‘Look Janet’, ‘No you look John’: constructions of gender in early school reader illustrations across 50 years

Children’s reading materials are a widely available cultural resource that children may draw on to make sense of gender. Much of the research on gender and reading materials has used content analysis and has focused on children’s literature. The research we present in this article detours from these approaches, using a feminist post‐structuralist analysis to examine constructions of gender in a randomly selected sample of 100 early school readers used in New Zealand schools over the last 50 years. Methodologically, our work contributes to the relatively small number of studies that analyze illustrations as texts of meanings. Analysis of the illustrations incorporates exploring the connotations of illustrations, identifying gender discourses, defining positions available within the discourses and illuminating similar discourses in other texts. Our analysis suggests relatively little change across 50 years in the availability of diverse representations of men, women and children in early school readers.