Another Mystery

I keep my daughter's hair long. It's a practice so routine that it hardly bears mentioning; except for how keenly aware I am that it is inconsistent with my feminism. Consider: the longer the hair, the more it requires maintenance. No "wash and go." Moreover, it tangles easily and as Frances shrieks at me every morning, "tanglies hurt!" What I should do and should have done since the beginning is cut it as short as I can. No mess, no maintenance, no pain. And while I do cut it regularly and kept it shorter than shoulder-length for the first two years, that's as far as I've gone.

Why? Because she's a girl. And no matter how much I intellectually understand that the messages this teaches are all wrong (beauty is pain, it's your job to be beautiful because you're female), her long golden hair is so pretty and shiny and the way her big blue eyes pop out of her face beneath her sideswept bangs when her hair is in a ponytail just makes me want to dish her up in a big bowl and eat her with a desert spoon. So pretty, so pretty. I can't resist it. If she were a boy, it would hurt me to chop it off, but chop it off I would.

This is the most glaring of the weaknesses I am aware of, but I do not believe for a second that it is the only one. I am certain that unconscious expectations about girls form a large part of our interactions, in ways that only Frances will be able to tell me, when she's old enough to do so.

As I've watched my feminist friends turn into feminist mothers, I've seen how our own gendered expectations and beliefs express themselves in our parenting practices, consciously or not. He really likes bright colours but I can't let him wear that, it's for girls and his hair is so beautiful long but people are starting to think he's a girl, so I've got to cut it off and she hates wearing dresses; how am I going to get her dressed up for our family photo shoot? and I never thought I'd buy pink for my daughter, but it just turns out it's the most beautiful colour on her. And then, sometime between the age of one and two years, when our children begin to express stereotypically gendered behaviours, we observe in shock and conclude that it must be biological. But we are not solid and impervious stones in a garden of gaseous influences. We are more similar to rags in a pond, soaking up whatever is nearby, until our brains are hodge-podges of known and unacknowledged ideas and motivations. There's a lot of stuff in the skull of your average Good Feminist Mother that would make her cringe, if she were aware of it.

I've based most of my own thinking on two books: Mother Nature, which I've already reviewed ad nauseum; and An Unconventional Family by Sandra Lipsitz Bem, an American gender-researcher and theorist. The latter book is based on her experiences in egalitarian marriages and feminist child-rearing, and includes not only her own recollections but also interviews with her ex-husband and children.

Lipsitz Bem writes of her efforts as "retarding their gender education while advancing their sex education." This ranged from the easy (or at least obvious) such as egalitarian divisions of labour within the home and exposure to non-traditional working arrangements, to the exceptionally difficult:

"Another way we retarded our children's gender education was to monitor--even to censor--books and television. I had no qualms about limiting television to three hours a week [three! hours! a week!] .... Books, in contrast, I hated even the thought of monitoring because I love books and I wanted our children to love them too. The problem is that if young children are allowed to sample freely from the world of children's literature, they will almost certainly be indoctrinated with the idea that girls and boys are not only different from each other but, even worse, that boys are more important. What else can one conclude, after all, when there are approximately ten boys in these stories for every girl and almost a hundred 'boy' animals for every 'girl' animal? (I'm not exaggerating.) [She's not, either. Go read your kids' Dr. Seuss books.] Or when the few females who are in these books almost always stay indoors and at home--no matter what their age or species--while the males go outdoors and have adventures. Or, perhaps worst of all, when the females are so unable to affect their own environments that when good things happen to them, those things just fall out of the sky, whereas when good things happen to males, their own efforts have usually played a part in making them occur.

"...although I have no artistic talent, I was handy with my whiteout and magic markers, which I used liberally to transform one main character after another from male to female by changing the character's name, by changing the pronouns, and even by drawing long hair (and, if age-appropriate, the outline of breasts) onto the character's picture. Nor did I limit my doctoring to the main characters."

Do you know anyone who does this? I don't. I don't want to elevate one person's ideas about feminist parenting to yet another impossible-to-achieve standard; but what I learned primarily from this book is what exactly I am up against, as a feminist mother, and what real anti-sexist parenting would entail--that it's not simply buying dolls for boys and trucks for girls; that it is, in fact, completely beyond me.*

One of Frances's favourite games right now is to make a "whole play-doh family." She got a set of play-doh cookie cutters for her birthday, and five of them are a mom, a dad, a little girl, a little boy, and a baby. We roll out the doh and make them all up, and a bed and pillow and blanket, and everyone takes turns putting everyone else down for a nap. It's a sweet and lovely game. And every time I notice how the little girl and little boy are differentiated from each other by the presence of a skirt and pigtails on the girl. Part of our conversation, now, is for Frances to note that "the little girl has ribbons in her hair and the Mummy has ribbons in her hair, too! But the little boy doesn't have ribbons in her hair."

