When Women Were Dragons

Kelly Barnhill sets the majority of the events of the novel, including the pivotal Mass Dragoning, in 1955 midwestern America. Within American culture, the overall tone and focus of the 1950s were heavily influenced by the national myth of the American Dream, which proposes that with enough hard work, anyone, no matter their social status or economic class, can achieve the prosperity they desire. On the heels of World War II, and in one of the most prosperous economic periods of America, the ideal household was portrayed as one that sported the newest technological conveniences, raised at least two children, and was run by a hardworking father and a picture-perfect “housewife.” “Housewives” were therefore expected to focus entirely on the minutiae of the domestic setting. Many women who built careers for themselves during the late 1940s because of the national war efforts were no longer invited into the workforce as readily, and instead, many were shackled by the expectation that they would return to the home to resume their roles as obedient mothers and wives who lived only to please their husbands with warm meals and quiet, well-behaved children.

When Women Were Dragons investigates and refutes these expectations, emphasizing the now widely accepted point that the 1950s-era image of the American “housewife” is an oppressive and impossible ideal. In the effort to live up to the unrealistic standards of behavior that primarily white, middle-class American women were expected to inhabit, the women who forced themselves to fit into this mold had to suppress their rage and desire—accepting the injustice of their limited existence and denying their ambitions for a freer lifestyle. The picturesque image of quiet, suburban families with two children and an apple pie in the window is a problematic, simplistic, and homogenizing one that is still perpetuated today in movies and advertisements alike. The complexity of human lives, however, is far more dynamic than such an ideal allows, for true femininity contains the raw, elemental power of dreams, desires, and the pursuit of joy. Thus, second-wave feminism began in the 1960s as a direct response to the sterile, repressed version of femininity that was widely extolled as the epitome of female virtue during the 1950s.

It is also very important to note that the US civil rights movement dovetailed with these societal trends and events; for example, December 1955 marked Rosa Parks’s infamous refusal to sit in the back of the bus, and it is no accident that the novel’s “Mass Dragoning” event, which marks the transformation of hundreds of thousands of repressed women into dragons, also occurs in 1955. Thus, Barnhill’s novel, while it draws heavily from the stereotypes of the white, middle-class, 1950s American household, also contains a plethora of parallels to the broader concerns of racism and prejudice that gave rise to the civil rights movement. Likewise, the community’s systemic segregation of dragoned women and the silent alienation and internalized shame of their families mirrors the far-reaching psychological and social effects of racism and segregation in 1950s and 1960s America.