Livre d'Or

Thing is, if my parents had believed that the role of women is to provide support for men rather than achieve in our own right, they wouldn't have paid money to send me to an academically competitive girls' school. So the existence of single-sex education wouldn't have been much help to me.

As for literature, I completely managed to miss that message, because I'm not very good at paying attention to gender cues in literature. Partly I just related to the most interesting character in whatever I happened to be reading, without really caring if they were male or female (and sometimes not even noticing, I was convinced that Kim was a girl since he has what I think of as a girl's name). I don't think I was anything like subtle enough to pick up that sexist subtext from reading about Pauline Petrova and Polly, or Susan and Titty and Nancy and Peggy, or Jo and Mary-Lou, or even Susan and Lucy and Polly and Jill, though as an adult I've read essays pointing out that Lewis was in fact unfair to his girl characters, especially Susan.