Mary Poppins Comes Back by Pamela L Travers and a Plea for Help

I tried... I really did.  I wanted to love Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back as much as I love every other children's book, but I just couldn't do it.  Maybe it's because Mary Poppins to me will always be an absolutely lovely Julie Andrews singing about how "a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down."  The Mary Poppins I grew up with was a wonderfully sweet woman who was "Practically Perfect in Every Way," a woman I could aspire to be.  She was the perfect mother filling in for a slightly silly woman who spends all day parading around trying to get women the right to vote (which is actually an interesting issue I'm working on developing in the paper I'm revising... more on that later).

What bugs me the most about these books is not necessarily seeing one of my childhood ideals brought off her pedestal, but rather the lack of punishment for incorrect behavior.  In the books, Mary Poppins becomes the woman everyone depends on, yet she is constantly shown to be vain and sometimes downright rude to people.  She uses her magic to manipulate situations and keep the children interested in what adventures might happen next rather than using it to improve family relations and help people.  It bugs me that in a children's book an adult would be genuinely looked up to and respected while not behaving correctly.  I guess I just expect that in a children's book, correct behaviors will be rewarded and incorrect behaviors will be punished... especially in older books since children's books have had to evolve away from strictly moral stories.

Anyways, enough about that.  Now for my plea for help.  I'm currently working on revising one of my senior research papers entitled "The Rise of the Modern Heroine: How The Feminine Mystique Shaped Young Adult Literature" so I can use it as a writing sample for applying to graduate programs.  I'm wanting to bolster my paper with more samples of books that show strong and weak female characters (they don't even have to be main characters... they just need to be talked about enough that I can get a good sense of what the girl is like).  I'm trying to focus mainly on American literature since 1900. 

If you have any ideas for books that show really strong female characters or really weak female characters let me know!  I could use all the help I could get!