Gender Socialization

In the fifties, it was all the same. The father went off to work, the mother stayed home and kept house, and the children were for the most part well-behaved with traditional values. Fast forward 40 some odd years, and that’s still the norm, but things are well on their way to changing. In the early 90s, the typical father still brought home the bacon, and the mother kept the kids in line, but there were more and more exceptions every year.
Family enforcement of gender socialization is almost always the first kind of gender socialization a child experiences. The child sees the way their parents, brothers, sisters, and occasionally extended family members act on a daily basis, and this serves as template for the motions that the child will emulate. Most girls are socialized to play ‘house’ while little boys are taught to roughhouse and run around. But what would happen if a girl grew up in a household where she didn’t have a permanent female figure in her life, where she was just surrounded by males the majority of the time? I have a hypothesis that comes from experience.
My family was incredibly atypical in the early 90s. My mom worked, and I mean WORKED. She was a salesperson for IBM, and she traveled out of state at least once a week for an overnight trip. We were lucky if she got home by 6 most evenings. My dad, on the other hand, quit his job when my older brother was born, and he was around the house to take care of me when I was born. Add another little brother in the mix, and you’ve got a house full of boys and me.
For the first 5 years of my life, contrary to what most people would think, I was the epitome of a girly girl. I don’t think it had so much to do with me identifying myself as a girl, and more so with the toys that were under the Christmas tree every year. Along with dresses and hats and shoes galore, I would receive costume jewelry and Barbies and the olden day Polly Pockets. My brothers both got legos, footballs, race cars, and other stereotypical “boy stuff”. Well what has more influence on a kid? Their family enforcement of gender socialization, or the toys their given and expected to play with.
Even though I’ve lived it, I’m not sure what influenced me the most. Sure I was a girly girl, wearing dresses and ribbons in my hair every day until the age of 6, but once six hit and I got that urge to play with all the other kids, I ditched the dresses, the ribbons, and the other girls in my class. I sought out boys to be friends with, emulating my brothers’ behavior in the classroom and in social situations. It was very curious. Instead of playing with my Barbies and my dress up, I would roughhouse with my brothers, or climb trees, or try to catch frogs and slugs in the garden. I copied Jack and Danny like they were the divine role models for young children. My hair was never combed, my room was never neat, my clothes never matched, my manners were atrocious, etc. I was even kicked out of my 4th grade class for my excessive burping one time. In short, I had gone from being a little princess who liked My Little Pony and pink, to the biggest tomboy west of the Mississippi with my spitting skills and tree climbing expertise on par with even the biggest 5th grade boys.
Let’s look at the sociological factors behind the transition. When I was a little girl, my dad treated me like a princess, bought me pink, and even played Barbie with me on occasion. I had 2 girlfriends in my neighborhood, and we all liked the same things – playing kittens, touting our sundresses, and skinny dipping in the ocean. As a collective unit, we loved pink and Disney princesses. I also clearly remember knowing what boys and girls were supposed to like, and was a strong advocate for gender enforcement. I remember telling my older brother – “since I’m a girl, I have to like pink. And since you’re boy, you have to like blue.” My mom smiled and shook her head, but I knew I was right. Sociologically, I was influenced by both my friends (whom I saw almost every day) and the mass media (after all, look at how happy the little girls on all the Barbie advertisements were). It’s very interesting though; I had almost no family enforcement of gender socialization from my mother. She wasn’t the stereotypical housewife, and she still isn’t. She wears all black or navy business suits, sports a very short (yet becoming) hair cut, and didn’t start wearing makeup on a daily basis until she hit the big 5-0 a few years ago. She much preferred basketball to Barbies, and I attribute all of my athletic prowess to her. In short, she wasn’t exactly the epitome of femininity.
However, I moved from Maine to Minnesota when I was 5 years old, and this had a tremendous impact on me. First of all, I left my main source of socialization (my two best friends) behind, and secondly and more importantly, the little girls in my new school all HATED me from day one (I don’t know why, but they just did). Because of this, I only had boys as friends for around 4 years. My mother also began to work later and later, and I was lucky if she was home before I went to bed. With this complete lack of feminine influence, I rapidly transitioned from the pink-loving little girl into quite the tomboy. My brothers were my only friends for awhile, and they didn’t play Barbies with me, so I had to learn to like football and wrestling, as that might be the only interaction I had with kids the whole day. And once I did make friends with the boys in my class, I didn’t want them to think I was weaker or worse at sports than them, so I began to copy them. From simple things like the way Jack held the bat in t-ball, to the way my friend Mark could burp the whole alphabet. So here’s another sociological contributing factor to my tomboyishness – PEER PRESSURE.
It was that age where if I was going to hang out with the boys, I’d better be able to keep up with the boys. And when my mom began to fly out to another state on Monday, and only return again on Friday, I really lost my already wavering grasp of any sort of femininity. Even if she wasn’t the perfect example of it, at least she was a girl. I had no girl friends, no female influences except for my teachers.
Things eventually sorted themselves out when I went to boarding school and was forced to live in a dorm with 35 other girls. I finally found the healthy balance that comprises the woman I am today, happy to wewar dresses once in awhile, but still unable to deal with petty drama and applying makeup on a regular basis.
Sociologically,the main factors that I found contributed to my different stages of life were family enforcement (having only brothers) and peer pressure (wanting my friends at school to accept me). But even though I was a huge tomboy, I was always proud to be a girl, which leads me to the conclusion that gender socialization and gender identification are completely unrelated, an argument for the nature side in the “nature vs. nurture” feud.