Besides the adorable mangling of personal pronouns (which I do not correct), I hate that she is already learning that females are decorated. Thank you, play-doh manufacturer. Sadly, I am not as handy with whatever tools one might use to refashion plastic cookie-cutters as Lipsitz Bem was with her whiteout and magic markers; and I don't even know what to do or how to begin undermining this cultural message. Except to say, "That's true, this little boy doesn't wear ribbons in his hair; but some boys do. And I never wear ribbons in my hair." If Frances would stand for it, I'd make a family entirely of the undecorated play-doh shapes and we'd make up a new, non-nuclear family narrative. But right now she wants a WHOLE FAMILY and she's already learned that this means one Daddy and one Mummy and one Little Girl and one Little Boy and one Baby, and the Little Girl and the Mummy wear skirts and have ribbons in their hair.

That's not genetic. And (see first paragraph) I am not blameless.

"The third thing we did was to help them to understand that all cultural messages about sex and gender ... are created, whether now or in the distant past, by human beings with particular beliefs and biases. The appropriate stance to take toward such messages is thus not to assume that they are either true or relevant to your own personal life but to assume instead that they merely convey information about the beliefs and biases of their creators."

I was fortunate enough to have read this book a few times before Frances was born, so I was able to think about some of these things before they became issues. I'd determined fairly early, for instance, that I would buy toys my child asked for, and not care what side of the aisle they came from. That I would buy her comfortable, practical clothing--Frances owns and wears boys' clothing when it makes sense to do so. But the newborn gifts temporarily stumped me--four pink teddybears, plus other stuffed toys.

Knowing that the default sex in western culture is "he" and that without some forethought all of her toys except the pink ones would end up being boys, and that this was not what I wanted her to learn, I gave half of them boy names and half of them girl names. Including the pink teddybears, one of whom, named "Stuart," Frances particularly loves. She has latched on to this; almost every stuffed toy she owns is a "she"--not just the ones with long eyelashes, pink fur, or clutching babies.

But there's plenty I can't control, or at any rate, don't: Ruby's zealous femininity and Max's precocious masulinity, in defiance of any little girls or boys I've ever met; the toys and clothes picked by relatives, which are nearly uniformly pink and feminine; how every girl in Timothy Goes to School wears a skirt; how all toy girl Calico Critters and nearly all girl Little People wear skirts, even the farmers and mechanics; how, no matter where I look, the imaginative world presented to toddlers and preschoolers is more gender-codified than the real world, more rigid. Even the worst of adult women's magazines with their incessant and relentless gender-programming do ocassionally show women in pants.

And there's still me.

You, me, all of us; we're all products of our upbringing. My mother is a staunch feminist who has spent two decades in a job she loathes essentially to prove to the Old Boy's Club that she can; yet I think I could turn her grey with stories of what I remember learning about women from her when I was a child. Actually, she would flatly deny it; and if there is one mistake I am determined not to repeat, it is to turn away from the consequences of my parenting decisions when they were both unintentional and undesired. If my actions are making it harder for her to test gender boundaries, I want to acknowledge that.

Frances is very girly in some respects. She plays with dolls, and even her non-doll toys take turns as "babies" and get carried around on her shoulder while she soothes them down for naps. She likes to cook in her kitchen, and specializes in microwaving plastic strawberries which her Daddy is then forced to enjoy, over and over. When she plays with the dolls in her dollhouse, it's usually to make them all have a big happy family hug and tell each other how much they love themselves. Tea parties are fun; and when we have them, each of us has to use the spoon and cup and saucer that match. She loves pink. And it's true that while she has blocks and trains and trucks, she doesn't play with them as often as she plays with dolls.

But she loves frogs and worms--for anyone used to the familiar tableau of a little blond girl in a frilly pink dress screaming EWWW over the earthworms on the sidewalk, I imagine Frances holding one reverentially and saying "it's so cute" might be jarring. She was a scary lion for Hallowe'en, and loved to roar at people. She likes to lounge around the house in jogging pants, stomp in mud-puddles, pick up sticks and stones on our way to the park through the woods, use the hammer from her doctor's kit to pound pretend nails into the floor (or into people, depending), and put together her dinosaur puzzle. She likes to play catch. She prefers her blue kitty-cat-and-fish placemat to the pink Barbie ballerina one my SIL gave her for Christmas. Her current favourite shows are Scooby Doo, Spongebob Squarepants, WonderPets, Horton Hears a Who, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

If she were a boy, which set of attributes would be dominant? Which set of attributes would people see as dominant?

Here's a better question: why do we have to divide these attributes into sets in the first place?

