Lauca, my 7 year old daughter is really into Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five at the moment and has even started watching old episodes of it from the 1960′s series. The Famous Five is made up of two boys, two girls and a dog. I cannot help but be struck by one of the female characters, a tomboy called George.
The series is just so wonderfully at ease with George. Can you even pick her out of the kids in the 1960s series below?
The character, Georgina, is the one holding the dog leash and she’s a girl who insists upon being called ‘George’ and who cuts her hair short and never wears dresses. She is also delightfully fierce and adventurous. There’s nothing apologetic about her and she wasn’t forced to embrace comforting symbols of feminity for the audience either. Enid Blyton was a conservative woman and the first book of her series, Five on a Treasure Island was published back in 1942, but here she was writing about this kid who did her own thing with gender, like it was no big deal.
My god, in comparison we’ve become so rigid about gender binary with kids now.
Almost nothing is gender neutral any longer. It’s exhausting. It takes serious effort by parents to question the binary for children because we live in such a sexist culture and so, I present to you this father. Adorable.
(I’ve written a lot previously on this topic and you can probably find the archives under raising daughters and raising sons).
I didn’t grow up with Blyton’s books, but I did read scores of Nancy Drew books–and that makes me wonder: Why “George?” It’s not the characters and how they express identity, but the name itself.
That’s exactly what I thought of – there was a similar but slightly older “tomboy” character named George in the Nancy Drew books. Maybe it’s because it’s not that common of a girl’s boyish nickname, like “Alex” or “Sam”, and thus more remarkable in a way?
Georgina must have been more common at some point, right? I feel like there are a lot of Georgina’s in kids books that were already kind of old when I was a kid (like Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, one of the grandmas) but never anymore.
I am picking up a couple of those books for my son now, thank you! George sounds so refreshing.
OMG I LOVED these books as a kid when I discovered them as a kid at my grandma’s house. I will definitely look them up when my kids are a bit bigger, and the old show as well. Never knew about that, and might have to watch it now
Yes…. but a lot of the narrative around George’s choice is about how being a girl is horrible and girls do silly things and they don’t throw balls very well, and isn’t Anne, the girl, going to be a great little housewife one day.
Yes, should have mentioned in the post that Enid Blyton is ..problematic. Haha. Thanks for picking up on it Deborah.
My thoughts exactly. As a kid I really, really hated George because there was always – always – a bit in every book when something manly/dangerous/thrillingly exciting has to be done and Julian always told her to shove off and get on with washing the dishes cos despite all the short haircuts and jeans in the world, she was still JUST A GIRL AND THE THING WAS FAR TOO MANLY /DANGEROUS /THRILLINGLY EXCITING FOR A GIRL. And, dear god, she let him get away with it! I would have punched the arrogant tosser. Problematic indeed!
I hate Enid Blyton for a million similar things.
I’ve not read these since I was Lauca’s age, but I’m with Deborah in my recollection. In fact, I remember feeling that it wasn’t fair that George had to do girl things (like making the picnic and washing up with Anne – which I remember happening, although this is twenty-something years ago) because she didn’t behave like a girl. Which is a strange kind of sexist, but like lots of tomboys trying to navigate the scope and limitations of gender, I was a strange kind of sexist!
@Tragic Sandwich, I’m British, I went to a posh school and there were two Georginas in my class of twenty-five, one of whom inevitably became George (the other Nina). She wasn’t a tomboy, but opting for Georgie would have lead to the taunt “Georgie Porgie pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry” in an all girls school where being called a lesbian was the worst possibly insult.
It was a common name in my (admittedly rather odd) school, and I’ve encountered a fair few female Georges of different generations – but almost all of them British upper middle class.
My 7-year-old loves these books too, as did I at the same age. Just took some of mine out of storage, and I have that cover on mine
Are you sure it’s the 60s for that series though? I was pretty sure it was late 70s or early 80s. Not that it matters!
Had the same reaction that George was pretty mean about other girls, and Anne wasn’t nearly as interesting. It was definitely George that I wanted to be though, even though in truth there wasn’t anything particularly “tomboyish” about me.. she seemed so much more admirable, the way she was written?
You might be right. They have re-made the series again.. but maybe this one she is watching was made later than I thought. Vintage confusion.
The books were written between 1942 and 1962 …
My husband got all teary when he saw the picture of the guy and his little boy wearing their skirts. Bless.
My impression of the George/Anne dichotomy was also that it, unfortunately, meant that being a girl still meant screaming and making tea and not wanting to go into scary caves, and George was obliged to reject being a girl altogether in order to separate herself from all the Anne things. But we takes what we can gets. I just read my first Tamora Pierce books, about a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to train as a knight, and I noticed she is really careful about emphasising that her heroine was not rejecting womanhood in itself.
Ages ago there was a lovely thread at the Guardian where people were naming their literary crushes, and someone wrote, “George from Famous Five. Must have known I was queer really early”.
[...] Lauca, my 7 year old daughter is really into Enid Blyton's The Famous Five at the moment and has even started watching old episodes of it from the 1960′s series. The Famous Five is made up of two boys, two girls and a dog … [...]
[...] Bluemilk reminisces on how wonderfully Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five explored gender norms with George, the tomboy. [...]
I loved these books too, and of course George was my favourite character but as I remember it, she was very much about rejecting being a girl and wanting to be a boy which was not at all helpful in trying to find a middle way.
It was either be ‘a girl’ like Anne or be George and wish you were a boy like Julian or Dick and not be fully accepted by them. Either way, being female in Blyton’s books was to be disempowered.
I wonder what Lauca thinks of it all.
I loved those books as a kid! I read them all, over and over again. I loved George and Timmy especially. As a trans person, I connected to her long before I knew what all those things were about.
[...] About George and gender rules – blue milk (Sept. 8th) [...]