Then I saw the incontrovertible proof on the sonogram (or what they said was incontrovertible proof to me, it looked indistinguishable from, say, a nose) and I suddenly realized I had wanted a girl - desperately, passionately - all along. My husband, Steven, is nearly a decade older than I am. A few years before my daughter was born, I had read about some British guy who'd discovered that two-thirds of couples in which the husband was five or more years older than the wife had a boy as their first child. And that was the problem: What if, after all that, I was not up to the challenge myself? What if I couldn't raise the ideal daughter? With a boy, I figured, I would be off the hook.Īnd truly, I thought having a son was a done deal. I had spouted off about it everywhere from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from the Today show to FOX TV. I was supposed to be an expert on girls' behavior. While my friends, especially those who'd already had sons, braced themselves against disappointment should the delivery room doc announce, "It's a boy," I felt like the perpetual backseat driver who freezes when handed the wheel.
Yet, when I finally got pregnant myself, I was terrified at the thought of having a daughter. Here is my dirty little secret: as a journalist, I have spent nearly two decades writing about girls, thinking about girls, talking about how girls should be raised. So little girls may be drawn to pink, sparkly princess gowns as a way of asserting that they're definitely girls.
Orenstein says very young children don't yet understand that your sex is fixed - that you can't go to sleep a girl and wake up a boy. That obsession with everything pink and princess is the focus of Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. "The dentist asked, 'Would you like to get in my princess chair so I can sparkle your teeth?' And I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, do you have a princess drill, too?'"
The final straw came at Daisy's first dentist appointment. "The waitress at our breakfast joint would hand her her pancakes and say, 'Here's your princess pancakes,'" Orenstein says. Suddenly, Orenstein began noticing princess references everywhere, surrounding her daughter. "She came home having memorized, as if by osmosis, all the names and gown colors of the Disney princesses," Orenstein tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. A few years ago, author Peggy Orenstein sent her daughter Daisy off to preschool - and within a week, she noticed a profound change.
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