For a moment, if you are able, put MGM's teary-eyed, Toto-clutching Dorothy Gale out of your mind and venture back to L. Frank Baum's version of Oz. Read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and ask yourself this: Why, in a time well before women won the right to vote, were all of Baum's strongest characters girls and women? Dorothy Gale, Glinda, the Wicked Witch of the West . . . what was going on here? The most notable male character turned out to be an ineffectual humbug!

In his next book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, the main character is a clever little boy named Tip, who turns out to be a girl named Ozma, who is the rightful ruler of Oz. Not to mention General JinJur's Army of Revolt, made up entirely of girls, who overthrow the Emerald City; and Glinda's personal army, also entirely female, which wins the city back for Ozma.

It doesn't take much delving into history to discover that Baum's mother-in-law was the well-known feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage: a leader in the suffrage movement and co-writer, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of A History of Woman Suffrage, among other feminist literature. Baum's own wife, Maude, was a strong, independent and well-educated woman who handled everything in the family from disciplining the children to controlling the family's finances. By 1915, all of Baum's royalty checks were made out solely to her! Baum himself actively supported the Women's Movement in his Aberdeen, South Dakota newspaper, The Pioneer.

Baum frequently wrote about strong, female characters, and not just in the Oz books. He wrote another successful series, Aunt Jane's Nieces, under the pen name Edith Van Dyne. The main characters, three girls, do heroic things such as rescuing men hanging from cliffs, and storming the hideouts of villains, armed with revolvers.

Coincidentally, Baum's final Oz book was published, post-humously, in 1920, the same year that women won the right to vote.

Baum's feminist slant still affects his readership. His popularity increased in the 1970's as a result of the Women's Movement. Feminists felt that Dorothy provided a good role model for both girls and boys.

In 1986, seven Fundamentalist Christian families in Tennessee objected to their children reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the classroom. Included in their complains was the fact that, in Oz, women often assumed traditionally male roles.

I should point out that Baum's motives were not always necessarily honorable from the feminist point of view. Baum had many flaws, among them his tendency to cater to audiences that like to see pretty girls in tights. Many of his stories were produced for the stage, and it has been argued that what might appear to be some serious gender-bending in The Marvelous Land of Oz was actually an effort to cater to future stage productions of the story. Tip's transformation to a girl close to the end of the story could have been designed to follow the so-called "trouser role". This is a dramatic tradition, popular at the time, in which a male role is played by a female actress, who dresses, for the last scene, as a woman. Could his two warring armies of girls, with their elaborate outfits, been a secret dream of dozens of scantily clad women delighting the stage audience?

Even taking that possibility into consideration, there is no denying Baum's respect for the importance and power of women. His strong female characters, no doubt, made an impression on the girls and boys of the early 1900's as they continue to do today.

Carpenter, Angelica Shirley and Jean Shirley. L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1992.

Harry, Lou. We're Off To Read The Wizard. http://sevenarts.voicenet.com/wizard.html