Happy Birthday, Nancy Drew

Maggie says:
Check out this great Salon tribute to mystery-solving heroine Nancy Drew, who turns 75 this month. I grew up obsessed with the old yellow hardcover Nancy Drew mysteries – and today every one is safely boxed away in the attic for any future Adams girls (thanks Mom!).

Nancy was the best role model any young girl could have had – she was smart, brave, level-headed, and a great friend to Bess and George, her female sidekicks. Her boyfriend Ned Nickerson figured less prominently in the original novels – he’d show up for dances but would end up getting kidnapped by the villain and need to be saved by his girlfriend, really featuring Nancy as the first feminist icon for young girls. Nancy and Ned had the perfect relationship – he was there and she enjoyed his company, but he wasn’t at all her top priority, she was her own self. And her friend Bess made a striking contrast, too – Bess was the pretty blonde one who was shy and boy-crazy, but ended up in trouble because she trusted the wrong person or had a broken heel and was caught by the bad guy. Nancy was the thinking girl’s heroine – I guess that’s why she was mine.

The new Nancy Drews are updated for modern readers: they’re written in the first-person and make her less perfect and more human – she has doubts and an interior dialogue now that shows her weaknesses. The publishers believe today’s girl readers would be put off by such a model of perfection, they’d be intimidated by her strength and force of will. Growing up on the old Nancy Drew, though, I saw her as what girls could grow up to be – anything and everything we wanted to.

So happy birthday, Nancy Drew. May you inspire as many girls of today and tomorrow as you did yesterday. This girl reader says thanks.