Nancy Drew and the Case of the Politically Incorrect Children’s Books

The young sleuth’s early mysteries were racist and anti-Semitic. Can problematic vintage texts still be valuable for kids?

By Marjorie Ingall for Tablet Magazine

When I was 10, I loved the The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on TV. My first seditious Jewish act was playing hooky from a Holocaust memorial service, pretending to be sick so I could stay home and watch a rerun (a rerun!) of an episode in which Shaun Cassidy’s shirt was unbuttoned.

But I turned up my nose at the Hardy Boys books. I was a Nancy Drew girl, all the way. In print, when not being played by the floppy-haired 1970s equivalent of One Direction, the Hardy Boys were boring as Weetabix. They were upright Boy Scouts, doing what boys were supposed to do. Nancy, on the other hand, was singular. If Harry Potter was The Boy Who Lived, Nancy was The Girl Who Dared. She was brave, rash, fierce. She had a snazzy car. She solved crimes that flummoxed the cops, snuck around in old abandoned houses, got locked in closets by bad guys … and she always kept her cool. Her mom had died when she was little, but her dad adored and trusted her and gave her free rein to save others. She was in charge, not her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t an object. She was a doer.

Little did I know Nancy Drew had such a troubled past.

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More than 200 million Nancy Drew books have been sold in the United States since their debut in 1930. Nancy has starred in numerous movies and updated reboots, graphic novels, and electronic games. Earlier this year, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was asked who her heroes were, she said, “I suppose mine was Nancy Drew, because she was a girl who was out there doing her work and dominating her boyfriend.” (Back in 2010, she said more seriously, “I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well-written—they weren’t—but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So, the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn’t have to take a back seat or be wallflowers.”)

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