Gender roles in the nursery.
Nov. 19th, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaIn any setting in which the topic of children and gender roles arises, a number of people will immediately jump in and tell the following story. This story is always invariant. It goes like this:
"Before my child was born, I was a really big feminist. I took all these Women's Studies classes in college, and I was determined to raise a completely gender-neutral child. Then [my daughter wrapped her truck in a blanket and rocked it to sleep/my son made his doll's bottle into a gun]. Now I realize that gender roles are innate. I don't choose gender-appropriate things for my child, they're just what my child naturally prefers. How naive and foolish I was!"
There's a long list of reasons why I don't believe this story.
(1) I've read the famous "Baby X" studies, which demonstrated that people vary their treatment of young infants according to their beliefs about the child's gender, even while they insist that they believe in gender-neutral treatment of children. Gender-typed appraisals of infants' behavior and gender-typed adult-child interactions begin at birth, and are not at all limited to people who know that's what they're doing.
(2) The Women's Studies classes these people have supposedly taken apparently failed to provide any information about larger cultural forces (television, relatives, caregivers, peers, toy manufacturers, etc.) which might affect children's gender role presentation, instead giving the impression that parents who buy both trucks and dolls will automagically have androgynous children. That seems like a mighty strange kind of Women's Studies class to me.
(3) I've been around a lot of parents of infants and toddlers. I can count the ones who genuinely provide a gender-neutral environment on one hand, and it's the hand with fewer fingers. If there were really a huge army of feminist parents who provided a strictly neutral environment until their kids' natural inclinations emerged, wouldn't I be meeting more of them?
(4) I've always figured that if something is really innate, then you don't need lots of rules and social pressure to enforce it. Contrariwise, the existence of a lot of rules and social pressures to prop up a given state of affairs makes me suspect that the state of affairs in question is not innate at all.
(5) People telling this story never sound worried, the way you would normally be if your deeply-held philosophical beliefs were rocked to their core. Instead, they sound relieved. And smug.
(I will say that I think there is sometimes a phenomenon in which feminist parents (usually mothers) have a strong preference that their child express anti-typical gender roles. They'll refuse to buy their daughter anything pink, or really push their son to play with a doll. Under these conditions, I think it's unsurprising that kids pick up on these heavy expectations and rebel against them. But that's very different from providing an environment that is gender-neutral.)
I think that the parents who deliver the little speech above sort of believe in gender equality, but also believe, more deeply and strongly, in gender essentialism - i.e., that the genders are naturally and irreducibly different. I think they are parents who would "allow" their boys to play with a doll, but who subconsciously prefer and reinforce traditional role behavior. I think they are relieved to discover evidence that validates their assumptions, so that they can give up the discomfort of their previously-assumed lip service to gender-role flexibility. And I think they are deeply, deeply oblivious to societal pressures toward gender conformity, even as they give these little speeches to other parents that reinforce inflexible gender roles.
How all of this applies to us:
Michael and I are both feminists who are fairly gender-typical in our personal interests. (For example, I enjoy cooking, needlework, small children, tiny fancy tea sandwiches, talking about people's feelings, and Georgette Heyer novels, although of course I also enjoy science, history, politics, hiking, arguing, and being in charge.) As a child, I loved my baby dolls, sewing kit, toy kitchen, and dollhouse. I don't have, at all, a stereotypically feminine interest in appearance, and I purely can't stand the pervasive cultural objectification and sexualization of girls (i.e., the hyperfocus on girls' appearance; "beauty" products and routines marketed to very young girls; clothes which encourage girls to be passive and looked-at rather than active and doing; and the encouragement of imitation romantic and seductive behavior at young ages). But I'm not at all uncomfortable dressing Alex in pastels (including pink) and comfortable-for-play dresses, or giving her dolls and homemaking toys. It won't bother me if she winds up preferring dolls to trucks (I certainly did, and look how I turned out); it also won't bother me if she winds up preferring trucks to dolls. We've provided her with a wide range of toys and books, and as far as I can tell we're both equally willing to rough-and-tumble with her or snuggle her baby doll.
