Ignore this post
He had some dirt on her.
Bra-vo.
Nitpick: “Red-Haired”.
Schulz had too much respect for the English language to see the latter, tense-inconsistent, interpretation.
It wasn’t tense-inconsistent in the original. The caption was something like “_____, a dog owned by ____, eats nails and screws”
It’s a Great Threesome, Charlie Brown!
[I almost typed “Charline” when I wrote that, BTW]
If you include Chuck’s imaginary girlfriend Emily, it involves even more sides and vertices.
If I remember right, Patty got upset with being called ‘Sir’, it is just that she could not break Marcie of the habit.
Wait a minute… I’ve been a Peanuts fan for 40 years, and I’m just now realizing the author’s name is spelled Schulz, not Schultz?
Yes! You’re the first person in the history of comicdom who ever got that wrong! 
I know NOTHIIIIIIING!
It was a special from the early seventies ('72?). Produced overseas. Europe, I think. Had a bit of weirdness to it as they redubbed the voices back in America.
All kidding aside, Marcie danced with Franklin in Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown, while PP was dancing with Snoopy.
Honestly, I think PP just had issues with her self-image as a young woman. I don’t think she was gender-confused; I think she was confused about how she could reconcile being a het female who enjoyed traditionally-male activities.
And I think it bothered her that she didn’t fit the physical mold the other girls did. She couldn’t wear dresses like Lucy, Patty & Violet and Frieda did, because she was always playing some sport. Likewise, she had to have her hair short and easy to maintain. Cosmetics were off the table for an eight-year-old, but she probably couldn’t have used them either. And she thought she was shortchanged in her face, but I’m not so sure about that. Being “plain” sometimes just means not having outstanding features, as opposed to having bad features, and being healthy and capable can sometimes be, as Roger Zelazny once said, “more attractive than mere comeliness.” Also, freckles can be cute as hell, and since she’s the only character who has them, that could be her trademark, same as Frieda with her Naturally Curly Hair[sup]TM[/sup].
But she sees herself as inferior, is the point. There was a sequence where she met the Little Red-Haired Girl face to face, and went on a crying jag because she realized that she, PP, would never look like that, and no wonder Chuck liked TLR-HG and not PP. Meanwhile completely overlooking that she has her own good qualities that TLR-HG will probably never have either. And now I feel like crying.
Point is, I can understand why people not really familiar with the characters would think PP is just completely unfeminine and okay with it. But if you’ve read enough/certain strips, it becomes clear that the character is massively insecure, and would be further crushed if she knew what so many people thought of her.
In the excellent Schulz biography that came out a few years ago, it says that Patty was pretty obviously based on a cousin of Sparky’s that was also named Patty and who was quite the tomboy.
He always denied that PP was based on his cousin Patty but but the speculation was that his cousin was pretty upset about being the inspiration for the character so he backed away from connecting the two.
I think the core characters, Chuck, Lucy, Linus, and Snoopy represented parts of Sparky’s personality. If I recall, Chuck had a crush on the Red Haired girl before PP was on the scene. But what happened to the original Patty? Anybody remember the Mad Punter?
CB and Snoopy definitely did.
Yes.
She and Violet got phased out. I’m not sure if she/they ever appeared in the same strip as PP, although they may have, but they made appearances after PP was introduced.
Shhhhhhh…The less you know, the safer you are…
Also, being “plain” as a child sometimes just means you haven’t grown into your face yet. I used to know a little girl who, I joked, was Peppermint Patty with better social skills. Like PP, she was “plain”, loved sports, found girly clothes impractical, had short, wild hair and freckles, and so on. But unlike PP she was happy, and all the kids, boys and girls alike, wanted to be her friend.
Once her mother commented to me, with a laugh, that “she looks so much like me as a girl it’s ridiculous.” And after she said that, I could see the resemblance - same eyes, same mouth, same laugh. On the other hand, no one would describe Mom as “plain”. She’s incredibly cute. My young friend may well grow up to be very pretty on top of being sporty and funny.
As to the original question - I can’t imagine Schulz didn’t hear about the PP-Marcie jokes. But I’m not sure he cared. There is a wonderful Sunday strip about Linus patting birds on the head that might be relevant here: he has no time for people who try to enforce conformity on others for the sake of conformity. If some readers insist that two little girls well before the age of puberty “must be” lesbians because one likes baseball and hates dresses, and the other is a little low on clue and calls another girl “Sir”? Well, let 'em. He’s not going to change the characters just to shut them up.
All of that, and the rest of your description, paints an exact image of a girl who was in my class in Primary School (Grade School in foreign-speak). Even appearance-wise. She grew up to be a troubled teen, but I think she straightened herself out by her 20s.
Not entirely true; she asked Marcie to make her a dress for a figure skating competition once.
The first time I heard the claim was from a lesbian comedian on TV. “I mean, look at her. She wears Birkenstocks, she’s the only one in the entire strip who’s any good at sports, and she’s got a Billie Jean King lookalike following her around calling her ‘Sir’!”