Whitman
Girls are different than boys and the sooner they learn that the better. One way is to make them read short stories that reaffirm the special status of girldom. Thus the introduction to A Batch of the Best:
What is a story for girls? It's a story that only girls can truly feel and understand, that's what!
Interesting as boys are (and aren't they!), they do have a way of being contented with just the surface things in a story...the action. Not you, though. You're a girl, and you like to see beneath the surface and find out how the characters feel, why they feel that way, and what they ought to do about it. That's why you'll like A Batch of the Best.
To summarize: boys = surface driven lunkheads / girls = deep feelings. Thus begins a life of heterosexual misery.
Editor Greiner returned two years later to hurl some more missives at boy idiocy:
Girls are special in many ways, but one of the very nicest is their taste in reading. Girls like variety. They want more than just adventure tales or stories about people in deadly danger--climbing the face of a mountain or tracking a vicious bear or fighting it out with bad guys--you know the kind of thing. Girls want a story collection that lets them react in a lot of different ways to a lot of different characters in a lot of different situations.
Each introduction then summarizes, in teaser form, the basic situation facing each girl in each story:
TENA has to learn--but fast!--how to control a huge, spoiled dog who's a real delinquent. In the process, she learns how to handle her problems with a boy and a scholarship.
DARLENE'S highly unsatisfactory love life is set right only after her young brother takes to tossing a pair of raw chickens hither and yon--and finally in the direction of a new boy.
DIANE--plain, serious-minded, brilliant--learns, when tragedy strikes, that the world needs the pretty, less-than-brilliant girls, too.
CLARE, bitter and withdrawn after her hand is mutilated, is forced, when Jon needs her friendship and understanding, to stop thinking only of herself.
NANCY, who wants only to be an architect, gets miserably involved in a project with the sewing class. But good old Nancy comes through, in her own weird and wonderful way!
Boys, presumably, were reading books about dirt-bikes, kung fu, and remaining emotionally aloof.
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