I wasn't sure if this was the best thread to post in, so am happy if someone wants to move it elsewhere.
Enid Blyton has come under a lot of criticism over the years as being sexist and racist, and maybe viewed with modern eyes some of it could be viewed that way, however, as has I think been discussed before, many modern critics are taking her writing out of the context of the time it was written.
I've been watching the early episodes of the
Up series. Out of 14 children selected to follow, 4 were girls, the others (obviously) were boys. I don't think when I first started watching the series (either from 28 or 35), that it crossed my mind that it wasn't a 50/50 split, and even when I did 'twig' in the last couple of series I didn't think over much on it. However I've just seen an interview with the producer of the show, and he said that it has been commented on widely as not being a fair split, but that back in 1963 when the first show was made, it never crossed anyone's mind to make it an equal number of girls and boys. I suspect the reasoning was that girls generally wouldn't have careers to follow up on. Indeed in the '21' episode, one of the girls from the working class background relates how a (male) teacher at school suggested that all girls wanted to do was to "leave school, get married and push a pram".
If that was the attitude of film producers and teachers in the 1960's/70's, then surely it's not surprising that Enid Blyton's books often reflected an attitude where girls didn't feature as strongly as boys, or were cast in more domestic roles.
As for the racist element, the first episode of
Up, showed some children (aged 7) asked what they thought of 'coloured' people - to which one of them replied most emphatically, that they'd never met one and didn't wish to! In the '21' episode, another participant uses the phrase "working like Blacks". A phrase which I'm sure that as an educated adult he wouldn't dream of using now.
I do wish Enid Blyton had lived a few decades more so that she could have shown that she was capable of understanding changing values - I feel sure that she would have been able to produce more books that would have moved with the times. She'd already done so in a smaller way with regard to mentioning a television in
Five on Kirrin Island Again, and a portable radio in
Five Go Billycock Hill whereas in very early books such as
Silver and Gold she writes poems about people listening to the radio via individual headphones - something that seems to have come full circle.