Whether it's because of our parenting practices or because of some kind of natural tendency, Alex has turned out to be a fairly androgynous kid. Her favorite color is yellow. She enjoys nurturing her dolls and building with blocks and cooking in her toy kitchen and playing with trains. She sets up lots of imaginary games about family life, and she eagerly requests books about dinosaurs and space and human anatomy. And books about mermaids. Sometimes she wants to wear a dress to nursery school, but it doesn't deter her from attempting the rock-climbing wall. This weekend she pretended to be an insect, and she pretended to be Cinderella. I enjoy the breadth of her interests - it seems as though she sees limitless possibilities for herself. That's what I wanted for her.
All of this is a long and fancy lead-in to the following confession: Yesterday, in the middle of playing with her train set, Alex took the engine off the train and climbed up into my seat at the table. She held the engine in her hands, talking to it in a quiet voice.
"What are you doing?" I asked her.
"I'm changing the engine's diaper." Then she called out to the other train cars: "I'll be right back! I'm just changing the engine's diaper."
When she came back, she put the engine down, picked up another car, reassured the remaining cars that she would be right back, and went off for another change. She didn't continue driving the train until each car had a clean, dry diaper.
That was about eighteen hours ago, and so far I'm still a feminist. I haven't yet drawn deep conclusions about the innate nature of males and females based on this incident. But stand by!
"Before my child was born, I was a really big feminist. I took all these Women's Studies classes in college, and I was determined to raise a completely gender-neutral child. Then [my daughter wrapped her truck in a blanket and rocked it to sleep/my son made his doll's bottle into a gun]. Now I realize that gender roles are innate. I don't choose gender-appropriate things for my child, they're just what my child naturally prefers. How naive and foolish I was!"
There's a long list of reasons why I don't believe this story.
(1) I've read the famous "Baby X" studies, which demonstrated that people vary their treatment of young infants according to their beliefs about the child's gender, even while they insist that they believe in gender-neutral treatment of children. Gender-typed appraisals of infants' behavior and gender-typed adult-child interactions begin at birth, and are not at all limited to people who know that's what they're doing.
(2) The Women's Studies classes these people have supposedly taken apparently failed to provide any information about larger cultural forces (television, relatives, caregivers, peers, toy manufacturers, etc.) which might affect children's gender role presentation, instead giving the impression that parents who buy both trucks and dolls will automagically have androgynous children. That seems like a mighty strange kind of Women's Studies class to me.
(3) I've been around a lot of parents of infants and toddlers. I can count the ones who genuinely provide a gender-neutral environment on one hand, and it's the hand with fewer fingers. If there were really a huge army of feminist parents who provided a strictly neutral environment until their kids' natural inclinations emerged, wouldn't I be meeting more of them?
(4) I've always figured that if something is really innate, then you don't need lots of rules and social pressure to enforce it. Contrariwise, the existence of a lot of rules and social pressures to prop up a given state of affairs makes me suspect that the state of affairs in question is not innate at all.
(5) People telling this story never sound worried, the way you would normally be if your deeply-held philosophical beliefs were rocked to their core. Instead, they sound relieved. And smug.
(I will say that I think there is sometimes a phenomenon in which feminist parents (usually mothers) have a strong preference that their child express anti-typical gender roles. They'll refuse to buy their daughter anything pink, or really push their son to play with a doll. Under these conditions, I think it's unsurprising that kids pick up on these heavy expectations and rebel against them. But that's very different from providing an environment that is gender-neutral.)
I think that the parents who deliver the little speech above sort of believe in gender equality, but also believe, more deeply and strongly, in gender essentialism - i.e., that the genders are naturally and irreducibly different. I think they are parents who would "allow" their boys to play with a doll, but who subconsciously prefer and reinforce traditional role behavior. I think they are relieved to discover evidence that validates their assumptions, so that they can give up the discomfort of their previously-assumed lip service to gender-role flexibility. And I think they are deeply, deeply oblivious to societal pressures toward gender conformity, even as they give these little speeches to other parents that reinforce inflexible gender roles.
