Your Next Quietly Subversive Read Aloud

Consider 'Caddie Woodlawn'

Last year we picked up a box set from Costco (where a surprising number of our books come from) of Newbery Award-winning books. We chose our next read-aloud somewhat at random from that box; we wanted a one-and-done book before diving into a series after my eldest returns from sleepaway camp (she leaves tomorrow!).

From that box, we chose a book in honor of that child about a redheaded girl with a love for the outdoors and adventure, called Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink.

Written in 1935, but about life on the Wisconsin frontier around the time of the Civil War, the novel centers on a family who had come to make a home on a farm in the Midwest. While the other girls in the Woodlawn family are more traditional, Caddie was encouraged to grow strong by running with her brothers, getting into adventures, and being as unladylike as she pleased.

Spoiler alert:

Towards the end of the book, Caddie and her father have a heart-to-heart about shedding some of her tomboy ways, and he shared some beautiful and countercultural insight with his daughter that would be wonderful to share with your daughters, too.

In the story, Caddie had been disciplined by her mother far more harshly than her brothers for playing a prank on their cousin. Her father came into her bedroom to discuss the day’s events and why her mother reacted as she had:

Perhaps Mother was a little hasty today, Caddie. She really loves you very much, and, you see, she expects more of you than she would someone she didn’t care about. It’s a strange thing, but somehow we expect more of girls than of boys. It is the sisters and wives and mothers, you know, Caddie, who keep the world sweet and beautiful. What a rough world it would be if there were only men and boys in it, doing things in their rough way! A woman’s task is to teach them gentleness and courtesy and love and kindness. It’s a big task, too, Caddie-harder than cutting trees or building mills or damming rivers. It takes nerve and courage and patience, but good women have those things. They have them just as much as the men who build bridges and carve roads through the wilderness. A woman’s work is something fine and noble to grow up to, and it is just as important as a man’s. But no man could ever do it so well. I don’t want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and understanding heart, healthy in body and honest in mind. Do you think you would like to be growing up into that woman now? How about it, Caddie, have we run with the colts long enough?

After that conversation, Caddie tried her hand, successfully, at quilt-making, and found herself surprised at how much she enjoyed doing so. She inspired her brothers to try it, as well.

In our gender wars happening in the modern day, Caddie might have been told she was actually a boy. It’s funny, how in the modern imagining of gender roles, girls can’t be tomboys and boys can’t just try “girly” activities like quilt-making. No, boys can only do boy things, and girls can only do girly things; any deviation is met with serious suggestions of hormones or surgery.

In modern books, a great deal of content that touches on traditional gender roles and the different place of men and women is prescriptive; it feels forced and contrived. Caddie Woodlawn is a beautiful throwback we all need. It’s funny that we need a book from 1935 to inspire a more healthy conversation about the importance and beauty of being a woman and doing womanly things, but crazier things happen every day. Which is why we need classics more than ever.