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Women were not the only ones to experience a deep and significant dissatisfaction with "traditional" children's books, however. Calls were also heard from representatives of the ethnocultural minorities. There, the primary complaint was that, for the most part, as far as children's books were concerned -- in either words or pictures -- the members of minority cultures simply were not given any place. Secondary to this (but equally critical) was the recognition that here too the worst kind of stereotyping frequently prevailed.
Efforts to right this particular wrong have perhaps been slower in coming to fruition but again it is the small publishing houses which have been the most instrumental in moving towards change. James Lorimer & Co., for instance, instituted a special series focussing on work by minority culture writers and also introduced books like Cedric and the North End Kids. Part of the Where We Live series for classroom use, it is the story of a young Jamaican immigrant. Gradually, then, a body of literature is emerging which represents all our peoples more fully and of which Paul Yee's The Curses of Third Uncle, Maria Campbell's Little Badger and the Fire Spirit and Barbara Smucker's Underground to Canada play an important part.
Partially at issue in both sex-role and cultural stereotyping is the need to take a stance within and before the community. Of equal relevance, however, is the concern for the strength children gain from experiencing themselves -- as themselves -- represented in all their hopes and powers and potentials. Out of this, there is concern for the damage done to them both as members of society and as individual human beings when always and always they turn the pages to find they are not "there".
These concerns have spilled over into other areas. They have had a formative place in the recent desire to depict children caught in modern family dilemmas, like that of Ani Croche or Jill in Please Michael, That's My Daddy's Chair; the wish to reassure children about the normalcy of their feelings, as in I Love My Babysitter.
These are simple examples in books for young children, but books for older children have been affected at least as much. The world of teenage literature is a world which reaches out by admitting -- in books like Kevin Major's Hold Fast! or Marilyn Halvorson's Cowboys Don't Cry -- that teenagers may get themselves in serious trouble; which tells them in works like Aller retour: roman that in truth adults may be wrong too.
 
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