You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  Let’s recall that “parent” is not actually a verb, nor is it a form of work. What we need to talk about instead is “being a parent”—that is, caring for a child. To be a parent is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love, not to make a certain sort of thing. After all, to be a wife is not to engage in “wifing,” to be a friend is not to “friend,” even on Facebook, and we don’t “child” our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are. Any human being living a fully satisfied life is immersed in such social connections.1

  Here’s something I didn’t know until quite recently: During World War II, the United States had federally funded, government-administered child care.2 An amendment to the Lanham Act in 1942 authorized the funding of a massive system of federally and locally funded high-quality day-care centers, which were established in every state except New Mexico. Over the course of the war, the government provided care for some six hundred thousand children—approximately one in ten of those who needed it. For fifty cents a day, a mother could drop off her child for enriching care that was found to have lasting positive benefits on the children’s well-being.3 After the war, the centers were closed despite appeals from working mothers, civic groups, and educators. As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in a newspaper column, “The closing of child care centers throughout the country certainly is bringing to light the fact that these centers were a real need. Many thought they were purely a war emergency measure. A few of us had an inkling that perhaps they were a need which was constantly with us, but one that we had neglected to face in the past.” She quoted from a letter she received from a woman that she believed expressed “the kind of thing a great many people are feeling,” including the fact that, to her surprise, women were “organizing to express their feelings on this subject.” The woman wrote to say that not all husbands returned from the war, and some came back unable to work, and their children had benefited greatly from attending centers that they couldn’t have afforded otherwise.

  As the closing of the centers helped move women out of jobs that could then be given to returning soldiers, and the feminine mystique kicked in full force, the need for child care didn’t go away. More women worked outside the home in 1955 than at any point in American history.4 That number increased to 40 percent by 1960. Forty percent of married mothers worked in 1970, and only about 24 percent of them had kids under a year old. In 1971, on a bipartisan vote, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, a bill cosponsored by Senator Walter Mondale and Representative John Brademas to establish a very similar system of government-funded centers, which they hoped would eventually lead to universal child care. Mondale’s intent was to make the centers high-quality and available on a sliding scale, so as “to avoid typing it as a poor person’s program.” On the advice of political commentator Pat Buchanan, however, President Nixon vetoed the bill, saying that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Opponents attacked it with Red-scare rhetoric. According to New York Republican senator James Buckley, the law would create pressure “to encourage women to put their families into institutions of communal living.”5 By the mid-seventies, the economy was tanking, interest rates were sky high, and married mothers entered the labor force in huge numbers. By 1984, 59 percent of married mothers worked. The government was aware of these statistics but did nothing to address the problem of child care or equal pay. Instead, psychologists continued to dispense helpful advice about how working mothers were scarring their children for life—but, hey, go “find yourself”—and the media latched onto hysteria about an epidemic of satanic abuse in day-care centers.

  Now, decades later, the mothers of more than 64 percent of prekindergarten-aged children are in the labor force, yet our country’s work-family policies are worse than they were in the mid-forties, when that number was only 10 percent (and the supply still didn’t meet the demand).6 As Rhaina Cohen wrote in the Atlantic, “Now, in 31 states and the District of Columbia, the average annual cost to send an infant to daycare can exceed a year’s tuition and fees at a public university. High childcare costs do not merely strain parents’ budgets; they often pressure women to drop out of the workforce, because in many cases the price of childcare would surpass earnings from a job. A lack of affordable childcare has contributed to the yawning long-term earnings gap between women and men.”

  My friend Darby told me a story about when her daughter (and Kira’s good friend), Sydney, heard the expression “throws like a girl” for the first time. She took it for a meaningless tautology. “Of course she throws like a girl,” Sydney said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s a girl.” Darby had to explain that “like a girl” was intended as criticism, that it expressed a belief “some people have” that girls are less good at doing things than boys, just in general. Sydney listened patiently for the punch line or the corrective. She waited. It didn’t come.

