At Baycon, an annual science fiction convention in the San Francisco Bay Area, I attended a concert by a group called the Library Bards. They have a YouTube channel (in addition to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, iTunes, a website, and several listings in the Internet Movie Database). When I got home I showed some of their YouTube videos to Ann Sharp (the trustee of the trust that publishes Sword and Sorceress). Our hands-down favorite was “Grammar Got Run Over”—sung to the tune of that unforgettable Christmas classic “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” I do reject stories for bad grammar and have been known to stop reading at the second grammatical error, or the first if I’m in a bad mood that day and have a lot of stories to get through.
But there was a song the Library Bards performed at their concert that stuck with me—in fact, it’s still running through my head. It’s called “Geeky Girl” and it complains about female characters being left out of toy sets. The song laments, “I want to play with toys, but they’re all for boys...”
I’m a writer and I play with ideas now rather than toys, but it got me thinking about the toys of my childhood. My grandmother referred to dolls as “doll babies,” which was a fair description. Most dolls available when I was a child were babies, presumably intended to prepare us for our adult careers as wives and mothers. “When you grow up, get married, and have children” was practically one word in our house. It’s scary to think that Barbie, which came along when I was around seven, represented progress. None of the dolls of my childhood could be considered even remotely heroic. G.I. Joe didn’t come along until I was in 6th grade, and that was for boys. Back then if you wanted to be brave and strong, you had to pretend to be a boy. And that’s my childhood. Marion Zimmer Bradley, who started these anthologies, was born in 1930, and I shudder to think of the role models available to her.
Fortunately things have improved since then. What “Geeky Girl” complains about is not the lack of strong female characters but rather their absence from specific sets of toys. “Where’s Gamora? Where is Rey?” Movies and books nowadays do have characters who can be both female and heroic. And I’d like to think that this anthology series does its bit to add to that trend.