The world gets in
Sarah Ditum tells us she failed at combating gender stereotypes with her own children. She couldn’t bring herself to let her son age 4 go off to school with painted nails like hers because it could have led to teasing. We can’t just brush that off, can we, because it damn well might have…or, for that matter, though Sarah doesn’t say this, it could instead have led to teachers’ concluding he must be trans.
The idea of letting him break the boy code in such a visible way, and sending him off to school where he might have been teased for it by other children, was too much to take. So I did the work of the prospective bullies before they could. That’s the trouble with “gender-neutral parenting” – the world gets in.
And the world is getting less gender-neutral instead of more so. Who saw that coming?
And it matters. Nail polish is just nail polish, CBeebies is just CBeebies, and a “pretty like mummy” T-shirt is just a T-shirt – but it adds up to a rigorous training in how to be a girl or boy, which turns into strictly held ideas about how to be a woman or man. According to polling for the Fawcett Society to support its newly announced commission on gender stereotyping in early childhood (for which I’m a commissioner), more than half of those who recognised gender stereotyping had affected them said it constrained their career choices, while 44% said it had harmed their personal relationships.
We don’t know how much gender differences in behaviour are innate and how much they’re learned but we do know that much of what we think of as essential is thoroughly cultural. In some societies, women are deemed the chatty sex; in others, men. In some eras, male flamboyance has been the height of masculinity, while other periods have deemed it effete and shameful.
Whatever the shifting rules, they’re inextricably bound to social power and sexism. The stereotypes we absorb as children shape the adults we become. I failed at gender-neutral parenting, but any individual – or even family – alone must fail. The Fawcett Commission report is a chance for all participants to get it right. If we want to create a fairer world for women and men, we need to start with girls and boys.
A fair wind to them.
I for one did not – in fact I was hopeful that by now we would have got beyond that, especially for young children.
30 years ago, it was odd but doable for little boys to wear pink (it was my son’s favourite colour at the time, though as he got older, we discussed the potential for teasing because “some people think pink is only for girls”, but I still supported his choice to wear pink if he wanted to). 55 years ago it was odd but doable for little girls to wear overalls (I hated wearing skirts/dresses, and my mum let me wear pants except for dressy occasions). Now, gender has become *so* important that we have the phenomenon of “gender reveal” celebrations (because otherwise, how would anyone know what toys, or clothes to get for the baby. Or even worse, they might paint the room the wrong colour!
TheoBromine, I don’t know where you went to school 55 years ago, but it obviously was not in my school, where we were required to wear dresses. And the principal would measure the extent of the hem above the knee and send home any girl who’s skirt was too short (he never measured mine; my mother would never let me wear skirts above the knees even in the 60s). I wasn’t able to wear pants to school until junior high, and then only “pant suits” – which meant I couldn’t wear pants, because my mother bought all our clothes at the thrift store, and nothing matched. When I was in high school, we were finally allowed to dress in jeans or non-matching pants and tops.
I saw that as a watershed time for women. Then, when schools started going to uniforms, it seems a lot of girls were back in dresses and skirts.
Iknklast, I went to school in Toronto, Canada. The situations in which I was allowed to wear pants were for leisure/play. I still had to wear skirts/dresses to elementary school (I remember how happy I was to change into pants as soon as I got home from school). When I was in junior high, I was happy to be allowed to wear “pantsuits” (and was fortunate that my mum was able and willing to buy them for me). But when I started high school (in 1971), mandated clothing for girls was skirts or dresses (that was the “grownup” way dress – the boys also had some rules to the extent that jeans/shorts were forbidden). It was cold in the winter in Toronto, and even putting aside fashion choices, I thought it was most unreasonable to force bare legs for my 2 mile walk to the school.* The tide started to turn during the year I was in grade 9, and the school decided that each individual teacher could make the rules for their class. I had 2 anti-pants teachers, so on days I had classes with them, I would wear a pantsuit (which ironically had a really short dress portion), and take off the pants just before those classes. The good news was that eventually the rules were withdrawn – girls could wear pants to all classes, and by the next year, even blue jeans were allowed as long as they were “clean and not torn”. (The not so good news is that the sexism on the academic side continued, as evidenced by the fact that I was forbidden by the vice principal to take an electronics class, despite having demonstrated math and science aptitude, as well as permission and support of the teacher, on the grounds that it was a subject inappropriate for a girl. But, rather to the delight of the teacher, I subsequently went off to university and became an electrical engineer.)
* uphill both ways in a blinding snowstorm
Theo Bromine, that’s similar to my experience. In Maine, having to wear dresses even in snowstorms. My mom bought us snow pants because that would allow us to stay warm on the way to school (and that was before we got to the point where she couldn’t afford to buy us pantsuits).
And as for the taking classes? Yeah, I got Home Ec when I wanted Chemistry. I got Home Ec II when I wanted…well, I don’t remember what I wanted, but it was not Home Ec II. I was good in the basic sciences, and in math, but my algebra teacher had a good old boy manner, only called on boys, and palled around with the boys, while the girls worked in lonely solitude doing problems he would then not bother to grade. And he never called on us. I soon “learned” that I was not good at math, and that there was no future in science for me. I finally became a scientist at 40. Just think of what I might have had, done, discovered, enjoyed if I had been encouraged to be a “person” instead of a “girl”.
Iknklast, the strange thing about the electronics course was that the highschool in general was encouraging (or at least accepting) of girls taking science. We even had a special set of microbiology courses (which I was taking) which had about 50% girls, and the 2 teachers were women. But for some reason, having a girl in electronics in 1975 was just a bridge to far.