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“When did every little girl become a princess?” journalist and “girl expert” Peggy Orenstein (Schoolgirls) asks in Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

It’s not a casual question: Orenstein had begun to observe that her young daughter, Daisy, was blithely skipping down the sparkly path of Disney-approved play ideas and high-priced, morally questionable figurines. Orenstein craved a detailed map of that path. So she dove headfirst into the swamp of marketing, science and sociology that makes being a girlie-girl—in all its pink, princessy glory—such an alluring role for females of all ages. If you’re anticipating a screeching rant on how parents have turned their daughters into midriff-bearing fembots, you’re way off. Orenstein refuses to play the blame game. “I am hardly one to judge other mothers’ choices: my own behavior has been hypocritical, inconsistent, even reactionary,” she writes.

More than anything, Orenstein is curious, and her insatiable quest for knowledge—ever the brave soul, she even attends a Miley Cyrus concert—reveals how the imagination of girlhood has been reduced to a troubling, and highly marketed, uniformity. Thanks to the deregulation of children’s television in the 1980s, cartoons now resemble advertisements with plots. Meanwhile, the reason why younger girls have ditched Barbie for Bratz lies in a principle marketers call Kids Getting Older Younger: “Toys and trends start with older children,” Orenstein explains, “but younger ones, trying to be like their big brothers and sisters, quickly adopt them.” Though she investigates many subjects you’ve probably heard too much about—sexting, children’s beauty pageants—Orenstein’s witty, pointed commentary always adds insight and clarity: “There is power—magic—in awareness,” she writes.

Today’s girls walk a perilous tightrope. Can they be feminine without being sexualized? Is it possible to keep their friends while maintaining their own identity and values? Orenstein has given parents invaluable assistance in helping their daughters find their own answers.

Copyright 2011 BookPage Reviews.

New York Times Magazine contributor Orenstein (Waiting for Daisy, 2007, etc.) investigates the impact of early sexualization on girls.

In this witty, well-documented study, the author of Schoolgirls (1994) examines the not-so-innocent side of princess culture represented by Cinderella and her sister Disney royals. Orenstein looks at the way race-based images of idealized female beauty and behavior, themselves the product of aggressive and manipulative marketing campaigns, influence preteen girls. Before they reach kindergarten, female children have already been indoctrinated in the idea that how they look is more important than who they are. Foundations have been laid for the idea that prettiness—and a narcissistic concern with the external self—is the true path to empowerment. The main issue Orenstein addresses, however, is whether Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel and Belle (and their less popular, darker-skinned counterparts, Mulan and Pocahontas) protect young girls from early sexualization or prepare them to be consumers of clothes, grooming aids, toys, music and other forms of media that seem to celebrate underage sexuality. During the course of her research, Orenstein visited the Toy Fair ("the industry's largest trade show"), specialty "girl" stores such as American Girl Palace, the Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant for preteen girls, a Miley Cyrus concert and social-networking sites such as Webkinz and Facebook. The author discovered that while girls have more role models than ever before to show them that they can become anything they wish, they are also under much greater pressure from an extraordinarily young age to prove their femininity. That Orenstein is the mother of a young, biracial daughter makes the narrative even more readable than her bestselling earlier writings on girlhood and self-esteem. Rather than writing as a concerned but detached observer, she approaches her subject as a parent seeking practical ways to negotiate a complex cultural landscape that has been as confusing for her as a mother and woman as it has been potentially damaging for the girl she is raising.

Intelligent and richly insightful.

Orenstein, who has written about girls for nearly two decades (Schoolgirls), finds today's pink and princess-obsessed girl culture grating when it threatens to lure her own young daughter, Daisy. In her quest to determine whether princess mania is merely a passing phase or a more sinister marketing plot with long-term negative impact, Orenstein travels to Disneyland, American Girl Place, the American International Toy Fair; visits a children's beauty pageant; attends a Miley Cyrus concert; tools around the Internet; and interviews parents, historians, psychologists, marketers, and others. While she uncovers some disturbing news (such as the American Psychological Association's assertion that the "girlie-girl" culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' susceptibility to depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, and risky sexual behavior), she also finds that locking one's daughter away in a tower like a modern-day Rapunzel may not be necessary. Orenstein concludes that parents who think through their values early on and set reasonable limits, encourage dialogue and skepticism, and are canny about the consumer culture can combat the 24/7 "media machine" aimed at girls and hold off the focus on beauty, materialism, and the color pink somewhat. With insight and biting humor, the author explores her own conflicting feelings as a mother as she protects her offspring and probes the roots and tendrils of the girlie-girl movement. (Jan.)