Let Books Be Books

Let Books Be Books was founded in March 2014 as a campaign to persuade publishers of children’s books to stop labelling and promoting books as 'for boys' or 'for girls'. The campaign, which is led by parents and traces its origins to a thread on the on-line forum Mumsnet, is a spin-off of the Let Toys be Toys campaign, which seeks to get toy manufactures to stop gendering their products.

In its founding statement, the campaign said: “Children are listening, and take seriously the messages they receive from books, from toys, from marketing and the adults around them. Do we really want them to believe that certain things are off-limits for them because of their gender? They’re not ‘getting it wrong’ if a girl likes robots, or if a boy wants to doodle flowers. […] It’s time that publishers Let Books Be Books and leave children free to choose their interests for themselves”.

Prominent authors supporting the Let Books Be Books campaign include former and current children's laureates Anne Fine and Malorie Blackman, the poet laureate Carol-Ann Duffy, and Philip Pullman.

Anne Fine told UK newspaper The Guardian:

"You'd think this battle would have been won decades ago. But even some seemingly bright and observant adults are buying into it again […] There are girls of all sorts, with all interests, and boys of all sorts with all interests. Just meeting a few children should make that obvious enough. But no, these idiotic notions are spouted so often they become a self-fulfilling societal straitjacket from which all our children suffer".

Also speaking to The Guardian, Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, said:

"I'm against anything, from age-ranging to pinking and blueing, whose effect is to shut the door in the face of children who might enjoy coming in. No publisher should announce on the cover of any book the sort of readers the book would prefer. Let the readers decide for themselves".

In the week following the campaign's launch, Parragon Books responded on Twitter, tweeting: "Feedback on gender-specific titles is important to us. We have no plans to create new titles referring to boy/girl in the UK". In the same week, publisher Usborne announced that a plan to "discontinue publication of titles such as these was decided some time ago”, adding that the company took "feedback on gender-specific titles very seriously” and that it had "no plans to produce any titles labelled 'for girls' or 'for boys' in the future".

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Wikipedia