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Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 104–129

Chapter 5
The angry caregiver

Gendered emotion in the Penderwicks series and the One Crazy Summer trilogy

| Illinois State University
The Penderwicks series by Jeanne Birdsall and the One Crazy Summer trilogy by Rita Williams-Garcia complicate the societal image of selfless maternal caring by legitimizing caregiving girls’ anger at the burdens placed on them by family members, gendered and racialized social roles, and their own complicity. These children’s texts depict the benefits of female anger, along with other instances of what Teresa Langle de Paz calls ‘feminist emotion,’ for an intersectional feminist ethics of care. Moreover, Williams-Garcia’s books, set during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, show that by learning to voice anger and make productive use of that often-abject emotion, young people can gain an apprenticeship in political action alongside a reshaping of interpersonal relationships.
Keywords: care ethics, gender, race, relational identity, family story, emotion, anger, narrative voice, political agency, caretaking
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The ethics of care and gendered emotions
  • The feminist emotions of the Penderwicks
  • From “angry and afraid” to “spilling over mad”: Caregiver anger and racial justice
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.05mor
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