Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (19 page)

Fenella’s daughter is not very typically girlish, either. ‘She likes pink and dolls, but she is very physically aggressive. Still, people now accept that more from girls. Whereas my son – he wants to dress up in my scarves and dance around the house. My husband thinks I’ve encouraged it by letting him watch
Strictly Come Dancing
, and he gets so angry when he sees him. “Why doesn’t he go and play football?” he says. But that isn’t who my son is, and it’s really sad that he isn’t allowed to be who he is. My husband will snatch the scarves off him and say, boys don’t do that.’

What worries Fenella is that her son, whom she sees as a normal, even talented and creative child, is being made to feel abnormal and secretive about his interests and pleasures. ‘I think he could be a talented dancer or designer,’ she said to me, ‘but I fear it’s going to be squashed out of him, that he’ll feel he has to spend his time playing sport and he’ll end up an accountant like everyone else. And he’ll be a secret cross-dresser rather than just enjoying wearing great clothes in public. This culture seems to be making boys feel that certain behaviour is abnormal for boys, when it isn’t.’

This is not just about the difficulties experienced by the occasional girl who hates pink or boy who wants to do ballet, but about how we reinforce stereotypes in many, often subtle ways. As we saw at the princess party, girls are constantly assumed to be more verbal and sensitive, and boys more aggressive and socially immature. And this new traditionalism is taking on extra strength by the renaissance of biological determinism: the theory that the differences we see between boys and girls are not created by social influences, but are laid down for them by the time they are born by genetic and hormonal differences.

In the 1970s, during the heyday of second-wave feminism, biological explanations for behavioural differences between boys and girls were often questioned, and explanations from social influences became more popular. It became generally accepted among educationalists then that Simone de Beauvoir had a point, and that if we wanted to move towards greater equality we had to be prepared to challenge the ways that femininity and masculinity were encouraged among girls and boys by the influences around them. Scanning my mother’s bookshelves recently, I came across a number of books that would have been unexceptionable in the 1970s and sound weirdly dated now; books such as Mia Kellmer Pringle’s
The Needs of Children
, which, according to its cover, was well reviewed on publication in 1974. Aimed at ‘students, teachers, social and welfare workers and others caring for children’, it took a socially oriented view of how sex differences are produced. ‘Clothes, toys, subtle differences in words, play, hugs, rewards, punishments and parental example, surround the child with a world which clearly distinguishes behaviour expected from boys and girls,’ it stated plainly. Far from encouraging the view that children are born into their pink and blue boxes, it suggested that children only learn to become masculine or feminine through the way they are treated. ‘The gender role is psychologically determined first by parental and then by wider society’s expectations.’
¹²

This view became pretty mainstream in many schools and playgroups. A guide to non-sexist education published in 1975 shows us what could be expected in a playgroup that tried to put it into practice. The aim was to encourage girls to feel free to encroach on boys’ toys and boys’ roles. It encouraged playgroup leaders to develop ‘non-sexist play situations … When we do woodwork, we especially encourage girls to learn to use tools as well as boys, and try to make sure that women help with this.’
¹³
Such advice was seen over and over again in literature about children’s education at this time.
¹⁴
And much research that was
carried out in this period was very optimistic about the results of such non-sexist child-rearing practice. For instance, in one study carried out in 1984, the researchers found that if exposed to a non-sexist curriculum for just six months, boys and girls aged three to five years showed significantly less preference for sex-stereotyped play, as measured, for instance, by asking them whether they thought certain objects, from cars to tea-sets, belonged to boys or girls, or asking them what activities they liked doing, from looking after babies to sawing.
¹⁵

Marianne Grabrucker was a leading proponent of the ideas about boys’ and girls’ development that were briefly fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s. Grabrucker is now almost unknown in the UK, but in the 1980s her diary of bringing up her daughter,
There’s A Good Girl
, enjoyed huge success throughout Europe.
¹⁶
This book speaks to us from a vanished world, in which this politically engaged German mother tried to resist the pressures on her daughter to be a perfect, girly girl. These included pressures from wider society, such as advertisements, toys and clothes, and pressures from within the family, such as Grabrucker’s own mother or herself. In the diary, Grabrucker battles with all these influences, trying to create a free space in which her daughter can follow her own desires rather than being pushed to fit in with the expectations of others. Grabrucker’s aim was to alert us to how social expectations encourage different behaviour in boys and girls.

