Anxious Mothers and Yummy Mummies
I research gender representation in children’s books and its change over time. The huge imbalance of representation in favour of male characters has been discussed extensively but for me personally, one of the most fascinating, though not so surprising, findings was the overwhelming frequency of occurrence of the word ‘mother’ and ‘Mum’ in children’s books. A mother is the most frequent female character type in the 19 th century books and remains to be also in contemporary texts for children. While in the 19 th century ‘mother’ occurs with similar frequency as ‘father’ and when they are mentioned together the order ‘father and mother’ is the established norm, in books published after the year 2000 it is ‘Mum’ that is more frequent than ‘Dad’ and ‘Mum and Dad’ has become the norm. However, mothers or mums are hardly ever the story protagonists. Sometimes we don’t even learn their names. Their defining feature, linguistically and otherwise, is that they are somebody’s mother. ...