my qualitative analysis showing that both female and male characters are confined to prescribed gender norms. In 80% of the books in my library sample, they contain gender stereotypes, According to an analytical grill that I developed that looks at behavior, relationships, imagery, status, et cetera. So you have boys very much involved in stories of discovery, adventure. They also happen happen to feature largely in stories about harassment and bullying. When girls are prominent in stories, the plot usually revolves around valuing relationships or concerns about beauty. My research confirms other studies that show that gender stereotypes are most salient actually for adult characters in children's literature. And as an example, in the library sample, not a single book of the 49 presents a mother with a paid occupation, whereas males identified by socio professional status appear 31 times. So, you know, there you go. This is just a little. A few examples, but it's pretty well documented in the book.
- [18:03]
Gina Stamm
Thank you. In section two of your book deals with book clubs in France. There are some similarities with the American system. But could you tell us a little bit about this model?
- [18:12]
Dr. Julie Fett
Right. So an English book club has two meetings. When I use the term book clubs for the French case, it's not the idea of a group of friends getting together to discuss a book they've read in common, but instead a subscription that typically entails receiving a monthly book over the course of a year. In French, this is more often called an abo dement or a subscription. You may be thinking about the scholastic model in the United States for children. So a dominant French children's publisher called called Des Loisir School of Leisure might be a proper English translation of the company name. They developed a children's book club in the early 1980s that today monopolizes a significant corner of the market. This book club is called Max, and it's delineated into eight separate clubs by age range, starting with newborn and reaching up into the high teens. Each book club offers a monthly book from November to June. And I wanted to focus on this book club as a backdoor way of looking at children's literature in school. We know that reading is so tied to school literacy, yet publishers of picture books such as Ecole des Loisemires claim to offer entertaining books that are antidotes to the drudgery of See Jane Run. So paradoxically then, Ecole des Loisir's book club books are promoted by schools to parents as a way to reinforce their children's literacy. So no other publisher, no other French children's publisher has been able to compete with this profitable market disruption. So in my sample, I look at 4 of the Ecote des Loisir picture book, so 4 of the Ecole des Loisir book clubs, a certain year 2020-2021, with eight monthly picture books in each.
- [20:15]
Gina Stamm
And you identify several factors that maintain gender stereotypes in these book club selections. Some of them like universalism, the publication of series nostalgia and the politique d', auteur, and the idea of joy instead of immoralization, which you've already evoked. Could you explain these a bit?
- [20:32]
Dr. Julie Fett
Sure, sorry. Universalism is intertwined with an auteur driven editorial policy. So let me break that down. Many French scholars listening to this podcast know very well what universalism is. The idea that equality is best achieved through color or gender blindness. So in this view, feminism could be perceived as a divisive terrorization that actually threatens equality. Activism in favor of any one social category is considered, or could be considered problematic with a universalist outlook. And certainly in literature, it makes for an agenda that is not purely creative. So that's something to apply to children's literature in a novel way that might not be be readily summoned by some of some of your listeners. But at the same time, in my interviews with editors, I noticed a primordial emphasis on creativity la creation and a refusal of editors to intervene in authors and illustrators creative process and creative work. And what I have concluded is that this factor, this refusal to intervene, enables stereotypes and automatisms and imbalances to proceed to publication unchallenged. But I also look at what I found, especially among interviews I conducted with editors, resistance to any kind of advocacy or agenda in picture books. This is a resistance that stems from suspicion of children's literature as historically Catholic, moralistic. This former kind of French children's literature has been resoundedly rejected since the post 68 May 68 rebirth of modern French children's literature as much more avant garde, with a focus on creativity and a widespread suspicion of activism as anathema to to creativity. So that's how I see universalism wound into this resistance and protection of resistance of advocacy and protection of creativity, if that makes sense.
- [23:05]
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- [24:07]
Dr. Julie Fett
You asked about nostalgia as a factor. We know that adults love to buy treasures from their own childhood for the young people in their lives. It's well documented by sales figures and it's a universal phenomenon not not unique to France in any way. Publishers cater to this demand by reissuing old or classic books, or books that become classic through this very process. And they save a prominent place for them on retail shelves. So that's one factor in reproducing gender stereotypes. And I can't tell you the number of times I've heard adults exclaim to me that when rereading one of their childhood favorites to a child several decades later as an adult, their shock at the stereotypes found in these stories that they thought they knew and and these stereotypes which they had never noticed as a child. To me, this reveals the acute danger of stereotypes for a young public because gendered roles and expectations are invisible and therefore normalized for Girls and boys, and it's only as adults that we realize this. Another factor is. Let me just talk about the fact that series are another factor that can reproduce stereotypes. So American Francophiles might know very well Martine or Baba. These are beloved French characters too, for the French as well. And although Ecote des Loisir disdained books series as a kind of commercialistic trend in publishing and likes to distance itself, in fact, I noticed that of the books in my sample of book clubs published by almost half of the books, 14 out of 32 were part of series. And of these 14 books, eight feature male protagonists and only one featured a female protagonist, with all the others either not having a main character at all or a group, let's say, but love magazine subscriptions that have recurring heroes every month. Book series can offer repetitive stereotyping if the premise of the original story is mass centric or if the plot puts girl characters in a subordinate role. So by virtue of starring a series much more than females, male protagonists multiply their dominance, I argue, in readers consciousness.
