Just as most people can remember exactly when, if ever, they had “the talk” with their parents, most millennial women can probably tell you about the first time they cracked open a slim little book called The Care and Keeping of You. Published in 1998 by American Girl, this trim, 104-page manual has taught millions of preteens — yes, it has sold more than 2 million copies — about personal hygiene and what to expect from puberty.
Its author, Valorie Lee Schaefer, finalized her book while she was on bed rest with her first daughter. Twenty-five years later, she took to Elle magazine to look back on the legacy of her wildly successful book.
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“We wanted to encourage and empower girls to step up and start to take ownership of their own health, hygiene, and well-being,” she wrote. “We wanted to plant the seed of an idea: Your parents and other grown-ups are there to help you, but it’s your body — a message that’s still timely today, even if it hits in a slightly different way.”
It’s not hard to guess where this is going. Girls in 2023 have inherited a world worse than that of their peers born in 1998, Schaefer wrote. Why? Because of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, of course.
“If my daughter were born today in 2023, she’d arrive into a political landscape where women and girls have less fundamental human rights in many parts of the U.S. than they did in 1998, less say over what happens to their own bodies,” she wrote.
Schaefer described Roe as “affirming a person’s right to reproductive self-determination,” as if women, in choosing whom to sleep with and when, are not the governors of their own reproductive fates. (Of course, there are tragic exceptions to this rule, ones that many state abortion restrictions acknowledge.)
Schaefer wrote that for young girls, the messages of The Care and Keeping of You “still ring true, even if their state laws tell them otherwise: You are strong. You are capable. You are worthy. The future belongs to you.”
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Hopefully, young readers don’t stumble upon the op-ed that tells them they have no future without the “human right” to end their pregnancies. With her pro-abortion rights lecture, Schaefer seems to forget the thing that made The Care and Keeping of You so popular: Without wading into politics or controversial discussions of gender and sexuality, the book simply encouraged young girls by teaching them the facts about their development.
But that was a different time. Now, American Girl’s A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image, which came out in 2022, instructs children about gender ideology. As Schaefer seems to imply, a book as simple and influential as The Care and Keeping of You may never be made again. What she doesn’t realize, however, is that we have only the ideologues to blame.