The story
How can a story be only for a girl, or a sticker book be just for a boy? Back when our campaign launched, titles like ‘The Beautiful Girls’ Book of Colouring’ or ‘Illustrated Classics for Boys’ were on the shelves in toy shops, bookstores and supermarkets around the UK and Ireland.
Just like labelling toys ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’ these books send out very limiting messages to children about what kinds of things are appropriate for girls or for boys. Blue covers, with themes of action and adventure, robots, space, trucks and pirates contrast with a riot of pink sparkles, fairies, princesses, flowers and butterflies. But real children’s interests are a lot more diverse, and more interesting, than that.
The campaign
On World Book Day in 2014, in collaboration with children’s booksellers Letterbox Library, we launched our Let Books Be Book campaign with a petition asking publishers to drop the gendered titles.
We were pleased with the immediate overwhelmingly positive response to the campaign, including supportive media coverage in the Telegraph, Independent, and Guardian newspapers. Katy Guest, the then-literary editor at the Independent, promised the paper and website “will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys.”
Guardian Witness ran a campaign in support of our ‘Boys Read Girls’ shoutout, asking for men to share what females characters they admired as kids, or parents to share about their boys who enjoy reading about girl characters.
Author support
We were also thrilled that so many authors came out in support of the Let Books Be Books campaign, including former Children’s Laureates Anne Fine and Malorie Blackman, former Poet Laureate Carol-Ann Duffy, SF Said, John Dougherty, Bel Mooney, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman, Catherine Johnson, Chuck Wendig, Jessica Spanyol and author of the ‘His Dark Materials’ series, Philip Pullman.
Publishers’ response
We were really pleased that respected educational publisher Usborne was the first to announce that it would not be commissioning any new boys/girls titles, saying in the Guardian that a plan to “discontinue publication of titles such as these was decided some time ago”. They added that the company takes “feedback on gender-specific titles very seriously”, and now has “no plans to produce any titles labelled ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’ in the future”.
Since then, Buster Books, Scholastic, Parragon, Egmont, Ladybird Books (Random House), Chad Valley, Dorling Kindersley, Miles Kelly and Hachette publishers have told us they will not be releasing any new girl/boy labelled titles, and Paperchase has agreed to withdraw gendered activity books.