- [26:51]
Gina Stamm
Thank you. And you've given us some examples there of how these gender stereotypes do show up in the book club books. One other factor that contributes to some of the difficulties in broadening the national canon, so to speak, is the EDUCO system. And so why does its role in promoting children's literature make the opening up of this national canon more difficult?
- [27:16]
Dr. Julie Fett
Edu School is an organization under the Ministry of Education, and they do a lot of pedagogical work for teachers. But one thing they initiated in 2002, which was not short of revolutionary really in education, was the constitution of reference lists, or let's say, recommended bibliographies of pleasure books. So the intent was to establish a kind of national literary canon, starting from pre K3 up through secondary school in France. So these are lists of recommended books, which was a first, like I said, in pedagogical initiatives to bring pleasure books into the curriculum. So several scholars have looked at these lists from many different angles, and some have even looked at them from a gender stereotype angle. And they have found that gender equality and ethnic diversity in these books on these lists lacking. Indeed, I interviewed a member of the selection committee who told me that gender equity was never a criteria for a book becoming listed. And so while I chose not to dive into the Edisco list for my primary sources, especially because other scholars preceded me there, they do provide an additional layer to my analysis of the max book clubs in schools, because I had to acknowledge that if the market, the Commercial market doesn't prompt publishers as a whole to offer gender equal books to students. One might expect that the public education system would be emboldened to do so. But instead I found that this is another area with these edgeschool reference lists, recommended books on reference lists, that the universalist outlook is also at play.
- [29:21]
Gina Stamm
Your final section deals with children's magazines in France, and you've brought up earlier that these are more prominent and influential in France than in the US Relatively speaking. Why do you. Why would you say that? That is.
- [29:37]
Dr. Julie Fett
So like I said, nearly 300 colorful magazines from birth to age 18. They're also vastly popular, Gina, with 70% of French children reading them regularly. According to surveys, Print magazines have largely weathered the digital revolution. Digital revolution and remain a vibrant and necessary primary source for a study like mine. So it's been dynamic and prolific for over a century with its golden age located actually in the second half of the 19 7th century and the 20th century. So most hundred years. So these deep roots publishing which were dominant roots in scouting organizations, children as well. So it's a fascinating history both for adults and children. And this is definitely where the past influences the present. This dynamism is not new.
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Gina Stamm
What are some of the factors that have influenced the content of these magazines over time?
- [30:51]
Dr. Julie Fett
Okay, I'll talk about two factors of the children's press industry in France that particularly influence gender representations in magazine pages. So over the course of this long history of children's magazine publishing, there have been some trends, of course, waves. Magazines of the late 18th and through the 19th century were originally officially for both boys and girls, but mainly geared towards boys, especially given the link between comic strips and magazines, with comic strips becoming popular and helping magazines become popular because of comic strips. Then came the founding of some magazines specifically for girls and or for boys, and that gender segregation dominated much of the middle of the 20th century, lasting up until the 1960s. And it was in the 1960s that the last only for girls magazines were shuttered. And that coincided with a lot of change in French society that many French historians will be familiar with. Listening to the podcast the Expanse and the starting and the expanse of CO education in public schools happening at that time. And a view that that a mixed gender approach to magazine content was in line with CO education. Also of course coincides with May 68, a new modern view of French youth beginning then and in magazines in particular, a turn to more secular content. Even the important press Bayard Press, which is significantly Catholic in origin, had made a significant turn to creating more and More magazines without any religious influence, even though retaining some magazines that are purely religious. And so this mixed gender magazine market that lasted for quite a long time in the late 20th century, for pretty much half of the, the second half of the 20th century, although it was mixed gender, I argue that it was de facto still a kind of masculine market. And I feel like the mixed gender argument, which is referred to in French as mix iter, has become a substitute really for equality. And I believe it's a bit of a false promise. So, for example, in the mixed gender magazine that I looked at, I scrutinized the joke pages. Every month there's a page of jokes and this was the sight of some of the most obvious gender stereotypes, bathroom humor, some actual mocking of younger sisters for their girly tendencies. Right. I came to wonder if in the editorial room, perhaps the joke section is a, is a conscious place, perhaps unconscious of a place of appeal to boy readers. And that leads me to the second factor that might influence, to answer your question, gender stereotypes. Second factor of magazines in particular, I noticed, is the fear of losing boy readers. Magazines, unlike books, have incredible data on their subscribers, and