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Educating to Israeli Feminism? A Feminist Reading of Girls’ Illustrations in Israeli Children’s Literature 1948–2019

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Abstract

This study examines illustrations of girls in Israeli children’s literature of the years 1948–2019. 54 illustrated books for children in which the image of a girl is at the center were analyzed. The illustrations were examined according to two key periods: 1940s–1976, and 1977–2019. The research findings did not confirm the conventional understanding, which maintains that the literature of the 1940s and 1950s promoted chauvinistic representations while the literature of the late 1970s began to disseminate feminist messages. In each of the two periods examined, ambivalent messages were found connected to the image of the girl. Some of the illustrations fixate on a stereotypical and limited representation of the girl-image, while others promote a panoramic perception of it, presenting girls with a variety of appearances, a broad emotional range, and a dominant place within their environment. The analysis relates to the influence of women illustrators on the characterisation of girls: some illustrate in “two voices,” combining stereotypical illustrations with subversive ones, while others shatter the hegemonic myth of the pretty girl who is tidy and naïve, and present girls who break the rules and are often “bad.” The first generation of women illustrators paved the way for the second and the present generation, some of whom continue to speak in “two voices,” while others adopt a feminist ideology.

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Notes

  1. Shavid (2009) notes that when Pucho (Yisrael Visler) asked Horovitz to prettify Redheaded Aya, his book in 1960, and to give her fewer freckles, she refused to do so.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gordon College of Education, Haifa, Israel

    Shai Rudin

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  1. Shai Rudin
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Shai Rudin (Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature, Gordon College of Education, Haifa, Israel) investigates Children’s Literature and Women’s Writing. He writes about gender in Israeli children’s literature and the influences of radical feminist discourse on women’s writing (in adults’ literature as well as in children’s literature); the acceptance of women writers (for adults and children) in North America, Europe and Israel, the representations of women and children in Holocaust Literature and the appearance of violence as a super-theme in women’s writing. His book Violences (2012) deals with violence against women, girls and minorities and its poetic representations in literature (spatial violence, textual violence, and sexual violence). His book To Herself: Reading in Galila Ron-Feder-Amit’s Work published in 2018 and deals with an Israeli writer for children.

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Rudin, S. Educating to Israeli Feminism? A Feminist Reading of Girls’ Illustrations in Israeli Children’s Literature 1948–2019. Child Lit Educ 53, 52–75 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09438-9

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