Gendered Tales Children’s books often depict gender stereotypes, reinforcing in children from a young age the expected or accepted roles for men and women in society. For this project, I chose chosen two children’s books’ one with a female protagonist and one with a male protagonist that reinforce gender stereotypes. These male and female characters while amiable and relatable can be skew children’s view on their own and the opposite sex and limit their perspectives leading them to believe that they must display certain traits of the characters in the books they read in order to fit into society’s standards. The first book I chose is Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish. Amelia is a female maid, working for an upper class family. The family leaves Amelia with a long list of chores to complete. Even so, Amelia insists on making the family a lemon-meringue pie before tackling the tasks. Once she puts the pie in the oven, she begins her long list of chores. The first is to “change the towels”. Amelia takes this literally, and uses scissors to cut up the towels, essentially changing them. She then must “dust the furniture”, so she finds dusting powder and puts it all over the living room. Finding each task sillier than the last, she then has to “draw the drapes”. Amelia gets a pad of paper and a pen out and hand-draws the drapes. After this she is asked to “put the lights out”, so she unscrews all the lightbulbs in the house, and hangs them on a clothesline outside. After this, she has to “measure two cups of rice”, so Amelia casually gets her tape measure and measures the rice. Finally Amelia is to “dress the chicken” which she finds hilarious but nonetheless sets about piecing together fabric to make clothes for the chicken. After all of this, she gets her pie out of the oven and waits for the family to get home. As one could imagine, the family was not pleased with