WASHINGTON — For some women, newly announced changes in the Barbie doll body type come way late. Ditto for the recent finding that the male characters have three times the lines as the female stars in a spate of animated Disney princess movies.

In fact, by the time a girl is 4, there’s a good chance she has already internalized messages about how big she’s supposed to get, how expansively she’s supposed to reach — literally, in the case of Minnie Mouse figurines — and how little space physically and psychically she’s encouraged to take up in the world.

Findings released from a project by linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, revealed a “surprising irony.” In animated princess films released more than 50 years ago, women, who played very stereotypical roles, spoke equally as much, and in some cases with greater frequency than male characters.

But from 1989 through 1999, in movies such as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “Pocahontas” and, my personal favorite, “Mulan,” male characters counted for as much as 60 percent of the dialogue. In more recent movies, female characters have had more to say, though frequently still far less than their animated male co-stars.

Liz DePriest, a feminist writer and University of Maryland doctoral candidate, was particularly surprised when she heard about results for recent movies such as “Frozen,” one of her 4-year-old daughter’s favorites, in which male characters talk more. Especially because the main characters are two sisters.

What’s been most obvious to her in the princess-power oeuvre is the lack of substantive interaction between female characters. She cites the widely used Bechdel-Wallace test, which was developed in the mid-1980s and measures female characters’ dialogue about something other than a man.

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“It feels like Disney is trying to make more contemporary female characters and trying to focus on their desires – outside of their desire for the prince,” DePriest says. “But it doesn’t feel like they’ve caught up yet with the public interest in women interacting with each other.” Interacting especially in friendship, as opposed to heroine-villain dichotomies.

In a 2014 blog post, DePriest wrote about a set of Disney figurines that a family member gave her young daughter. The female characters – Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck – are compact, feet together with their arms pressed to their bodies in coy, demure postures. The bros — Mickey and Donald — have wide stances with arms flung to the world.

Seeing the images on screen, I feel a visceral reminder of how habitually I’ve played myself small. Because even now, being powerful is a concept I’ve barely grown into. And I’m a big girl.

DePriest called the news that Barbie had diversified their lineup a more-promising development. Last week, Mattel announced that it was adding petite, tall and curvy dolls to the iconic, anatomically freakish doll most of us grew up with. They added different skin, eye colors and hairstyles, as well.

DePriest always has had strong feelings against buying Barbies for her daughter, who loves getting them as gifts from others. But “I would probably buy her one that is more representative of an actual body type, just so she kind of has that in her collection.” Whether the toymaker’s motivation is pure profit or something higher-minded, DePriest is glad her daughter can have a Barbie “that actually looks like the people she sees out in the world.”

What has been the most unsettling part about raising daughters in our princess-industrial complex, DePriest says, has been coming to terms with her lack of control over the ways subtle and not-so-subtle messages about women seep in.

“Egotistically, finding out I was pregnant with a daughter while working on a feminist dissertation, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to be able to teach her that genders are equal,’ ” DePriest recalls. ” ‘I’m going to be able to interest her in superheroes and not just princesses, because in our house we’ll have equal numbers of girl toys, and boy toys and gender-neutral toys.’ ” But the reality has been far more complicated.

As mothers, we are not the only ones, or even the primary ones, messaging to our children. In the short term, that might mean we have to keep pressing hard to at least have more of the princesses’ voices heard.

Lonnae O’Neal is a columnist for The Washington Post.


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