26 October 2010

Girls & Books (Luize)


"Pippi Longstocking has always been my favorite princess - she was strong, confident, fun, didn't really respect authorities just for being authorities and wasn't afraid of anything, had great sense of style and the prefect look (red hair + freckles)...


...though my first books on women that changed a lot overnight were both German (by a weird coincidence) - Ute Ehrhardt's Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Even Farther and Sabine Werz's Best Friends, Best Enemies that I read when I was 13, I guess (the translations being my Latvian to English translations of titles I knew them by). These were fun popular books for somebody not really introduced to any feminist consciousness yet - raised the basic awareness about the existing gender norms / barriers / inequalities and told me that I am allowed to ignore what people expect from me as from a girl if I please so. And that's what I've been trying to do since that."
Luize

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing, Luize! The title of Ute Erhardt's book actually says: Good girls go into heaven, bad girls go anywhere" In combination with the subtitle "Why being a well-behaved girl does not let us proceed" this leads to another conclusion than just saying "bad girls go even farther": It says that being nice, and aiming for heaven offers only limited options and is therefore not worthwile. Great book, I've read it too when I was a girl.

Luīze R. said...

thank you for the comment, Raphaela, I was actually looking for a proper English translation on Amazon and couldn't find any...