I happened to glance upon a story my daughter was reading 📙📙, called Princess and the Pea, where a beautiful young woman is portrayed to be so physically sensitive that a single pea 🥒(separated from her skin by 20 mattresses) causes her so much pain that she can’t sleep. Even worse, this tenderness of hers proves that she is not a wretched orphan but, in fact, a real princess.
Written by a man, this is one of those many #stories that exemplifies the social currency of female weakness as an empowering narrative. My worry is the inclusion of such false, demeaning and weak presumptions 👎👎 in children’s books, and the effect it will have on their growth and overall personality.
A big shout out to all content creators in the education and edtech space, high time that we portray princesses as women 👠who were courageous, fought, stood tall and came out stronger 💪💪 rather than thinking of them as someone whose whole life seemed to revolve around dealing with delicacies!
Above picture is a drawing by my daughter of one of her favorite princesses. 👧👧
This content was originally published on my linkedin profile.
