It started with Hop on Pop. The copy I have is the one I read as a child. Sometimes Henry gets into it and wants to read it over and over, although he often ignores it. He's actually memorized some sections. Anyway, one evening as I read it to him, I noticed the character Mr. Brown introduced with his wife. We then follow Mr. Brown through various events but wife never returns -- he doesn't even bother to invite her to his snack soiree with the hirsute Mr. Black! Must have been a business lunch.
And then there's the generic family of Mother, Father, Sister, Brother and Other Brother featured at the end of the book. Sister praises the reading prowess of her brothers and her father but never mentions her own or her mother's ability to read. Eh?
The last straw came as I was reading I Can Lick Thirty Tigers Today, a collection of three tales related to the Cat in the Hat's family which is part of Henry's current rotation. The last story is about the Cat's daughter and how she finds herself hosting a huge, green chatty Glunk who's bent on running up the Hat family's long distance phone bill. It's not enough that the "trouble" occurs because daughter has decided to use her mind for more than thinking up innocuous fuzzy cute things but she's denied the ability to solve the problem herself. Ordinarily, daughter uses her imagination in small ways and when she's through with the little stuffed animals floating in thought bubbles around her head she uses her "UN-thinker" to erase them. Woe to her when she tries for something more "fun" than fuzzy doe-eyed widgets. Her puny female brain is unable to erase the Glunk. According to the Glunk, he cannot be un-thunk. However, we are shown that he is vulnerable to un-thunking as long as it's the BROTHER's mind that's doing the job. Oh, and for good measure, we then see brother chewing out sister for thinking outside her station. She looks properly chastised and happily returns to fluffy little placid thoughts that are all she should ever really hope for.
I know this is the problem with favoring "classic" children's books. Don't even get me started on Curious George. But I had always thought Dr. Seuss was an author I could trust to be a steadfast pillar of imaginative, compassionate children's books. I understand that dear Mr. Geisel wrote these two in the mid-sixties when women were still largely ignored, but with all the acclaim about Dr. Seuss redeeming children's literature from the "dreary world of Dick and Jane" I expected more from him. So many of his other books have strong messages of social justice. So perhaps I should just tuck these two books away for a little chuckle later on when Henry's learned a little more about girls and boys.
Huh?