  Finally, she said, “Whatever. I throw better than Daddy.” Then she walked away.

  Around the same time, Kira brought home a library book about a brother and sister who time-travel to Ancient Greece. Upon arriving in Athens, they are greeted by Plato (because all time travelers get the celebrity VIP treatment), who informs them that girls are not allowed to watch the Olympic Games. Girls aren’t allowed to go to school, either, or learn to read and write. Then he introduces them to a great poet who can’t put her name on her work or she’ll get in big trouble. “What?!” Kira yelled, indignant. “That makes no sense!”

  It bothered me that the book framed this as a thing of the past, that it didn’t go beyond simply noting the unfairness. It’s easy to deplore past injustice. It makes you look good. It’s much harder, especially in a children’s book, to confront why injustice arises, how injustice is consciously and unconsciously perpetuated, and why it is allowed to continue while we are fed fairy tales about the way things are now. Kira’s shocked disbelief was made possible only by her innocence. Eventually, she’ll shed it and no longer be shocked. The stories still won’t make sense, but she’ll stop expecting them to.

  In the meantime, what should we tell our daughters about fairness? How should we raise them? Maybe we should consider types of pedagogical approaches better suited to the current environment—wilderness survival camp, maybe? gladiator school? Should I start organizing Lean In Circle playdates? Driving to preschool that morning, Kira got (understandably) annoyed with NPR and asked, “Is there anything about Rosa Parks on that thing?” And, you know, there wasn’t. But now, several years later, all through the third grade, she has gotten to know a lot about Donald Trump. At what point, and how, do I prepare her for the existence of that?

  PART FOUR

  A Mad Tea Party

  “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

  “There’s plenty of room!” said Alice indignantly.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  16

  * * *

  Let It Go

  Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was released from prison, and every time I opened my browser to the New York Times home page, I saw Elsa, queen of Arendelle. Like Elsa, Tymoshenko has the folkloric fairy-tale look of a Disney princess combined with the forbidding froideur of one of its villains. And it’s not every day that a blond, peasant-braided head of state unseated by a murderous rival dominates the news. Naturally, you lump them together. Or maybe I’d started to see Elsa everywhere, in everything, all the time.

  Kira saw Frozen something like thirty times. I took her to the theater the first time, after her dad and I had a fight and he jumped out of the car at a stoplight and walked home. She got scared during the scene where Prince Hans’s soldiers storm the ice palace and arrest Elsa, and ran out of the theater screaming, “I have to get away from this movie!” Then someone gave us the so
undtrack, and we played it on loop in the car for two months. A few days after Craig and I decided to separate, I took her to the sing-along screening at the El Capitan in Hollywood on my birthday, where we joined Darby, Sydney, and roughly another thousand tiny Elsa impersonators in heartfelt, tuneless song. It was as if we’d discovered in Elsa some kind of mystical instrument magically attuned to our emotions. After that, we got an Oscar screener and the movie took over our lives. We couldn’t stop watching it, and we especially couldn’t stop singing “Let It Go.” For a while, I was swept away by the histrionic fun of it all, and then the pitch of our fixation started to give me pause. I couldn’t decide if “Let It Go” was about submitting or rebelling. What was Elsa saying? What did I think she was saying? What did Kira? One night, as I tucked her into bed, I asked her what she thought Elsa’s anthem was about, and she looked at me like she didn’t know who I was anymore. “It’s about her powers,” she said.

  I pressed her. “But what about her powers?”

  She squinted at me. “It’s about her powers!”

  “OK,” I said, no clearer. Then she launched into one last rousing bedtime rendition of “Let It Go,” and I tried to join in, and she punched me in the eye.

