When is the right moment to reveal the full horror of the patriarchy to your daughters? According to BBC historian Dan Snow, you don’t. The “grim realities” of gender relations won’t encourage them to follow their dreams, he reasons, and so he fibs. This week, on an episode of the Parent Hood podcast, he said that during a visit to an aviation museum his six-year-old daughter pointed out that all of the photos of Spitfire pilots were of men. Snow told her that women also flew Spitfires in combat in the second world war, which is untrue.
“Having to then explain to her why all the pictures of women are of them in ball gowns or in formal dress looking quite wooden and all the pictures of men are of them rampaging around having a great time, being heroic and climbing mountains, shooting things, being soldiers. That is something I struggle with,” he said. “Now at some stage she’s going to learn that I lied to her and she’s going to find out that women weren’t allowed to do active frontline service so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
This has naturally enraged some, who are already spinning it as disrespect to the war dead and snowflakey leftie liberalism, not to mention saying that Snow is a rubbish historian – which he might be, were he employed to teach history to his children, which as far as we know he is not. What struck me was how challenging it must be to bring up daughters in a world where the odds are stacked against them, without completely terrifying them by lifting up the filthy, unequal carpet in one brutal flourish to reveal the Hieronymus Bosch clutter beneath.
There is something heartbreaking about Snow’s lie. This is an intelligent, educated man, with a better understanding and knowledge of human history than most of us, and he has had a good look around patriarchy, decided it’s a monumental pile of flaming rubbish, and tweaked the truth in order not to crush his child’s ambition. Which seems to me to be an act motivated by kindness and empathy, not an indication of bad parenting.
Perhaps I am wrong, and we should always tell children the truth. But I have never met anyone who does this. There is always some protection from the world offered to us by our parents – the news is switched off, the terrorist attack is explained gently, and with comforting caveats. A therapist told me once that one of the things children desperately need from a parent is for them to keep their child’s anxiety within limits. Not to suppress it – that wouldn’t be healthy – but to be there, when, for instance, the night terrors have struck, to tell them everything will be OK. If you grow up without hearing those words, without feeling that there is someone who can protect you (even if the truth is that they can only protect you so much), problems can arise.
Snow’s daughter is growing up in different world than that in which any aspiring female Spitfire pilots did. It is a world in which books such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls attempt to address the gender imbalance in the histories we tell, highlighting brilliant and courageous women from across the world to inspire new generations. So perhaps she doesn’t need the Spitfire lie.
It is not as though Snow is keeping his girls fully cushioned from patriarchy, anyway: they are not being raised in a wilderness, and society will have already ingrained itself in myriad ways, in the “aren’t you pretty?” versus “isn’t he clever?”, in the toys, in the shoes they wear, in the books they read, in the men in suits they see on television. It’s fairly harmless, all in all. Plus, she’ll find out soon enough.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author