they use that data, of course, to market and to develop content. Among all publishers, both books and magazines, there's a widespread assumption that girls will gender jump. It's an expression I use to talk about this idea that any reader can project themselves into the skin of a character, whether it's male or female, regardless of age, national origin, et cetera, race, maybe even animal species. Right. Because many of the books in children's literature contain anthropomorphism with animals playing important character roles. So there's this widespread assumption that girls will gender jump, will project themselves, can project themselves into any character, boys will not. So boys won't read a book about girls. This is a widespread assumption that I believe has become a self fulfilling prophecy. And it's particularly dominant in the magazine industry, despite a rhetoric of inclusiveness, actually, which magazines compared to book publishers definitely sustain that rhetoric of inclusiveness as well as despite their built in audience. Because once a, once a subscriber is signed up in November, they've got them until June for sure. And usually with magazines do what book clubs do is they try to encourage a child that might have grown out of a certain level magazine to immediately subscribe to the next level magazine with more advanced content. And so I believe that male centric content is developed to attract the elusive boy reader and that actively girl readers, the actual girl readers who are there reading and subscribing, are taken a bit for granted. And gender stereotypes are plain to see in my evidence. So there's a kind of reification of inequality under the guise of a supposed demand of boy readers.
- [36:33]
Gina Stamm
And in discussing the magazine Je l', Armaques, you create a detailed taxonomy of the many ways that girls are disempowered or misrepresented, underrepresented in some of this content. What are maybe some of those that you haven't discussed yet?
- [36:48]
Dr. Julie Fett
Okay, yeah. In the magazine sample, Jem, Lier, Max. Yeah. Five of the seven comic strip characters are boy protagonists. That's just one thing. There's a literary. Every magazine contains a short story and then multiple recurrent comic strips and then some more non fiction sections of the magazines. And let's just say individuals which are obviously haven't talked yet about imagery, but images are obviously so key in children's literature without any kind of text to reinforce this. If you're seeing males, they're riding horses, and if you're seeing females, females, they're riding ponies. Significantly smaller in dimension. Males are all fully clothed in the imagery in the magazine sample that I analyzed, but females may be often depicted in a bikini or in a bra. The research around the magazine confirms other studies that show that adult stereotypes are more salient for adult characters. So for example, in my magazine sample, teachers are most often depicted as women, unless they're math teachers and then they're men. The only situation where female characters are more numerous than male characters in the magazine sample is when parents are presented and then it's mothers, mothers, mothers. These are just some quick examples. But Lens is very detailed in the book and, and I'm afraid, Gina, I don't, you know, I'm afraid I might have made some enemies in France in the publishing world with this book. My tone is very careful and my evidence is overwhelming, I'm afraid. So I really hope it will be the beginning of some dialogue not only with scholars, but also with publishers. And actually my conclusion argues that France is very well positioned for sport, for change, and for better gender equity. The fact that this market already abides tiny publishers that focus. Some do focus specifically on gender and LGBTQ themes, although they're marginalized and sometimes disdained by others in the larger children's publishing industry, they exist. One publisher, Talon O, has been in operation since 2005 with a backlist of 400 titles in two decades. There's no such thing as that in the US so I feel like it wouldn't be such a leap given the exceptionalism of the French children's literature market to engage in a paradigm shift that would allow considering equality to be part of quality. And final point, I just want to say, is I originally wanted to frame the book as a comparison between French and American children's literature, partially because I didn't want to be the foreign analyst who kept pointing fingers at French society for being racist, now sexist. But in initial study, I didn't show that there were hardly any differences to highlight between French and American children's literature. The real problem is the gender stereotypes in kids hands remains universal in the 21st century.
- [40:29]
Gina Stamm
Well, thank you so much for your time and for your thoughtful answers to my questions. And as we come to the end of our time today, do you have any new projects you would like to tell the listeners about?
- [40:40]
Dr. Julie Fett
Thank you, Gina. Well, I'm excited to take a smaller leap to my third monograph than I did from the first to the second and sort of close the circling back because I am very interested in, of course, representations of ethnic diversity in children's literature. And I just had so much to say about gender in this book that we're discussing here right now that of course, while I nod regularly to ethnic diversity throughout the book, I wasn't able to give it the time and the attention that it deserves. So, working on a new project indeed, that looks at representations of migration and otherness in French children's literature.
- [41:30]
Gina Stamm
Well, that gives us something to look forward to. So thank you again so much, Dr. Phet.
- [41:36]
Dr. Julie Fett
My pleasure. Thank you, Gina, for the invitation.