Last weekend, Netflix released the first video teaser of its new show, “The Baby-Sitters Club.”
If the title sounds familiar, it’s because before it was picked up by Netflix, “The Baby-Sitters Club” was a widely popular 213-book series published over the course of 15 years. Writing about young girls starting their own business, author Ann M. Martin approached the story and the characters with a feminist perspective. She wrote the members of “The Baby-Sitters Club” to be ambitious and decisive, exercising their agency over their business independently.
“I felt it was important for them to create the rules themselves—for the rules not to be imposed on them or even suggested to them by an adult,” Martin says.
Last year gave us great female TV friendships like “Tuca and Bertie,”, “Grace and Frankie,” Abbi and Ilana from “Broad City,” and the girls from “Derry Girls.” So the adaptation of “The Baby-Sitters Club” for TV felt appropriate, as it was a series that inspired young women to make friends with other young women during the height of its publication run.
I grew up reading a lot of popular book franchises that I constantly discussed with friends, but “The Baby-Sitters Club” was a personal book series that was just for me. While the books I grew up with had female characters, they often weren’t depicted as having female friends. They can be the lead characters, sure, but they’re usually loners, stuck in a love triangle with boys or pitted against another female lead.
So when I discovered the girls of “The Baby-Sitters Club,” I kept it close and dear to my heart because of how revolutionary it was to finally read a book about girls just being friends and running a business together.
I haven’t read all of the books, specials, and spin-offs (I discovered the series eight years after the last book was published so copies were scarce) but from the ones I’ve read, the “BSC” (or Baby-Sitters Club, to those not in the club) provided me with my first step into the complex, liberating, and wonderful world of female friendships.
The girls who make up the BSC are Kristy, Stacey, Mary Ann, and Claudia. Throughout the series, a lot more girls join like Dawn, Jessi, and Mallory. Each of these characters has their own personalities, likes, dislikes, babysitting style, and story arcs—this is what primarily drew me to the series. T
hey weren’t just mean girls or awkward losers, they were their own complex persons, just like how girls are in real life. It was also a big step in representation, considering the time in which it was published. Kristy was a tomboy who had divorced parents, Claudia was of Japanese descent, Stacey was diabetic, Jessi was an African-American ballet dancer, and Dawn was a vegetarian.
They were squad goals before squad goals were even a thing. As friends, they were supportive, accepting of, and respectful to each other. Claudia, the club’s vice president who loved sweets and junk food always had healthy and sugar-free snacks for Dawn and Stacey. Kristy always had big ideas that don’t always turn out well, but when her plans backfired, the group always helped her get out of it without saying “I told you so.” Mary Ann can be socially awkward but no one forced her into situations where she’d feel obligated to socialize uncomfortably.
As babysitters, they were professionals who distributed the babysitting load fairly, curated their Kid Kits in order to make the babysitting process efficient and personalized, logged their experiences in their official notebook, and upheld the good name of babysitting in their fictional town of Stoneybrook.
The series managed to tackle tough topics like death, racism, disability, and poverty while still being able to connect with young girls and their less-than-serious dilemmas. This was an aspect that Martin aced in terms of being rooted in reality. If they had fights, they were always true to life. They didn’t just fight about boys (although Mary Ann could not handle boy crazy Stacey) or the fact that one person wore hoop earrings when hoop earrings was someone else’s thing, nope.
Kristy and Dawn were initially cold and snarky to each other as each felt they were fighting for Mary Ann’s attention. Claudia and Janine, her genius older sister (a 16-year-old taking college-level classes), had an intense sibling rivalry due to the fact that Janine was always looking down on Claudia for not being as good as her in academics.
Stacey always stood her ground when it came to her diabetes treatment. Mallory met her idol author who turned out to be a snobbish recluse who told her she can never fulfill her dream to be a writer. Their struggles and fights, as well as how their friendships played a part in overcoming disasters, taught me that when girls allow themselves to be vulnerable and real, no matter how difficult problems were, they will always find support in their true friends.
As true-to-life as their mishaps were, their adventures and triumphs were delightful as well. There’s no babysitting job—from using butter to lubricate a kid’s hand that got stuck in a jar, and learning American Sign Language in order to communicate with a new kid in town to finding a secret tunnel in your house or solving the mystery of the phantom phone calls—that the BSC did not make into a fun experience.
The end goal of every book wasn’t fitting in with a clique or getting the guy or becoming conventionally attractive—it’s becoming the best version of yourself with the help of your babysitter friends and babysitting clients (and hey, raking in the cash doesn’t hurt too).
I’m excited for the Netflix adaptation because it can be an opportunity for a new generation of girls to discover and define for themselves the power of female friendships. Although some aspects of the book series are probably already dated (I’ve never picked up a landline phone since 2012), the values and lessons still hold up to this day.
The BSC will live on in my mind as the first friend group that ever welcomed me as I am, and the lessons they taught me about true friendship, acceptance, professionalism, and living in the moment will stay with me forever.
Art by Dana Calvo
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