Why is it that as soon as our children start to evince a personality, we need to parse out whether or not they are behaving according to gendered type? Doesn't that say something about our expectations and their source? As long as Frances isn't tearing the heads off of ducklings or expressing affection for people by bashing their kneecaps with tire-irons, I couldn't care less if she's feminine or masculine. I celebrate everything she does because it's Frances who's doing it. A thousand naps an hour for Ella the Ellephant? Fabulous! Frog hunting in the backyard? Fantastic!

Because the last thing I want to do is teach her about gendered expectations by deciding whether any particular activity is "girly" or "boyish," or whether she as a person is behaving according to type.

Because I don't want any of my early assumptions about the "naturalness" of her interests and skills to become a trap she has to break out of later. This seems to me a real danger of looking at our children at this young age and saying "she likes pink--it must be biological after all." Once we've decided that our children are displaying proof of the biological essence of certain sex differences, where does that leave them if they change their mind in a few years?

Moreover, where does it leave us when working to eradicate those sex differences which are truly harmful? If we decide before they start school that they are simply girly and that's why they don't assert themselves, how do we teach them to be assertive? Conversely, if we decide that aggressive behaviour is proof of the unruliness of boys, how do we teach them to treat others with consideration? Haven't we given up before we've begun?

Our kids come into the world with their own temperaments. Our personalities are formed by some combination of nature and nurture, and which part of us comes from one or the other can never be fully known. And I think all mothers, at one point or another, are astonished to realize how little influence we have over the people our children become. But it's not the same to realize that I have nothing to do with her shoe-shopping predeliction or her physically affectionate dolls as it is for me to assume that these traits reside on her X chromosome. Maybe it was one too many viewings of Max and Ruby. Maybe she got it from her Dad. Maybe she picked it up from the girls in daycare, along with that atrocious and thankfully temporary stage of everything beautiful being "just like Barbie." Maybe I am completely wrong and I did teach her this, without knowing. Or maybe all of the above. There's no control-Frances, so who she would have been in the absence of these influences can never be known.

Ultimately it doesn't matter, and I don't want to find out. People are tightly-knotted mysteries; unravelling the wherefores, putting cause to effect and determining how-much-mine and how-much-not-mine would ruin it. Why does she cry sometimes when I knock on the tent, when most of the time she begs me to? What rule of her expanding universe have I violated? What is it she loves about pretending to be Ruby on that episode when they are trying to catch the bus, and why does she laugh so hard when I pout and cry "Stay home!"? Why doesn't she want us to call her gorgeous or cute or beautiful or smart or strong anymore? Why does she insist on being "just Frances"? Why must Bella Bear sit on that chair during the tea party? Why must Boots the Monkey and the Whole Play-Doh Family always be made out of the red tub? What does she see in my mole, anyway? Why does she like pink? Why does she so often insist that pink is her favourite colour and want to get the pink version of whatever is on offer, and then reject it in favour of some other colour for days at a time? Why does she prefer to eat her cereal as two separate food items: cereal as finger food from a bowl, and milk in a glass beside it?

Maybe one day she'll tell me. Maybe I won't like it. Maybe she won't tell me. Maybe she can't. Could you sit down and determine which of your traits and interests are due to temperament vs. upbringing vs. genes vs. sex chromosomes? Would you want to? Aren't we mysteries even to ourselves? Isn't the unknowableness of human beings part of what makes us human?

Reading the interviews with her children in the back of the book reveals a fascinating glimpse of two people who regularly violate gender norms and consider it a a basic human right to be able to do so. I found this question and answer set particularly interesting because both their son and their daughter answered it in similar ways, though here I am including the daughter's voice:

"Someone else could easily categorize your interests as feminine and Jeremy's as masculine. And they could even go further and say that this is an example of how your parents' gender-liberated child-rearing 'failed' because it produced a boy with boy interests and a girl with girl interests. How would you respond to that?

"Why bother classifying our interests that way? It's just so obvious who is talented where. If you listen to me sing, you can't help but say, 'This girl has a great voice.' And if you look at Jeremy when he's doing math, it's clear that he is a mathematical 'genius.' People just have talents where they have them, and you're not going to get a boy who hates math becoming a great mathematician any more than you're going to get a girl who has no voice taking opera seriously. We don't do what we do well because Jeremy's a boy and I'm a girl. And I think it's absurd to talk about any kind of child-rearing failing when it produces children with interests and even passions that are guided by talent." (emphasis mine)

Why bother classifying our children this way? Next to the harm it can do--to the harm we ourselves have experienced when being boxed in or out of this or that because of our sex--where is the benefit to be gained by deciding whether our children are feminine or masculine, especially at this early age?

~~~~~

* Though I intend to write and make storybooks of my own for Frances, and have made one already that stars Frances playing with the animals in our backyard. It's not even hard, so if anyone is curious about how to make a book, let me know.

Posted by Andrea at January 29, 2007 6:54 AM under Mothers and Anti-Mothers

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