I perhaps had too much hope when I picked up the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. My hope was, she would get into the problems with Disney Princesses and the negative impact and hopes that the movies tend to give to young girls. I also had hope that she was going to drill into Barbie, Bratz and other dolls that are similar like that. Well she did do all that, and a bit more than what I expected, but unfortunately a lot of what she said also didn’t sit right with me.

The main theme of the entire book was Peggy trying to keep her daughter from feeling as though she had to… Well, apparently be a very young girl. It apparently wasn’t alright that her daughter was watching Disney movies and had fallen in love with the color pink, like every other girl at that age. So not only did Peggy try and keep her daughter away from such things, but she also started to read the original Grimm Fairy tales to her. I don’t know if you have read the Grimm Fairy tales, but they are certainly not stories that I would be reading to a four year old child, and I love scaring the bejeezus out of people.

When she finally gets her way, her daughter moving on from the Princess phase, for some reason the author was shocked when the young girl was also rejecting femininity. Up until this point, she had practically been denouncing everything that the young girl had begun to identify as feminine. At least to my approval, the young girl had started to take an interest in Wonder Woman, who I always thought of as one of my favorite super heroes. But no, not even that was good enough because apparently Wonder Woman was a princess, and therefore unworthy of Peggy’s approval.

In another segment, Peggy decides to take a totally different approach on Disney girls. Yes, the girls that have been gracing the Disney Channel for the past so many years. Well, they don’t exactly live up to Peggy’s standards of who they should be. While some of them have seen very hard times, and I can see how they’re not exactly role models, Peggy doesn’t stop right there. No, she starts to downright slut shame them. As a matter of fact, the chapter is even called ‘Wholesome to Whoresome’. Now that strikes a cord with me. These are woman and girls that are supposed to be protected by feminism, not chastised for their own choices. They are supposed to have the right to dress anyway they please without being torn down for how they dress. But Peggy does just that, only a few chapters later to call girl on girl cattiness as an unfair type thing. I guess that doesn’t apply when it’s a grown woman looking at a woman twenty years younger than her.

Now, before I seem as though I am the anti-feminist, let me say something about my own personal experience with being a girl and having my mother teach me the ways of feminism. I played with barbies, I loved the color pink and I watched Disney movies as though my life depended on it. My mother, however, made sure that I know the difference between Disney and the real world. She let me know that I was a special kind of girl, no matter what. We read books about female heroines and watched movies with strong leading female characters. Strong women, and I still got to enjoy the ditsyness of Barbie. She taught me that feminine and being a feminist aren’t two separate things, they are the same thing, as long as you understand what is right and what you deserve.