Sugar and spice and everything nice? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Whatever you think boys and girls are made of, you can forget it—Pippi Longstocking takes traditional gender roles and throws them out the window. Sure Annika is a conventional 1950s girl—polite, proper, helpful, kind, and well dressed. And Tommy, her brother, is a typical boy. He too is well dressed and polite (that's the kind of family these kids come from), but he's more of a risk taker than his sister.
And then there's Pippi. She lives on her own, she never cries (though both Tommy and Annika do), and she's stronger than the strongest man in the world. Crooks who think little girls are easy targets need to think again when it comes to Pippi, and anyone who believes girls need to conform to society's ideas of beauty to fit in can take a hike, too. Pippi doesn't play those games, but she still comes out on top.
Questions About Gender
- Pippi was written in the late 1940s and published in 1950. What kinds of roles did women play in society at that time? (Remember—this is a Swedish book, so check to see if there was a big difference between women's positions in Sweden and in your country.)
- In what ways might the character Pippi have challenged stereotypes about women and girls in the 1950s? How is she different from what was expected of a young girl at that time?
- Does Pippi still challenge stereotypes in today's world? How? What stereotypes still exist in terms of the ways men and women (and boys and girls) are expected to behave?
Chew on This
If Pippi Longstocking had been published for the first time in the year 2010, Pippi wouldn't be considered a feminist icon at all; she'd just be a weird kid who lived with a monkey and a horse and happened to be super-strong.
Even though Pippi Longstocking was written over sixty years ago, it still challenges gender roles today.