The decision to commission chapters from women with disabilities was a very conscious one as, just as in the 1970s, the study of any literature written for women was in its infancy while the study of childrens' (and girls' fiction in particular) was more or less nonexistent. There is little in the way of writing by women with impairments about how they see the portrayal of any disability or illness in fiction as a whole and even less when it focuses on stories for girls. This book thus straddles three distinct disciplines, Women's Studies, Disability Studies and Children's Studies, drawing on each discipline to one extent or another.
Each chapter has its own 'personality' or 'feel' as I did not want a homogenous entity, prefering instead to allow the contributors to focus on whatever they felt was important to them. The design for this book's structure is a three-by-three "Noughts and Crosses" style grid as the structure of the book shows. The choice of how to categorise the subject columns involved much discussion with Ju Gosling, but we settled on the following: Role Models, Stereotyping and Inclusion. The three time rows were simpler to decide upon as to an extent books tended to fall into what, for convenience, I have called Early Period, Mid Period and Modern Period.
In the Role Models column we look at how, or if, a disabled character is used by the author to put forward an idealised model for their readers to emulate, or possibly show what not to do as in the case of the books about diabetes. The Stereotypes column was both easier and harder to fill despite it being a far more clearly cut thread; there proved to be plenty of books to be examined in the Modern Period to test against the believability of characterisation but as one went back in time we found fewer books, particularly in the Mid Period. The Inclusion column for the Early and Mid Period looked at the inclusion or exclusion of people with impairments, while the Modern Period presents us with an overview of a range of mainly American books.