Male and Female

THE ATLANTIC

BY EVELYN GOODENOUGH PITCHER

How early do young children play a distinctive sex role, and how do parents accent sex differences in young children? Evidence from a recent study of mine suggests that by two and through ages three and four, boys and girls have strikingly different interests and attitudes, which their parents steadily influence and strengthen.

The influence is inescapable. In my study, fathers and mothers who were questioned agreed that women are more indirect, illogical, circuitous in their thinking than men. Men’s thinking was considered to be more analytical, definite, precise, abstract, direct. “Men have a quantitative, analytical, objective interest in things,” was a typical remark. The woman’s mental approach was described to me as “cunning and deceptive, intuitive, subjective.” Be a listener at a women’s luncheon and note the subjects of conversation; do the same with a group of men. Eavesdrop on a woman’s telephone conversation; listen to a man’s. It has long been a byword that men like to talk about business, politics, and the mechanisms of their cars, while women commonly talk about their friends, their hats, and their children. Is this true?

If men and women are really thus different in their thinking, or if they are believed to be, how would this influence the development of young children? How can we find out? I devised a simple experiment which allowed me to take boys or girls, one at a time, into a room to play with a box of brightly colored plastic chips the child had never before seen. During a ten-minute period 1 recorded everything said, and thus had some tangible record of the way the child was thinking.

The forms and problems the game presented seemed to fascinate the boys, so that they kept talking about the chips, wondering about their use, how they could be arranged, where they had come from. If the boys’ remarks left the immediate situation, they rarely went far away.

The whole business intrigued the girls much less. Like women bored by men’s conversations, after a few minutes they would look up and say, “I’m going to a party tomorrow,” or, “We have blue wastebaskets at our cottage at the beach.” Their digressions included comments about planting seeds, birthday parties, Christmas, friends, gifts, clothing, visits to doctors, pictures on the wall, quarrels with brothers, conversations with mothers. The tendency of the female to jaywalk in conversation was amply illustrated by the little girls.

Had the parents themselves presented different models of thinking to their children and thereby influenced the way the children thought? And what about different kinds of interests in boys and girls? Did parents expect the girl to be more “intuitive, subjective,” and the boy to be more “analytical,” with an “objective” interest in things?

To find out about this, I questioned parents about what they thought made their little girls feminine and what characterized masculinity in the little boys.

Both fathers and mothers clearly regarded it as feminine to be interested in pretty clothes, domestic habits, families, or babies, or for a girl to identify herself with women. They expected a girl to be more social, more interested in herself and in other people than a boy would be. They reported of their girls, “She looks at people’s faces and observes their expressions. She observes relationships,” or, “She wins by guile; she has bright playful ideas calculated to win and attract attention.” In addition, the girl — never the boy — is marked as especially feminine because of her coquetry, in such remarks as “seductive, persuasive,” and “She cuddles and flatters in subtle ways.” It would seem that by noticing such social awareness and coquetry in the little girls, parents encourage the development of precisely these traits.

In contrast, parents regarded it as masculine to be interested in objects or ideas, not persons. Parents commented often on the boys’ preoccupation with bulldozers, trucks, cement mixers. The boy, as the parents reported him, was not only interested in objects but in making them work.

Would young boys and girls actually show such a difference in interest in people or objects as parents seemed to expect? To answer this question, I again devised a simple test. I gave a child a paper and pencil and asked him to make something. Any parent will know that with a child from two to four I got usually meaningless scribbles, often slightly formed but still hardly recognizable as drawings. Clearly, nothing could be learned from the marks themselves; the point was to ask the children what they had drawn and then to record their intentions.

The result was significant and fascinating. Over 50 percent of the girls drew, or said they had drawn, persons, while only 15 percent of the boys did so. In just as great disproportion boys were drawing things, such as a car, a park, a bench, an egg, a train, a tree. The girls’ drawings also showed a marked interest in the family, in babies, in clothing, in domestic activities, which was not apparent in the boys’ drawings. When asked what they had drawn, girls made such remarks as, “Susie on roller skates, sleeping”; “Just a girl, with snaps instead of buttons” ; “A man with an orange shirt, white hair, like Grandpa. He’s barefoot in the grass, because it’s summer.” Usually boys would only name the object.

THE impression that the greater interest of women in persons and the greater interest of men in things and processes begin at an early age was confirmed also by the stories children made up in response to the simple request, “Tell me a story.” Here are some typical examples:

TWO-YEAR-OLD GIRL

Once there was a little kitty cat, and he scratched. Then the Mommy spanks the kitty. Then the kitty doesn’t cry. He scratches the Mommy. The Mommy puts him in jail, but he has friends and he can peek at them. More friends come, but they’re going to be naughty friends and spank the kitty. He scratches them and cries because he doesn’t like naughty people.

