Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a die-hard Trixie Belden partisan, but nonetheless Nancy Drew played an important part in my childhood as well. When I spotted this book at the local library a week ago, I just had to read it.

It turns out the book is as much about the women’s movement and changing attitudes towards women in America as it is about Nancy and her creators. Nancy herself appeared in 1930, while the two women most responsible for her, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt Benson, appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures respectively. Like Nancy, these two women were somewhat unusual for their time, though none of the three could be accused of being radical or even conventionally feminist.

Adams became CEO of the Stratemeyer Syndicate after her father Edward Stratemeyer’s death in 1930. At this time few women had even had careers, much less were the head of a company. There was some question whether Adams would even be accepted as a colleague by her publisher and other industry members, and she was condemned by her upper-class peers as a bad and neglectful mother for working outside the home.

The Syndicate itself was responsible for many well-known children’s series, including the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins as well as Nancy. Adams’s father and then Adams herself created characters and wrote outlines for the stories, and hired ghost-writers to write them. Benson was the ghost writer of many of the early Nancys, and she too was a unique lady. She was an all-around athlete, determined to maintain a career in journalism and writing for children despite marriage and motherhood (career and family were mutually exclusive for women in those days), got her pilot’s license when she was in her 60s, and worked as a journalist for a Toledo, Ohio newspaper until her death at the age of 96.

Throughout these women’s lives, ideas about women and their appropriate roles fluctuated wildly. Edward Stratemeyer, who no one would ever call a feminist, came up with the idea of Nancy as a result of new attitudes appearing in the 1920s about women’s potential for independence and competence. Nancy’s realization by Benson created an instant role model for young women: one of the earliest and among the few female characters who were competent in traditionally male spheres (who can think of Nancy without thinking of her expert handling of her blue roadster/convertible throughout storm and harsh conditions?).

Yet Nancy was not a radical figure. She was completely conventional, belonging to the upper class, with perfect deportment and an impeccably feminine wardrobe. Perhaps this is how she (for the most part) avoided anti-feminist backlash through the decades: she didn’t openly flout gender roles, she simply was herself and did everything in a manner above criticism. Attitudes about women continued to fluctuate: women in the work world suddenly became a much-needed reality during World War II, then became taboo once again during the Baby Boom era, until the women’s liberation movement got started in the late 60s. But throughout all this, Nancy was read by girls and passed on from mothers to daughters through the decades and despite this cultural crazy-quilt of shifting gender roles.

Through the years, Nancy underwent changes too: Adams made her a little more polite and unassuming that Benson had. And Nancy underwent a major transformation around the middle of the century, when the original blue-covered books became those yellow-spined ones most of us remember from the library shelves. This rewrite, undertaken mainly by Adams, was intended to get rid of racist language that was becoming more and more objectionable during the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and to update wardrobe and language. But the spirit of the books (as well as large chunks of the plots) changed at the same time, for a variety of reasons.

What didn’t change was Nancy as a role model. No matter how outmoded her wardrobe might become, Nancy simply does not go out of style. Regardless of what is going on in the world, a young woman who is kind, competent, charitable, and with an unshakeable courage of her own convictions, is always called for. She transcends rather than flouts traditional gender roles, and therefore transcends political and cultural divisions between women. She proves that we do not need to accept anybody else’s idea of what a woman should be; we simply need to know what’s right, know who we are, and then get out there and follow that dusty old map we found in an ancient tome right to that hidden treasure, which will enable our best friend to keep her ancestral estate. Or, you know, whatever other challenges might await us.