I designed this image as a front cover for a short story I wrote for a friend’s daughter. Both the story and the image have been heavily influenced by Sandra Lipsitz-Bem’s book The Lenses of Gender. I was also influenced by her class “Psychology of Sex Roles” which I took as an undergraduate at Cornell. I recommend the book if you are at all interested in the psychology of gender roles in western culture!
The beasts of the field and forest had a Lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. During his reign he made a royal proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for a universal league, in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, “Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.” And after the Hare said this, he ran for his life. — Aesop (Aesop’s Fables)