TWO-YEAR-OLD BOY

A camel, and he went down the mountain, and he fell down. Then he fell down in a hole. Then a bear came and saw, but he shoot the bear. Then he jumps on the bear. Then he ride on the horse and go, “Giddyup, giddyup,” up the mountain.

THREE-YEAR-OLD GIRL

A little girl, gone to a party. Her got dressed up. Her came back home and got spanked ‘cause her been a naughty boy ‘cause she got into Mommy’s ink. And she spilled it all over the floor, over the rug, and over the floor. Then she went to bed.

THREE-YEAR-OLD BOY

A broken train was going down a hill. And it splashed right in the water. The engine driver got wet. A big wolf came along. And the Indians came too, and ran into the water. A big Indian was very mad and chased the engine driver, and they fight. The Indian wins, and the engine driver is dead.

Analysis of some 360 stories collected from children of from two to five years revealed that girls tend to present people more vividly and realistically and to identify themselves with the personalities and experiences of others. Direct conversations are often quoted in the girls’ stories, and people are more individually conceived and characterized by their names. The boy, on the other hand, speaks with significantly greater frequency of things. He seems especially fascinated by vehicles of transportation and machines, and talks about rockets, boats, cars, trucks, ambulances, fire engines, covered wagons, parachutes. He is interested in mechanical gadgets, too, such as the cement mixer and typewriter, and in such elements of nature as sun, ice, rain, snow, and hurricane. The girl’s interest in objects is more likely to be in personal or household equipment, or in productive nature — leaf, tree, flower. She mentions relatively few vehicles of motion.

Among the people most prominent in the girls’ stories are parent figures, and the girl is much more likely than the boy to express emotions about the parental figure, particularly the mother.

If the boy is experiencing intense reactions to his mother and father, he rarely expresses them directly. From the stories, it would seem that the girl’s personal awareness and personal identity are sharpened by seeing the mother doing things all day with which she can identify. The boy, on the contrary, especially one whose father goes away to a business or profession all day, sees little he can copy or take to himself. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that he is less aware of himself as a person than the girl. The girl usually knows in great detail what it is to be a mother. The boy more often discovers masculinity and identifies himself with it in a general way — in the policeman, fireman, soldier, Indian. These are the masculine roles he can comprehend and play at imitating, as he cannot do with his father’s role as factory worker, executive, lawyer, or scholar.

It also seems that the girl’s early identification with her mother may influence her ideas about morality, for she is over and again more personally and maternally involved in her judgment of what is good or bad than is the boy. The girl seems not to be the more moral of the sexes, but the more personally concerned with morality. Even at an early age she moves in her traditional role of guardian of domestic morality. She can be emotionally and personally involved as she identifies both with the mother who must punish naughtiness and with the child who is naughty. The badness the girl reports is usually minor and spiteful — tearing dresses, ripping trousers, snatching candies, spilling milk or ink, cracking things, scattering crumbs. The girl is skilled in planning punishment at once devastating, personally rejecting, and humiliating.

Considering the amount of aggression and destruction in the three-year-old boys’ stories, relatively little is labeled naughty. For the most part, the gamut of physical aggression is described, atrocity is piled on atrocity, and there seems no particular reason why it should start or stop. For all this aggression, the boy most often mentions two forms of punishment — spanking and jailing. Clearly, the expression of aggression is more common than the consideration that aggression should be punished.

It is the boy rather than the girl who seems to move into a concern for the larger social aspects of goodness and badness. He sees the possibility of good and evil in the same person and specifics that standardized kinds of good and bad characters, such as witches or police, might have other qualities. For boys the arena of evil is more often out of the house. It is the boy who matches forces of good and evil in organized warfare, who sees a responsibility for saving people or fighting from a sense of duty.

All these data from children would be consistent with the observation that questions of social or personal morality among adults are largely regulated by women, while men generally formulate the problems of law, labor, or diplomacy. Children in this study suggest that such differences are already identifiable in the years two through five.

Although almost as many girls as boys speak of aggression, it tends to be much more violent with the boys than with the girls. One almost feels and hears the reverberation of crashing, shooting, and pounding as general catastrophe reigns. Boys have much more shooting in their stories, and often use the word “fight,” suggesting an adversary and a definite concern as to who will win. They biff and butt, roll on the ground, punish with their hands, puke and whiz, lasso and tie up, poison and hook with rope ladders. They use oral aggression freely, in addition to swords, knives, bows and arrows.

