Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

Expected More

Peggy Orenstein, an award-winning writer, author, and speaker concerning issues affecting girls and women, is set to come out with a new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, this week. As an author with reportedly over 20 years of writing about women's issues, I expected more from the book. Written in a blog-like manner, it tends to be more fluff, containing more anecdotal evidence than scientific research. The concepts, while not new, still hold merit. However, I believe Orenstein would have been better off condensing the topics to the pertinent matter and writing a series of articles rather than compiling them into a book.

After the first few chapters, I began to think I never wanted to read nor hear the word pink again. More depressing is the fact that she is correct in her descriptions of our consumerist run society. Market campaigns play a much larger role in our daughters' self-views than ever before. As the author states, rather than giving girls freedom from the traditional stereotyped constraints, companies are merely packaging those constraints in a way that is geared to convince girls to chose them.

In a world where every little girl is expected to idolize packages princesses and where our home, free of the typical character royalty, is unique even among more progressive thinkers, the concepts are thought provoking for some and old hat to others. The book had potential but fell short. Readers would be better off checking out Packaging Girlhood.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of Cinderella Ate My Daughter from Harper Collins Publishers.

7 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

Girlie Girl Guile

Every little girl is a princess and pink has pervaded our culture. Peggy Orenstein's newest book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" is a interesting look into the so-called "girlie girl" culture. I'm very interested in reading about sneaky marketer tactics and their effects on children, and this was a new perspective.
Are we limiting our daughters by giving into their princess fantasies? Why do girls need pink baseball bats, pink camo, pink everything? Is it feminist to discourage girls toys when that just shows them that being a girl is bad or some how worth less? Orenstein tries to answer these questions and more.
Let me just say, I really enjoyed this book. I agree with some of the other reviewers that it was a bit fluffy, but for someone who is not an expert in the subject, I liked the highly personal, blogger-esque feel to it. Because of this I think it is a book that many people can read enjoyably without it being too academic. I also enjoyed that Orenstein herself seemed so relatable as a human. I was afraid that it would be preachy, talking about the wonderful things she does. Instead, she seemed very sincere and admitted her failings. I really appreciated that.
As for the content, I felt myself torn between my own experiences and the things I might want for my future children. I personally loved Disney princesses, American Girl dolls and fairy tales as a child (still do!) and don't believe that I was damaged. I want my children to be able to enjoy these things too, does this make me a bad (future) mother? But I found myself agreeing that brand name toys limit the range of play. It seems that a lot of children these days are unable to make something up themselves; could the children be stuck in the stories of the characters? I also agreed a lot with the section on the usage of the internet by children. As we see time and time again, children have been getting themselves in trouble by putting themselves on stage on the internet. How do we protect them without overprotecting them? I felt that though most of these questions remain unanswered, Orenstein is trying to open the dialogue.
All in all, I felt that this was a great introduction to thinking about how girl power could be making our daughters powerless. I believe I will read Orenstein's other works as well.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Waste of time!

This woman gives feminists a bad name. Her ideals and ideas about feminity and womanhood ate antiquated at best. Quit whining about having to raise your kid and explain life to them. The woman is a pseudo intellectual with an axe to grind against Disney and that's it! She really is missing the bigger picture, it took her 51 pages to make a coherent point and keeps rambling on about being worried about sending her daughter mixed signals about feminity yet denies her girlhood and feminity at every turn. You can dress like a princess and even have the doll without buying into the whole consumer culture, parents have done it foryears. She's not even a therapist so she's hardly an expert on children or childrearing.

2 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

Snowfur

Hey...

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

new perspective

Loved it. She and I had similar thoughts and now I have some some great ideas of how to raise my daughter.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Thought provoking

"Cinderella ate my Daughter" is a look at how consumer culture and hyper-sexuality affects young girls, as told by a self-proclaimed expert (I'm not doubting Orenstein's credentials, I'm just too lazy to double-check them up for the purposes of reviewing this book) on raising girls, and as a mother of a young daughter (her daughter, Daisy's age is never explicitly stated [or if it is, I missed it] but it can be inferred that in the stories told, Daisy was between the ages of 3 and 8.) It is an expansion of an article written by the author for the New York Times Magazine, to which she refers within the first few pages of the book. (honestly, said article is a good place to start--if I had read it first, I wouldn't have bought this book.) Confession time--I don't have kids, and very rarely have contact with little girls. I downloaded this book because I thought it would be a good place to start for a paper I'm writing. That being said, this is the first book I've downloaded (that I don't also have a paper copy of) solely for the purpose of research. The Nook isn't really designed for research--for instance, rather than being able to click back and forth between text and notes and the bibliography, I had to bookmark, highlight and note (then on a piece of paper, re-write my notes, because, frankly, the annotation system for the Nook sucks) then look up Orenstein's notes or bibliography, and hope that I hadn't lost my place in the mean time. Suffice it to say, I wish I'd either a) got the paper version, or b) waited until I saw this book in the library. Actually, c) both. That being said...this was a thought provoking book. With only about 160 pages of actual text, it was a fairly quick read. While apparently well researched (again, problems with the Nook, I had a hard time connecting Orenstein's notes and bibliography to the actual text itself) it was written in a popular enough style to be easily accessible and understood. This is a book for a concerned parent, not, as I've discovered, an English major with an interest in childhood development. I wish there was more talk about boys and boy culture in this book--though, I do understand that Orenstien is writing from the position as an expert on raising girls, and as the mother of a daughter. And while the points she brings up about girls are thought provoking and at times terrifying, the information mentioned almost in passing about boys is equally so.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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