SOURCE: McReynolds, Douglas J., and Barbara J. Lips. “A Girl in the Game: The Wizard of Oz as Analog for the Female Experience in America.” North Dakota Quarterly 54, no. 2 (spring 1986): 87-93.

In the following essay, McReynolds and Lips argue that Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the few examples in American literature depicting a nontragic adventurous female protagonist, who exemplifies the true experience of women on the American frontier.

When Leslie Fiedler suggested that American literature is essentially children's literature,¹ he seemed to give legitimacy to what readers of American books had sensed for some time already but had been too self-conscious to think out loud: that the American experience not only was a learning, a youthful experience, but that childhood provides the effective analog for its telling; that the epic subduing of that great wilderness from Tennessee and Massachusetts through South Dakota to California...