In addition to offering reduced portions at a lower cost than adult menus, children’s menus are often designed to entertain their audiences while they are waiting for food. I’ve noted recently that some don’t do a very good job at this.
Click image to download a 1.7-MB PDF of this 8-page menu.
This one does, at least for little boys. It has four pages offering them a choice: would they like to grow up to be a red cap, a train engineer, a conductor, a dining car steward, a waiter, or a sleeping car porter? Ignoring the fact that the porters were the only blacks (on a U.S. railroad, the red caps and waiters would also be black), the boy in the pictures has a sister but the menu doesn’t suggest that any of these occupations would be open to women. It is likely that most of the little girls seeing the menu wouldn’t be aware of such discrimination for a few years.
Personally, when I was a little boy I wanted to grow up to be the capitalist who owned the railroad. In the case of the CN, that might have been the bureaucrat who ran it. I wonder why those choices weren’t on the menu?