Cinderella ate my daughter

In essence, Orenstein has written a memoir about what it is like to be someone like me: a conscientious, modern woman trying to raise a girl to be anything she wants to be, and not just a girl, not that there's anything wrong with girliness (with that last part being basically all one phrase.)
It's hard and Orenstein nails her depiction of the double whammy: first they extensively market pink, princessy, unempowered women to our girls, and then society tells us we're not allowed to complain, because if we complain we're dissing feminity, disempowering our girls and being all-around anti-feminist.

Orenstein doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, but it's nice to know that there are others out there who want to raise our girls to be able to choose to be anything that they want to be, rather than “choosing” to be anything that society presents them with. And that even the best mom has girls who go through the princess stage, but that if you talk them through it, they come through the other side and realize that they don't need to sit on their duff waiting for a prince to save them and that there is more to the world than consumerism and aesthetics. Or at least Orenstein's daughter came out the other side – mine is still young enough that I cover her ears when people call her “princess.”

The other part that really spoke to me was the idea that she explores relating achievement to appearance – it has definitely been true for me that the more I have been academically and professionally successful, the more I am expected to perform a stereotypical female gender role. I had previously thought that was only anecdotally true for me, having transitioned from the world of computer science, where I could perform whatever gender I wanted, into the extremely gendered world of medicine. However, Orenstein presents it as a global phenomenon: “‘We can excel in school, play sports, go to college...get jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands...“

A lot of interesting thoughts about Disney, fairy tales, American Girl, etc. I enjoyed a lot of the book but wished it went into more depth in certain points (at least there's an extensive bibliography). The idea that when women were more restricted to the home allowed them to actually have more freedom (in terms of appearance mainly) was interesting. I would like an updated copy talking about Brave and Tangled since she briefly mentions they will be happening in the future at the end of the book. I think she was a bit dismissive of American Girl (though I am biased in that I love AG), focusing too much on its consumeristic aspects and not really dealing with how much of the change was due to Mattel taking over. That's a pretty minor quibble though. All in all an interesting book about things I do worry about if I ever have a daughter.