Children’s books are a microcosm of mainstream culture. I will shortly introduce society’s general perspective of women’s roles in the 1990s in order to reveal how children’s books internalized those ideas.
The 1990s in the United States had a general trend of decreasing centrality of marriage and family as well as the pay gap between men and women. According to The American Women: A Concise History written by Susan Ware, American women began to marry at a later age. The average age of first marriage was twenty for women in 1960, and it was twenty-three for women in 1990. What’s more, the number of single mothers also grew. 5 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers in 1960, 18 percent in 1980, and 33 percent in 2000. According to “The US gender pay gap in the 1990s: slowing convergence”, the female-to-male pay ratio rose from 63 percent in 1979 to 74 percent in 1989 and 80 percent in 1998.
There were also more women entering the workforce that were dominated by men, and society’s attitude also inclined more to gender equality. Lillian Faderman pointed out in Woman: The American History of an Idea that by 2000, nearly half of the law students and half of medical students were women, and about 40 percent of the seats in dental schools were occupied by women. However, almost three-quarters of the female labor force remained in predominantly female occupations, such as teaching, nursing, clerical and sales work, health care, and personal service and the percentage of working women who were the mothers of school-age children began to drop starting from the early 2000s and only 15 percent of them worked full-time. The rest of them worked part-time or gave up their careers completely.