How all of this applies to us:
Michael and I are both feminists who are fairly gender-typical in our personal interests. (For example, I enjoy cooking, needlework, small children, tiny fancy tea sandwiches, talking about people's feelings, and Georgette Heyer novels, although of course I also enjoy science, history, politics, hiking, arguing, and being in charge.) As a child, I loved my baby dolls, sewing kit, toy kitchen, and dollhouse. I don't have, at all, a stereotypically feminine interest in appearance, and I purely can't stand the pervasive cultural objectification and sexualization of girls (i.e., the hyperfocus on girls' appearance; "beauty" products and routines marketed to very young girls; clothes which encourage girls to be passive and looked-at rather than active and doing; and the encouragement of imitation romantic and seductive behavior at young ages). But I'm not at all uncomfortable dressing Alex in pastels (including pink) and comfortable-for-play dresses, or giving her dolls and homemaking toys. It won't bother me if she winds up preferring dolls to trucks (I certainly did, and look how I turned out); it also won't bother me if she winds up preferring trucks to dolls. We've provided her with a wide range of toys and books, and as far as I can tell we're both equally willing to rough-and-tumble with her or snuggle her baby doll.
Whether it's because of our parenting practices or because of some kind of natural tendency, Alex has turned out to be a fairly androgynous kid. Her favorite color is yellow. She enjoys nurturing her dolls and building with blocks and cooking in her toy kitchen and playing with trains. She sets up lots of imaginary games about family life, and she eagerly requests books about dinosaurs and space and human anatomy. And books about mermaids. Sometimes she wants to wear a dress to nursery school, but it doesn't deter her from attempting the rock-climbing wall. This weekend she pretended to be an insect, and she pretended to be Cinderella. I enjoy the breadth of her interests - it seems as though she sees limitless possibilities for herself. That's what I wanted for her.
All of this is a long and fancy lead-in to the following confession: Yesterday, in the middle of playing with her train set, Alex took the engine off the train and climbed up into my seat at the table. She held the engine in her hands, talking to it in a quiet voice.
"What are you doing?" I asked her.
"I'm changing the engine's diaper." Then she called out to the other train cars: "I'll be right back! I'm just changing the engine's diaper."
When she came back, she put the engine down, picked up another car, reassured the remaining cars that she would be right back, and went off for another change. She didn't continue driving the train until each car had a clean, dry diaper.
That was about eighteen hours ago, and so far I'm still a feminist. I haven't yet drawn deep conclusions about the innate nature of males and females based on this incident. But stand by!
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-19 11:22 pm (UTC)Ah yes, I've been regaled with it too, on more occasions than I care to remember.
I love you for this entry, which I've just happened upon via
can count the ones who genuinely provide a gender-neutral environment on one hand
In theory I'm all for a gender-neutral environment, and it's certainly what I'm aiming for, more or less, but at the same time, I think the very notion of a "gender-neutral environment" is a fiction. You can't just jump out of culture and start from scratch (cf. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and your own very perceptive comments above!).
One area that I've found particularly messy is clothing choices. If you dress your little girl in "boys'" clothes, it's less of a statement than if you dress your boy in "girl's" clothes. If Charlie wanted to wear a frilly skirt or a pink T-shirt covered in roses, would I let him wear it? Damn sure I would. But I don't actually buy half his clothes in the girls' clothing section; I only buy the odd piece of clothing for him there (he owns yellow trousers with flower embroidery, for example - since yellow is his favorite color, too, and there were no yellow trousers in the boys' section!). By pre-selecting his clothes in this way, I'm clearly inculcating him with ideas about what to wear and what not to wear. But what's the alternative? I could dress him in skirts half the time, but then everyone's attention would be focused on his clothing instead of on HIM. It's just not an option I've ever seriously considered. The idea is for your kid to be as happy and free as possible, not for them to be a walking publicity statement for their parents' views on gender theory.
I do have to admit that I really pushed the baby dolls on him though!
BTW, you might check out
no subject
Date: 2007-11-20 04:03 pm (UTC)I completely understand what you're saying about clothes. The big non-neutral thing with Alex is her long, thick, silky blonde hair. She draws a lot of compliments on her appearance, which I don't like, and yet I haven't been able to bring myself to have that gorgeous hair cut.
She also mostly wears girls' clothes, in part because they seem to fit better (more close-fitting styles and stretch fabrics, which suit her scrawny frame) and in part because I buy her clothes in big mixed lots on eBay rather than piece by piece. The few things that I buy piece by piece, like pajamas, tend to come from the boys' department. (Boys' pajamas are so much cooler than girls'.)
But yeah, the only thing that bothers me about her decidedly female appearance is the number of attractiveness-related comments she gets. Otherwise, indeed, it's far more important that she be happy than that she be perfectly gender ambiguous. So we're feeding her love of books about science, and not worrying too much about the long hair.