Girls Posing as Boys: Stories Still Worth Telling? A guest post by Linda Joan Smith

Somewhere, there is a photo that my dad took on my ninth birthday, of me and four of my friends lined up along our backyard fence. My friend Diana stands next to me in a frilly organdy party dress. I’m wearing corduroy pants and a beard made of brown yarn, and am holding the twenty-two rifle I had just inherited from my father. I am posing as Pa from The Little House books, ready to fend off the panthers of Wisconsin’s big woods. Somehow, I already knew that girls and women led more restricted lives than men and boys did, and I wanted my life to differ from that. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I longed to infiltrate the world of boys and lay claim to the additional freedoms they seemed to enjoy.

Stories like The Peach Thief, in which girl protagonists do just that—pose as boys in order to access freedoms otherwise denied them—date back to the 12^th century with The Ballad of Mulan, itself based on an earlier folk tale. They remain popular today. But a lot has changed since I was nine. Do we still need stories where girls masquerade as boys, when girls in so many countries have gained so much ground? When there are so many great middle-grade books out there, with spunky girls as their main characters, and so many YA books where heroic young women take on the world—and sometimes even save it? When girl protagonists now can do anything that boy protagonists can?

I think we do.

There’s the timeless fun of such stories, of course: everyone loves a masquerade and the misperceptions that ensue when a girl is in disguise. Romantic mix-ups and gender confusion abound, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays, manga, YA fantasy, and Korean rom-coms and historical dramas. Readers also enjoy the built-in suspense: how will a girl protagonist hide her breasts, deal with her period, change her voice, finally be discovered? There’s the practical aspect, too. When writing stories set in earlier times in history, authors know there are places their girl characters can’t realistically go, and things they can’t believably do, unless they are posing as boys. So, authors clothe them in trousers and set them free.

But there’s a deeper yearning in many girls I believe these tales continue to satisfy.

The female protagonists, whether living in the past or the present, are often undergoing the inexorable changes of puberty, the same as the preteen and teenage girls who are reading about them. For these readers, the differences between themselves and their male peers are suddenly undeniable, as are the new, intense feelings they may have about the boys around them. At the same time, societal pressures are newly coming to bear. For the first time, girls may experience sexism, either subtle or overt. It’s a tipping point, beyond which many girls become self-conscious, and critical of their bodies. They lose their confidence, and retreat from adventure. By age 13, I wanted someone else to shoot the panthers out there, thank you very much. And I was suddenly very, very aware of my knobby knees.

Yet girls’ fictional surrogates are doingthe opposite, in the face of far more rigid sex-role restrictions. With their breasts bound and voices lowered, these characters dive headfirst into adventures that bring out their innate strength and courage. They triumph over hardships. Secure themselves an education. Earn respect, perform with valor, receive accolades largely denied to girls and women throughout history. For a time, they become knights or warriors, join the British Air Service, sail the high seas. They earn money to save their families from ruin, become apprentices to dragons, survive the dangers of the westward journey, carry messages to General Washington. Drawing on their own inner fortitude and clarity of purpose, these characters gain power and confidence through the arc of their story, and sometimes change their worlds. Not because they are boys, or are acting like boys, but because they are girls who finally have the opportunity to be treated as equal. Which gives readers hope that such a thing is possible.

There’s a lot I’m not addressing here—similar stories with transgender or genderqueer characters, the role that romance plays in these plots (sometimes perpetuating gender stereotypes), the reasons more girl characters dress as boys than the other way around. There’s much to plumb. But for girl readers, perhaps part of the continued popularity of this story type is that they can bring back hope from these fictional realms—along with some measure of courage—to help them navigate in today’s world. Because girls continue to need that hope and courage, no matter their age.

In The Peach Thief, my 13-year-old protagonist—a starving workhouse girl—poses as a boy in order to get a tenuous job scrubbing pots in the all-male world of an earl’s walled kitchen garden. Partway through the story, she comes to a gut-wrenching conclusion: that even after all of her hard work, she’ll be lucky in this life to ever be thought as good as any man or boy. A writer friend told me, “You can’t say that to girls—it’s too discouraging.” I kept it as worded, though, because I believe that’s exactly how my 19^th century protagonist would have felt—and because she does find ample hope by the story’s end. But I also kept it because every time I reread that paragraph, it got to me in my own gut. Deeply. It felt true to my own life experience, stretching all the way back to age nine: that in spite of the advances we’ve made, girls and women still aren’t viewed by many as equal members of the human race. Even today.

At their best, tales in which girls pose as boys can help readers see that. They can help girls build the courage and confidence needed to push back against that inequity. They can help girls learn to speak out, strongly—with their own girl voices—against what restrains and restricts them. They can give girls hope.

That, to me, makes these stories still worth telling.

Middle Grade Books:

Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness series) By Tamora Pierce

Girl in Blue by Ann Rinaldi

One Half from the East by Nadia Hashimi

The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis

The Mad Wolf’s Daughter by Diane Magras

The Peach Thief by Linda Joan Smith

Tolliver’s Secret by Esther Wood Brady

Young Adult Books:

Bloody Jack by L. A. Meyer

Eon by Alison Goodman

Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas

The Thousand Names (The Shadow Campaigns series) by Django Wexler

Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee

Meet the author

Linda Joan Smith loves to travel back in time through the magic of books, and writes about the past for today’s young readers so they can do the same. She formerly worked as editor of Country Home magazine, as a freelance writer, and wrote garden books, yet her most fulfilling roles have been as a parent and library fundraiser. Learn more at lindajoansmith.com.

About The Peach Thief

The night that workhouse orphan Scilla Brown dares to climb the Earl of Havermore’s garden wall, she wants only to steal a peach—the best thing she’s tasted in her hard, hungry life. But when she’s caught by the Earl’s head gardener and mistaken for a boy, she grabs onto something more: a temporary job scrubbing flowerpots. If she can just keep up her disguise, she’ll have a soft bed and food beyond her wildest dreams…maybe even peaches. She soon falls in with Phin, a garden apprentice who sneaks her into the steamy, fruit-filled glasshouses, calls her “Brownie,” makes her skin prickle. At the same time, the gruff head gardener himself is teaching lowly Scilla to make things grow, and she’s cultivating hope with every seed she plants. But as the seasons unfurl, her loyalties start to conflict, and her secret grows harder to keep. How far will she go, to have a home at last?

ISBN (Hardcover): 978-1-5362-3778-8

Publisher: Candlewick Press, March 2025

Publication Date: March 4, 2025

Age Range: 10 and up

A Junior Library Guild Selection

“Nuanced, richly atmospheric, and exquisitely written.” Kirkus starred review

A “vivid story of struggle and loss spearheaded by hope.” Booklist starred review

A “historical fiction tale not to be missed…A first purchase for all libraries.” School Library Journal starred review

Filed under: Guest Post