It's A Man's Kingdom.

Since hearing some great interviews with the author of "Girl Land" on NPR, I've been spending some time thinking about that passage from girlhood to adulthood and what that means. This has got me thinking about the overlap of two interesting issues:

1. My desire to have and to be a strong female role model.
2. Disney princesses.

Allow me to illustrate, using Mitt Romney's favorite tool, the Venn Diagram.

On the right hand side we have our favorites: Belle, Ariel, Jasmine, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White. For me, and I imagine most young girls, these ladies were the first frontier in identifying femininity and womanhood. At a time in our lives when we knew "girl stuff" because it was pink and covered with bows, the Disney Princess lunch box was de rigueur. These women represented our fantasies of growing up, and informed so many of our childhood games.

And what an interesting set of women to play that role for us. Belle taught us that being bookish was cool and alluring. Ariel was the scientist and archaeologist, constantly prowling the deep seas for treasure untold. Jasmine was the ultimate self-posessed independent woman. Straying from tradition, sneaking into town, she wasn't some milquetoast loitering around on her veranda waiting to see if Aladin would come a callin'.

But there is one striking omission from all of these girl's lives: a mother. With the exception of Sleeping Beauty, whose life is rich with mothers of all kinds, each of these princesses was raised in a single father home. In several cases the father remarried to the evil stepmother, whose conflict with our princess is the main axis of the plot.

I guess we could chalk it up to the era when these stories were written, I suppose men often outlived their wives, who frequently died in childbirth. But it is interesting to me that these characters, who are so often a girl's first association with femininity and womanhood, are so squarely situated in a man's world. My point now, is that the middle section of the Venn Diagram appears to be empty, which strikes me as quite strange.

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