Censorship of Mother Goose and Her Followers:
Beginning of the Pattern

Censorship and Intellectual Freedom have been important topics throughout the ages and still exist today as issues of power and control. The ideas of accessibility, diversity and inclusiveness of information were debated long before the first printed book was published; indeed, information was censored long before the first ideas and words were permanently recorded. For the many people throughout history who were eager to spread information, there seemed to be an equal number wanting to censor that information - to limit its distribution, to control who has access to it, and even to ban it altogether.

The manual printing press, the first step on the road to mass production of books, came about because the hand copied book was available only to those who could afford such an extravagance, making wealthy individuals and institutions, particularly the early Catholic Church, the "information haves" and the controllers of human thought. Gutenberg and his contemporaries believed that information, particularly the words of the Bible , should be available to and readable by the common man, the "information have-nots" of the Middle Ages. We can easily picture young Johann offering his first printed book to the people of Mainz, while someone stands nearby eager to grab it, to censor it, to limit its circulation and to deny it to certain people. The spread of religious texts and other such powerful books have continued from that day forward to be controversial and the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and the major books of other religions are always on banned book lists somewhere in the world. Censorship has been so prevelant a problem throughout history that our founding fathers felt it was necessary to include the right to disseminate information, and therefore to have access to information, as a right to all under the first of the Bill of Rights, right up there with access to religion and permission to make a grievance against the government.

And yet today, in our supposedly enlightened world, the practice of banning and censorship is widespread. People seem to have the need to regulate what others know, sometimes as a means of control as in the past, but more often today, for someone else's "own good" or protection. One may find this position understandable, but not acceptable, when it applies to materials that might be physically harmful or dangerous to the reader or to materials that insult or denigrate another individual or group, but it is surprising when it is applied to seemingly innocuous works such as "Snow White," Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, or to venerable old Mother Goose herself (Doyle, 1995).

Early versions of Mother Goose were written with all the sentiments and prejudices of that period but were certainly considered at the time to be suitable for children. Although it can be argued that early versions of some of the rhymes were composed for adults as political statements or superstitious spells, the first printed versions of Mother Goose were clearly meant for an audience of children and were widely published, distributed, and read as such. The idea of censoring Mother Goose didn't actually come about until those early sentiments and prejudices themselves were brought under scrutiny in today's more "politically correct" atmosphere.