Evie, Meenie, Miney, Mo
A BRIEF STUDY IN FICTIONAL FEMALE ROLE MODELS
I am a product of flesh, blood, and television.
One of the best things my parents ever did for me was let me watch TV. The important bit here is that I was never alone with it, and I never got to choose what was on.
My parents made sure my sister and I saw a steady satellite stream of good female role models long before we were capable of reading about them for ourselves.
The influence of these fictional women was so subtle it’s taken me twenty-eight years to detect some of it, but I’ll try my best to unpack it now.
Mulan was the first film I saw in theatres. I didn’t understand what cross-dressing was, but I knew from context that impersonating a solider was bad. Being yourself, though, was ultimately good and far less deadly.
Mulan sent the message that it was (eventually) commendable for a woman to take up a sword and fight for what she wants. This I learned at three years old.
Fa Mulan was joined quickly by the 1960’s Velma Dinkley, who taught me early on that brains will save you and that pretty blond men can be dumb.
Tzipporah showed me how to slip the bonds of my own distress. Megara taught me that you can be a damsel without letting the label define you. Kim Possible informed me that sometimes the dumb blond boy is the damsel. And that cheerleaders can be smart.
Speaking of cheerleaders: Bring It On is a war movie, and the opposing sides are led by female captains. From the Clovers I learned the value of creativity, and from the Toros the value of honesty.
Fox Studios’ Anastasia revealed it was possible to be both a princess and a spitfire. And that maybe high heels come in handy after all. I also blame that movie for my taste in partners, but that’s an essay for another time.
I watched gritty, complicated things, too. Major Maraget Houlihan might not have been squeaky clean, but she was a head nurse in a male-dominated and quite literal field. I spent every afternoon for five years with her, learning that there was a benefit to getting your hands dirty.
When M*A*S*H wasn’t on, Sister, Sister was. And a half-hour of that predominantly female cast was every bit as funny as the half-hours of male-centric sitcoms that bookended it weekdays on WGN.
If you were to hold my cells under a microscope, every one of them would be a film reel for A League of Their Own. I watched that movie long before I understood where all the men went. It didn’t matter where the men went — Woody from Toy Story was hanging out with a bunch of the coolest women I had ever seen.
I didn’t learn a damn thing about baseball, but I learned that you could be an athlete, a wife, a mother, and still have room in your heart for found family. And room in your suitcase for your baseball glove.
A complement to the 1940’s bat-wielding housewives were the women dancing on bars in their 2000’s low-rise jeans. I knew all the words to Coyote Ugly before my boobs came in.
It taught me that women can hold male jobs, which can be a means to a dream. While my adult life is curiously bereft of the hot Aussie men I was promised, I now have multiple uses for a freezer.
But from the moment I could form words, I was quoting Evelyn Carnahan, a 1920’s librarian obsessed with Ancient Egypt. Evie saves a man from the gallows in the first ten minutes of The Mummy. Did I know what gallows were when I was four? No. Did I need to, to understand that Evie is every bit the hero Rick is? Also no.
My family quotes the film a lot, but no line quite as often as “They’re led by a woman; what does a woman know?”
Even at age four I gathered that the answer was “a good bit.” You don’t get to ride off into the sunset with a hot gunslinger and a camel full of treasure if you’re dumb. Evie wasn’t dumb. She was a librarian.
I can’t mention librarians without mentioning two Emma Watson roles: Belle and Hermione (not in that order). Hermione Granger’s booksmarts hit the silver screen when I hit first grade, and suddenly, before anyone could mock me for my only hobby, reading was cool. Belle has. . . other issues to unpack, but illiteracy isn’t one of them.
I grew up with fewer book heroines. The good ones were often hidden at reading levels above my comprehension (Jane Eyre) or buried in an ensemble cast (The Bailey School Kids, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Mortal Instruments). Before the advent of Katniss, I had Nancy, Bess, and George.
And it absolutely was an advent. I was seventeen before Katniss Everdeen forced Hollywood to realize people would pay to see a franchise helmed by a woman. It was 2012 before we were allowed to be the main characters in our own stories.
“Make sure she’s married by the end,” a publisher demands of a female author’s main character in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women. Because our stories don’t matter unless there’s a man prominently featured in them. American society reinforced that idea until 2012, until Katniss. They reinforced it for nearly 150 years (Little Women was originally published in 1868).
I read Little Women when I was fourteen, and most of it went over my head. But it was enough for me to understand that Jo March wore pants, wrote stories, and did whatever she wanted. Especially if it upset polite society.
I’ve got the pants, I wrote the stories. Two down, one to go.