  Frozen is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”—so loosely, in fact, as to be nothing like it. “The Snow Queen” had been kicking around Disney for seventy years, since Walt Disney’s day, defying attempts to adapt it for the screen. “The Snow Queen” is divided into seven parts. The first part consists of an explanatory myth about an evil mirror made by the devil (or, in some versions, an evil troll) that has the power to distort everything it reflects. The mirror causes “all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness.” Excited by the possibilities, some demons (or trolls) decided to take the mirror up to heaven, but dropped it on the way up so that it shattered on earth and sent specks and shards flying. The specks and shards lodged in people’s eyes and hearts, distorting their vision and making them cruel.

  In part 2, we’re introduced to Kai and Gerda, two little neighbor children who love each other like siblings. Kai and Gerda love to listen to Gerda’s grandmother’s stories about the beautiful but frightening Snow Queen, who peeps into people’s windows at night and covers their panes with flowers made of frost. Kai threatens to melt her on the stove if she comes near their houses, and the Snow Queen appears in his window that night. The next summer, he feels a pain in his heart and his eye, and soon he’s mocking Gerda and rejecting her in favor of the big boys in the square. (“His games now were quite different to what they had formerly been; they were so very knowing.”) The Snow Queen comes for him soon afterward, freezes his heart with kisses, and spirits him away to her ice palace, where she tasks him with working out pointless logic problems until he’s literally blue in the face.

  Meanwhile, an inconsolable Gerda sets out to find him. On her journey, she meets some magical talking flowers, a witch who wants to keep her, a prince and a princess who tempt her to stay with them, a band of robbers who capture and threaten to kill and eat her, a fierce little robber girl who frees her from the robbers, and a Finn woman and a Lapp woman who help her reach her destination. Eventually, Gerda reaches the Snow Queen’s castle and finds Kai alone, “quite blue, yes, nearly black, with cold,” trying to solve math problems in a near catatonic state. Gerda throws herself at him and weeps hot tears upon his breast. In real life, we know, this tactic usually backfires, but in this instance her weeping “melted the lump of ice and consumed the splinter of glass that was in his heart” and broke the spell.

  “The Snow Queen” is sometimes considered a feminist fairy tale, because it’s the girl who undertakes the brave quest to save the boy, but this interpretation relies on a fundamental misreading of the story. Andersen was not remotely interested in subverting the patriarchy—on the contrary. The working-class son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, he was brought up and educated by a wealthy bourgeois Copenhagen family. His life with them inculcated a worshipful attitude toward elites, an enthusiasm for essentialist ideologies, and a deep sense of inferiority. Andersen continued what Jack Zipes describes as “the Brothers Grimm mission of remolding oral folktales explicitly for a bourgeois socialization process.”1

  “The classical fairy tale for children and adults reinforced the patriarchal symbolical order based on rigid notions of sexuality and gender,” he writes.

  Stereotypes, not archetypes—depicted in printed and staged versions of fairy tales tended to follow schematic notions of how young men and women behave and should behave. Though it is somewhat of a simplification, most of the heroes are cunning, fortunate, adventurous, handsome, and daring; the heroines are beautiful, passive, obedient, industrious, and self-sacrificial. Though some are from the lower classes and though the theme of “rags to riches” plays an important role, the peasants and lower-class figures learn a . . . set of manners, customs, normative behavior, and thinking that enables them to fulfill a social role, to rise in social status, and to distinguish themselves according to conventional social class and gender expectations.2

  If anything, the fact that adorable little Gerda prevails over the terrifying specter of the frosty and aloof but lethally enchanting Snow Queen can more accurately be read as a moral about the benefits of girls remaining pure and childlike forever. Gerda, in the story, represents innocence, whereas the Snow Queen, as Naomi Lewis writes in her introduction to Andersen’s The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography, is “neither good nor evil: She is Experience.” Kai is corrupted by the latter and redeemed by the former. Gerda becomes a “true woman,” and a “true woman” never grows up, never wakes up, never learns. She’s there to help, and to save the boy from himself.

  That’s a weird story. Then what happened?

