From the 1970 book...

[telophase]

If you have never removed the hair from your underarms or your legs and decide to do so, you should ask your mother or teacher or some other adult to show you how.

Barring the unfortunate cases where you can't ask your mom or sister or other close friend or relative, I think that asking a teacher to show you how to shave your legs would rank right up there among the list of humiliating things in your life.

However, this book does what none of the previous books did: acknowledge the existence of black people. We see black girls and women in the photos and illustrations, although Asians don't appear to exist yet. The 1959 book had a few photos that might have had Latino/as in them - I can't tell for sure, just going by appearance - but they tended to be from newspaper file photos of kids in Houston and San Antonio, as the book was written by the woman who was head of the homemaking department in the Houston Independent School District at the time, and the South Texas areas tend to be heavily Latino. The photos from other sources remain resolutely white.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

*snrrrrk*