Girls show in their stories a relatively more prosocial, adultlike aggression. Among the girls, even shooting is not so likely to be synonymous with violence or death. The girl seems, indeed, more sensitive to the personal implications of death, and more likely to see death as a reversible process, with persons disappearing and returning. The boy seems more likely to deny the reversibility of death. His greater expansiveness in ideas, on the other hand, may lead him to be more receptive to abstract considerations of the finality of life or of a life hereafter, as the following story shows:

Once there was a terrible crocodile with sharp teeth. He saw a person, ate him up, and he got fatter, fatter, and fatter. He threw up and died. He was underground. He couldn’t get up, ‘cause he was dead. He went back to seed; he has a little seed like you have a baby in your stomach. And he grew up to be a crocodile again, because he was planted in the ground and up came a crocodile again. And that’s the end.

In considering such a theme as food, or eating, which includes the providing, preparing, or partaking of food and drink, data from the stories show that it is obviously the girl who markedly identifies with the female role of cook and hostess. The girl mentions specific meals and is interested in the eating of food as a social occasion, and in the preparation of food. The boy is not so likely to mention specific foods; breakfast, lunch, and dinner are likely to be just in the routine of the day.

The girl’s interest in food again suggests the female’s loving concern with details, her tendency to utilize experience in the enhancement of self. Similarly, mention of clothes or apparel is not only more popular with the girls, but among them is treated with more attention to detail, to color, to suitable costume. The boy is not much interested in the details of dress except when he mentions a cowboy suit or an Indian costume. The girl is also likely to comment on general appearance, to perceive greater subtleties of emotional tone in characters — “a nice smile,” “a stern voice,” whereas the boy tends to a more generalized description of persons or references to being “mad” or “glad.”

A concern with friendship and pleasure from interpersonal relationships, a mention of friend or friendship are more frequent among the girls. It is the girl, not the boy, who refers to love, courtship, and marriage. Already, in the early years, the female is attentive to the predatory task of ensnaring a husband. A memorable example is the story from a four-year-old girl which seems to express the association of feminine sexuality and the sea, which appears so often in myths:

Once there was a fish named Flower. She went down in the water and said, “Oh, my gosh, where’s my lover?” She went down in the cellar where my house is. She saw a big father fish which had a sword in his nose. She ran away from the house and hid in another house. She ran up the water and flapped out. She ran away. She went to another house in a deep, deep river. She saw her own home which had her lover in it. They kissed each other. That’s the end.

These stories from children bring out the different emphases expressed by boys and girls in fantasy themes. Such differences must in part have arisen from the different ways in which society makes demands or presents opportunities to children of different sexes.

I HAVE already made reference to the parent interviews as providing evidence of cultural demands and expectations; a closer scrutiny of the material comparing the father’s interviews with those of the mother reveals a curious differential in parents’ sex-typing.

Both fathers and mothers allow what appears to be tomboyishness in girls during the early years, while they try to discourage what might be feminine behavior in their sons. Their attitude seems to reflect the general pattern in America, where our culture tends to grant the female the privileges of two sexes: with impunity she can dress like a man; she can at will interchange the “little boy look” with cloying femininity. She can use any name — her own or her husband’s — enter any job, any area of education, or she can make a career of motherhood. She can be independent or dependent, or both, as and when she pleases.

The male has no corresponding freedom. He is increasingly expected to help in the home, but this is largely because the woman without servants demands such help. Deviations in dress, appearance, or job that reflect the feminine are immediately suspect. If a man is actually feminine in his instincts, even homosexual, he must never appear to be so.

It was impressive to observe to what extent the father more than the mother was responsible for sharpening such differences. There were clear indications that fathers especially tended to emphasize what seemed to be an exclusive masculinity in their sons. “He gets mad if I tease him about his interest in anything girlish and therefore babyish,” said one father about his two-year-old son. “His father was furious when I painted his nails red,” said a mother about her husband’s reaction to fingernail polish on his son. And another mother remarked, “On Halloween a boy can’t wear anything feminine. The idea of lipstick horrifies a father.”

A direct question followed such observations as those I have just mentioned, and brought out the same contrast between father and mother. A father, when asked if he would be disturbed by aspects of femininity in his son, said, “Yes, I would be, very, very much. Terrifically disturbed — couldn’t tell you the extent of my disturbance. I can’t bear female characteristics in a man. I abhor them.” But a mother said, “Jimmy is not as masculine. But he’ll grow up to be considerate and kind. Gentlemanly, rather than masculine.” Another father was distressed and scornful at signs of his son’s femininity. “He’s always interested in flexing his muscles. Perhaps he has to prove that he’s masculine — that’s why I call him feminine.” The same boy’s mother admitted that at one time she was very much concerned about her son’s femininity, but reasoned thus, “I am aware these people make splendid contributions to the world. I’d try to help. I would turn all my energies to producing a good environment for him.”

