sexism: books for tinies edition

[psocoptera]

Someone (who is hopefully not reading this) gave us a "Baby Einstein" book for Christmas (of the "press buttons and play annoying sounds" type, which is on the one hand annoying but on the other hand successfully enticed Q away from a power cord earlier this evening, so hey. But that is not actually what I am writing about.) What struck me is that it features five little animals, Baby Galileo, whose (trite and poorly-scanning) rhyme mentions the stars, Baby Mozart, who plays a flute, Baby Monet, who sees colorful flowers, Baby Vivaldi, who is taking a bath... and Mimi, who is eating breakfast. Now, setting aside the question of why Vivaldi is taking a bath, one of those names is not like the other ones. I couldn't come up with any cultural reference for Mimi - Wikipedia suggests the heroine of La Boheme, but a) I've personally seen Boheme three times and I didn't think of that, so I just don't think she has the same level of name recognition as Mozart or Monet, and b) she's a creation, not a creator. I really can't think of another explanation here besides "someone pointed out that there were no women in this book, so they stuck one in in the most half-assed way possible". Which is all a slow build to my actual point: what female "culture hero" *should* they have name-dropped (and if we can't come up with one at the Mozart/Monet/one-name-famous level, how fucked up is that?)?

Comments

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, you officially win. That is excellent.