“Spitfire [a new publisher about to start up in the UK] wants a return to adventure stories where men are men and debauchery is welcomed along with smoking and drinking.
“Female characters look like they will be given short shrift in Spitfire stories, as Mr Elliot believes JK Rowling was wrong to have made Harry Potter’s friend Hermione his equal.
“‘It is typical of modern children’s books in which there is a boy and a girl and the girl is as good as the boy,’ he said.
“[Richmal Crompton’s] Just William is a much better read for boys. Violet Elizabeth Bott was a whingeing, snivelling sneak who was always frightened. That is how I would like the girls to be.” 
…However, this gent seems to be remembering some other Violet Elizabeth Bott, possibly one in an alternate universe. The Violet Elizabeth in the William books that I read was rarely afraid of anything, and was best known for the (lisping but utterly calculated) threat to “thcream and thcream and THCREAM until I’m thick!” (ominous pause) “I can…“, thus effortlessly railroading the hopelessly outclassed boys around her into doing whatever she wanted. That’s the kind of woman they want in their books now, huh? (grin) …Bring her on.
A little background here from Mary Cadogan’s Just William Through the Ages:
“William’s attitudes towards members of the fair sex are well defined in the early books. On the whole he has little time for them. As Richmal Crompton was to write much later (in the 1962 Collectors’ Digest Annual): ‘He dislikes little girls, not only because he considers them to belong to an inferior order of being but also because he suspects them of being allies of the civilization that threatens his liberty.’ (Throughout the saga he makes no secret of his contempt for civilization. His classic quote is: ‘I don’t WANT to behave like a civilized yuman bein’. I’d rather be a savage any day. I bet savages don’t let themselves be dragged off to dotty ol’ women when they’d rather go to see blood-curdlin’ an’ nerve-shatterin’ westerns.’)
“The fearful feminine threat to William’s freedom is expressed in his skirmishes with a variety of village stereotypes like Miss Milton, the astringent martinet, and Mrs Monks, the vicar’s wife, who, after having so many church functions wrecked by [William’s gang,] the Outlaws, feels fully justified in foiling their knavish tricks. There are also those solemn ladies who are concerned with Higher Thought or Perfect Love or Psychic Phenomena whose doings both intrigue and repel William. Generally speaking, these female seekers of truth or appreciators of art are not over-responsive to the male sex. As Miss Featherstone of the Literary Society nervously predicts, ‘as soon as you begin to have men in a thing it complicates it at once’.
“‘On the whole William can cope fairly well with the most determined of elderly or middle-aged females. The direst threat to his noble (or ignoble) savage state comes in the form of that frill-bedecked, diminutive bundle of pertness that is Violet Elizabeth, the darling only child of the stinkingly rich sauce magnate who lives with his family at the Hall.
“William’s first meeting with Violet Elizabeth in Still — William is a classic example of the clash between the sexes. ‘William, pirate and Red Indian and desperado, William, woman-hater and girl-despiser’ finds his worst fears about girlish ghastliness realized when he is forced by his mother to go to tea at the Botts’ and meet the lisping little horror. She has bubbly blonde curls, glowing like a golden halo, a squeaky-clean pink and white face and a filmy white lacy frock, from the ballet-type skirts of which peep white silk-socked legs and white buckskin shoes.
“She shamelessly imposes her will upon him by threatening tears (the famous threat to ‘thcream and thcream’ until she’s ‘thick’ comes a little later). For William there is no escape from her tear-filling eyes and trembling lips as she insists that he plays ‘little girlth gameth’ with her, that he really likes ‘all little girlth’ and — most humiliating and horrific of all — that he wishes he was a little girl.
“Er — yes. Honest I do,” said the unhappy William.
“Kith me,” she said, raising her glowing face.
William was broken. He brushed her cheek with his.
“But even worse torture is to follow that notorious kiss as she piles on the final indignity: ‘Now leth play fairieth. I’ll thow you how.’ He spends the rest of the afternoon agonizingly, ‘in the character of a gnome attending upon Violet Elizabeth in the character of the fairy queen.'”
So much for William, who, for all his “savagery”, reveals himself as a soft-hearted and irredeemable weenie, or, as Nigel Molesworth would say, “uterly wet and a weed.”
(Anyway, thanks to Jessa at Blog of a Bookslut for the link.)
