When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy: A Vintage Illustrated Daydream about Life without Unimaginative Rules
By: Maria Popova“She can pet any dog she likes without asking if it’s friendly. (She’ll know. I always do.)”
The recent rediscovery of Lincoln Steffens’s magnificent 1925 meditation on the delights of gender-blind parenting reminded me of the like-spirited gem When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy (public library) — a magnificent collaboration between children’s book legend Charlotte Zolotow (June 26, 1915–November 19, 2013), whom the greatest patron saint of modern childhood once aptly described as “a brilliant and sensitive creative person,” and artist Hilary Knight (b. November 1, 1926), best known for illustrating the widely and wildly beloved Eloise series.
Originally published in the late 1960s as two separate boy/girl versions, the story was eventually combined into a charming “flip-flop book” in 1988 — reading from one end tells the story of a little girl (reminiscent of the lovably mischievous Eloise) daydreaming of the unconventional mother she’d be when she has a little girl of her own; turning the book upside-down and reading from the other end tells the parallel story of a little boy daydreaming of being an equally unconventional father to his future little boy.
The story tickles every child’s dream of escaping the silly rules imposed by overcautious and unimaginative adults, calling to mind young Mark Twain’s irreverent advice to little girls and offering a positive counterpoint to Toni Morrison’s dark take on the things kids are made to do, with a touch of Emily Hughes’s wonderful Wild.
Above all, it celebrates children’s inherent intelligence, living up to E.B. White’s famous proclamation that “anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time” — Zolotow writes up to them, as she always did, and Knight elevates the writing even further, as he always does.
Tucked into the cheekiness is also the subtle acknowledgement that these rules are sometimes in place to benefit the adults rather than the child — like the practice, always unfair to kids and familiar to those who have grown up in complicated families, of asking children to keep grownups’ secrets.
When I have a little girl, all the rules will be different.
And I will never say to her, “When you are a mother you will understand why all these rules are necessary.”
Complement When I Have a Little Girl / When I Have a Little Boy with Zolotow’s charming reverse-psychology ode to friendship, The Hating Book, then see Lena Dunham’s fantastic documentary about Knight. Here is a taste:
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