Katha Pollitt The Smurfette Principal Summary

Katha Pollitt is a prize winning poet, critic and essayist, who often writes about gender politics, media trends, domestic and foreign policies, and popular culture. In “The Smurfette Principal,” she revealed the inequity of gender in children’s programming, using her own experience as a mother of a three year old daughter. She examines children’s books, movies, and TV programming and finds that in most of them male characters are active main characters and female characters are just sidekicks, or helpers of the males. She named this principal “The Smurfette Principal.”
This Christmas Pollitt gave her daughter Sophie, her own cassette of The Little Mermaid. Ariel, the teen-ager fish girl who trades her voice for legs to marry to a prince, who

she have seen only few times. The witch who gives Ariel legs, sings “On land it’s much preferred for ladies not to say a word,” but since she is baddie no one agrees that she is correct.
“But The Little Mermaid was my idea” Pollitt said.

She chose Ariel, because comparing with Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty, she is active and main character of her own life. She even saves the prince who she is willing to marry.
If you check the kids section in a video store, almost every one of the videos will be for boys and boys starred videos. Same for the TV programming, Pollitt could not find a single cartoon or show with a female main character. Even in her childhood there were only male characters.
The Smurfette Principle is on every show. For example, popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the message is boys are the center and the girls are only there in relation to boys. Sesame Street is the only place which you see girls having fun together, but even there the stars the real stars whom kids cherish are males too. Pollitt knew one girl who was disappointed when she found out that even Big Bird, her last hope was a boy.
“Let’s play weddings” says her little niece, which is the only time where the girl is the center. All these lead to sexism. Little girls are choosing their dream depending on boy characters when admiring the clothes of princess same time. Some try to be exceptional women in men’s world, others just taught to accept their

fate.
We don’t really care about what happens with our kids, and what messages they get from their entertainment. Pollitt’s daughter, who is clever and adventurous is starting to doubt about gender ideas, and she watches very little Television. Pollitt and her husband try to not let the entertainment and society to affect her daughter, but it would help more if half of the monsters on TV were female.