SOURCE: Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Female Power and Male Self-Assertion: Kipling and the Maternal.” Children's Literature 20 (1992): 15-35.

In the following essay, Knoepflmacher links aspects of Kipling's life and his treatment of feminine power in short fiction, particularly through the story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.”

My first child and daughter was born in three foot of snow on the night of December 29th 1892. Her Mother's birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things, and she throve in her trunk-tray in the sunshine on the little plank verandah.

—Kipling, Something of Myself

Whether addressed to adults or children, Kipling's writings are preoccupied with female power—a power he persistently associates with a mother or a mother surrogate. The bluster and bravado of the barracks on which Kipling had built his early reputation owe much to a...