  The Disney project was revived in 2010, then shelved again after the disappointing box-office results of The Princess and the Frog. Tangled, with its prominent male lead, was put ahead of it on the production slate, and it did well enough to convince Disney to try again. Jennifer Lee was brought on to write the screenplay, and later to codirect.

  What is Frozen even about?

  In Frozen, Jennifer Lee’s adaptation of the story, Elsa and Anna are sisters. Elsa has magical powers that allow her to create things made of snow and ice. Originally, Elsa was modeled after the Snow Queen and conceived as the villain of the piece. At some point, however, the songwriters asked themselves what it would feel like to be cursed with an awesome power that you are taught to be ashamed of. The song made Lee rethink the Snow Queen entirely. The queen was renamed Elsa and made queen of Arendelle. Gerda became Anna, her little sister. One day, while playing as children, Elsa accidentally zaps Anna in the head with an ice beam and nearly kills her. Their parents spirit her away to the land of the trolls, where Anna’s consciousness is restored and her memory is erased. From then on, the girls are kept locked up in the castle. Elsa is made to wear gloves and told not to touch things and to keep a lid on her feelings. This makes her fearful and anxious. Nobody tells Anna anything. All she knows is that Elsa used to love her and now she doesn’t. This makes her needy and desperate. The isolation warps them both. Trapped in a story they had no hand in creating, the sisters spend their time enacting their respective pathologies: Elsa struggles to contain her feelings while Anna projects herself in fantasies into the paintings on the walls and dreams of imaginary loves.

  On the day of her sister’s coronation, Anna falls instantly in love with a visiting prince she’s just met, named Hans. “Can I say something crazy?” she asks during their falling-in-love number. “I love crazy!” he says. And at the end of it he says, “Can I say something crazy? Will you marry me?” he asks. “Can I say something crazier?” she replies. “Yes!” When Anna tells Elsa about her engagement, Elsa says that she can’t marry a man she just met, and they fight. The stres
s unleashes Elsa’s powers, and she is outed as a freak—a princess with powers! The Duke of Weselton, a visiting potentate, brands her a monster, and the mob runs her out of town on a rail. Elsa flees to the North Mountain, where she builds herself a glittering ice palace, transforms into the Snow Queen, and declares her intention to be “alone and free” forever. Perhaps her anthem can be interpreted as Elsa’s intention to break with bourgeois convention and step into a radical void. And yet Elsa’s flight from repression and her big creative awakening coincide with her transformation into a showgirl sex kitten.

  “Let it go, let it go,” she belts out, “that perfect girl is gone!” as she transforms into an even icier and more perfect girl than before, a sexy version of her uptight self in a skintight dress slit up to here and high heels made of jagged shards of ice.

  Meanwhile, Anna sets out to find Elsa and bring her back to Arendelle, leaving Hans in charge. On her journey, she meets a scrappy ice salesman, Kristoff, and an enthusiastic snowman, Olaf, whom Elsa created as a kid and who represents her long-suppressed youthful exuberance and creativity. The three of them eventually reach Elsa’s castle, and Anna tries to persuade her to return to defrost Arendelle. The realization that she has frozen Arendelle sends Elsa into a spiral of self-loathing, and she zaps her sister again—this time in the heart. Kristoff brings Anna back to Arendelle so Hans can bestow upon her “true love’s kiss” and prevent her from turning into an ice sculpture. But Hans is only too happy to get Anna out of the way so he can assume the throne. He doesn’t love her: he only just met her. Who does love her, of course, is Elsa, and vice versa. Just before she turns to ice, Anna prevents Elsa’s execution; and Elsa, in turn, weeps hot tears upon her frozen sister and brings her back to life. Hans is arrested, peace is restored, and Elsa—presumably back on the throne again—becomes a kind of magical, mystical, celibate hostess, using her magic to turn Arendelle into a playground; her creativity has been tamed, her fundamental aloneness confirmed. Nobody gets married at the end.