A father was also more likely to appreciate femininity in his daughter. One mother reported her husband’s pleasure when she put their six-monthold daughter into a dress for the first time. “That’s much nicer than these old pajamas,” said the father. Another mother reported that her husband blanched when he found she had cut her daughter’s long hair. “Promise me that you will never, never cut it again,” he said.

Still another father taught his son how to react to femininity in his baby sister. “His attitude toward his sister is masculine, very big-brotherly. I’ve impressed him with this — to be careful, treat her nice, ‘oogle-google’ with her.” The same boy’s mother remarked, “My husband talks in a high voice to the little girl, in a deep bass voice to Jimmy.” Other remarks show that there is a tendency for the father to grant his daughter a special, privileged place: “It is so inevitable to spoil a first child, I’m glad my first child was a girl,” and, “I’d be stricter with a boy than with a girl, perhaps because my own father was stricter with me. Mary [daughter] once asked me [the father] which of my ‘girls’ I liked best — her or her mother. One is always conscious that there is a little sex factor between a little female child and her father.”

Indeed, half of the little girls’ fathers pointed out their daughters’ coquetry in a way to show that they were themselves personally intrigued. Ten different fathers made the following remarks, describing their daughters:

“Very coquettish. Gallantry and consideration work with her.”

“Seductive, persuasive, knows how to get me to do things she can’t get her mother to let her do.”

“Inclined to be coy and a little seductive.”

“A bit of a flirt, arch and playful with people, a pretended coyness. Sometimes she seems like a Southern girl — may be a little flirt when she gets older.”

“Soft and cuddly and loving. She cuddles and flatters in subtle ways.”

“Engages in outward display of affection.”

“Her coyness and flirting, ‘come up and see me sometime’ approach. Loves to cuddle. She’s going to be sexy — I get my wife annoyed when I say this.”

“Certain amount of flirtatiousness to most everyone, especially strangers. Occasionally with me too. Little shy looks and smiles — attentiongetting devices. I am probably completely taken in by her.”

“She is extremely loving, always coming around hugging and kissing. She loves to play with me at night. I always heard that girls look more to their fathers than to their mothers.”

“A soft person, lovable, affectionate.”

Such statements suggest that there may be some general truth about father-daughter relationships in the remark of one father: “Femininity cannot be divorced in my mind from a certain amount of sexuality.” Such an attitude of the fathers must be presumed to be conditioning their little daughters in this aspect of femininity.

Again, in contrast, only half of the mothers mentioned the flirtatious character of their daughters at all, but when they did so, showed no such personal involvement. Where the father said, “She flirts with me,” the mother, in one way or another, said, “She flirts with her father or with other people.”

Only sparse examples could be gathered from the interviews to indicate that the mother was playing an active part in encouraging her son to a more masculine role insofar as interaction between the sexes, or the cultivation of manly custom, is concerned. Mothers are as likely to take their sons to a tea party as to visit a railroad yard, and are as likely to give their daughters overalls as dresses. The fathers appeared more likely to view the boy as a male trapped in a world of women and needing to guard his uncontaminated masculinity from association with the female sex.

Of course, the impact of this expectancy of the child appears in his everyday behavior. In children’s drawings, we noticed that if a boy drew a person, he would almost invariably draw a boy, whereas girls would draw either girls or boys, almost indifferently.

Thus, it would appear that the father has much greater interest, and hence influence, than the mother in accentuating differences between boys and girls. He likes the little girl to be a little girl and enjoys her femininity, but expresses himself with intolerance about any show of femininity in his son. The mother, however, seems more like a mother animal, treating the babies in her litter with little distinction. Perhaps the mother can afford to be relaxed, since she knows that the worlds of both sexes are hers. She has no real need to promote the purity of either, except insofar as she wishes to please her husband and go along with general cultural mores.

It seems from the evidence I have here presented that boys and girls are from early age subjected to influences that would develop different characteristics. However, the parents interviewed were apparently unaware that they were doing or saying anything directly to foster in their children interest or lack of interest in people. They were probably influencing their children in two ways. First of all, by subtle rewards and punishments, if only those of tone of voice, they perhaps registered approval or disapproval as situations arose. Second, we assume that the girl tends to imitate the mother and the boy the father by reproducing their kinds and sources of interests.

The question arises whether parents really create such distinctions as I have described in otherwise undistinguished personalities. Or do parents — and all our cultural influences—just develop and accentuate tendencies that children are born with? Of course, it is impossible to come to any firm conclusions about whether or to what extent psychological sex differences are innate or learned or both. But however the differences arise, it is clear that they exist from a very early age in children in our society, and that we might do well to consider such differences in planning children’s education.