Emily Thornberry doesn’t like “this thing about being little” and Piers Morgan wonders why “people bother with these things”, but this week’s kerfuffle over an undergraduate study on gender and stereotyping in children’s books shows that the Mr Men have their shocking side.

To be more precise, it’s the Little Miss series that has been causing all the trouble. These books are an offshoot of the Mr Men world launched in 1981, 10 years after Mr Tickle first extended his “extraordinarily long arms”.

I’ve written before about the Little Miss books – how they’re endlessly repetitive and suffer from a plague of exclamation marks – so I’m rather pleased to have another reason for relegating them to the sidelines.

According to the study, “female characters were more passive, had less direct speech and relied on being saved more than male characters” – a finding that chimes with my less scientific survey. Opening our collection at random, I find Doctor Makeyouwell (male) and Mr Small plotting about how to bring down (the admittedly vile) Little Miss Trouble: “I think … that something should be done about that little lady.”

But the Little Miss books are just one chapter in the long history of children’s books that reinforce sexist stereotypes. Take Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister books. When a father is asked to “mind my naughty little sister for the day”, she is predictably annoying, while he is “being a busy man”. When she has a tantrum, his answer is to shut himself away inside and forgets all about her, while she runs away. His response, when she’s found, is to breathe a sigh of relief: “Thank goodness I can work again without having to concentrate on a disagreeable baby.”

Then there’s Enid Blyton. She was a major slice of my own young reading, so I was keen for my children to enjoy the Famous Five and the Faraway Tree, despite their problematic treatment of race and sex. I was less keen, however, on lines such as: “If danger was about, he could deal with it better than George could. After all, she was only a girl!” and, “Don’t be an ass, George. I know you make out you’re as good as a boy, and you dress like a boy and climb trees as well as I can – but it’s really time you gave up thinking you’re as good as a boy.” Not to mention Anne’s home-making obsession, Anne and George’s endless sidelining for safety reasons, and Anne’s complicity in her role as second-class citizen.

I used to employ judicious editing as I read. Now I’ve decided that’s nuts, and try to explain the context of Blyton’s attitudes to sex and race. But what can you do? Fortunately, we’re on Matilda at the moment, so bedtime reading doesn’t have to make room for cultural studies.