Gender Ambiguity
Throughout his text, Baum is careful never to specify the gender of his character Chick the Cherub, even to the point of referring to Chick as "it" instead of "he" or "she." Chick dresses in androgynous pajamas; Neill pictures Chick in a Buster Brown haircut that could fit either a boy or a girl.
The publishers wanted Baum to resolve the ambiguity, but he refused. Eventually they made the best of the situation: in the publicity campaign for the original edition, Reilly & Britton conducted a contest in which the book's child readers could vote on the gender of Chick. The children who gave the best answers, in 25 words or less, won prizes.
The contest's second-place prize was won by a boy who read the story in the Seattle Times. His entry read, "The Cherub was a girl because if it had been a boy he would have eaten the ginger-bread man at once whether it agreed with him or not."
Read more about this topic: John Dough And The Cherub
Famous quotes containing the words gender and/or ambiguity:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.”
—Thomas Reid (1710–1769)