For instance, in this passage she is out with her daughter and her daughter’s best friend, a little boy, when they call at a friend’s house. ‘Ingrid’s door opens; she is a teacher with a progressive approach to education. Anneli and Schorschi are in front of me. In their snowsuits, with their bright blue eyes and brilliant smiles, they do make a lovely picture. Ingrid says hello and we talk briefly. Then she turns to the children. “Well Schorschi, it’s lovely to see you; have you been busy tobogganing?” She speaks in a normal, cheerful tone. Then she bends over Anneli, gives her
a brilliant smile, puts her arm round her, picks her up and says, “Hello Poppet, don’t you look pretty today? And what lovely curls; they are growing quickly. I’ve got something for you.” … Is it surprising that girls can relate to people better?’
¹⁷

In picking apart such situations and showing the impact they had on her daughter, this book explained very clearly what was to turn out to be one of the most vital projects of the second-wave women’s movement: the attempt by some parents and teachers to allow girls and boys to grow up free from such stereotypes. In my desire to find out what had happened to this enterprise, I went to Munich to talk to Marianne Grabrucker and her daughter Anne-Marie, about how things had changed since those idealistic days.

Anne-Marie, like her mother, is now a lawyer, and we met in her simple, small flat in Munich. Marianne is now sixty, while Anne-Marie is a confident young woman of twenty-six. Marianne explained to me why she had felt the need to write the book, back in 1985. ‘It was Simone de Beauvoir who showed me what I should do,’ she told me. ‘She was my intellectual mother. She said, a girl is not born, she is made a woman, and when I knew I was pregnant with a daughter I felt, OK, I had to give evidence to see how this happens.’ Marianne had herself already rebelled against her extremely conservative Bavarian upbringing, by becoming a lawyer and a feminist activist. The genesis of the book lay in a diary she kept for herself of her day-to-day struggles with the environment around Anne-Marie, and when it was published she was amazed at the response she received. ‘I was surprised by the success – the first edition of 10,000 sold in two weeks. So much press, radio, TV shows – loads of lectures – parliamentary debates – all the reaction, or almost all of it, was positive.’

But now, she says, the temper of our culture has changed completely. ‘At the end of the book, when Anne-Marie was three, I write about how I and my friends establish a kindergarten, and we were very serious about this issue, about how
boys and girls should be treated equally there. Now, if you started talking about this, people would think you were crazy – you can’t even talk to teachers about this issue – they would think you were a bit mad. Then, people were ready to think about how differences between men and women are produced by society. Now the mainstream is that it is all the genes. Even when I talk to the same people who thirty years ago thought along my lines, they have started saying to me, no, it’s all genes … I don’t mean that they say it very emotionally, on the contrary, it’s just taken for granted … it’s in the genes, that’s it, no argument.’

Just a few weeks before I met Marianne, an article appeared in
Die Zeit
which showed how much attitudes have changed.
¹⁸
The journalist, Burkhard Strassmann, argued that there are differences in the innate aptitudes of boys and girls and that these drive all the differences we see in their behaviour. He mentions Marianne Grabrucker’s work and the ‘failure’ of her experiment as proof that differences between men and women are biologically determined. ‘At the beginning of the 1980s, the feminist Marianne Grabrucker deliberately attempted to raise her daughter in a truly liberal and gender-neutral way … Marianne Grabrucker’s diary reads as a shattering document of failure.’ When I asked Marianne about this article, she spoke with resigned irritation. ‘He said that I did an experiment to try to prevent these differences, but at the end of it I had to admit there were still differences. He said that this meant that the experiment failed. But what he never mentioned was that I gave an explanation for this. My conclusion in the book was that I can’t change everything as an individual, just through myself, because my influence – I said this clearly – on my daughter was not more than one-fifth. The other four-fifths were made up of other family members – grandparents can have great influence – friends and neighbours, educators and other childcarers, and cultural influences, everything that is
out there – advertising, films, going to church, television, books.’

So the conclusion Marianne came to after writing her book was not that she should despair, but that it was time for her to work politically. ‘I didn’t change my mind. The starting point was to ask, is the gender problem caused by education, or genes – and finally I knew, yes, gender inequality is caused by education. I was very optimistic in the beginning, and I was optimistic still in the ending. I thought, now I know: it’s not only education in the narrow sense, we have to define education in a very wide sense. Education is more than the personal influence by parents. It’s politics. My book was very useful for me. By writing it I came to the conclusion that we have to go into politics and change the wider culture.’

Marianne Grabrucker feels that the ground established by feminists like herself is now being undermined by a backlash in the culture around her. ‘I don’t think that women are any longer interested in how to create political change.’ Anne-Marie, Marianne’s daughter, also believes that the current state of our culture has made it difficult to carry on the project her mother began. ‘This is a bad time for feminism,’ she says seriously. ‘There was a peak, then it died down. Then another peak, then it died down again. I am still glad about how things have changed to the extent that they have – I can go to work at a law firm now that wouldn’t even have employed women twenty years ago. But if anything, the pressures on young girls are more than before. I think the way they are pressuring them at such an early age is just taking away their choices. There are a lot of very feminine women out there, and some very masculine ones, and I think you should be given the choice and left to your own devices, to see which way you will go.’

It was both heartening for me to meet Marianne and Anne-Marie, and very dispiriting. On the one hand they were still convinced by the experiment that Marianne had undertaken,
and they still believed that it had been invaluable for Anne-Marie to have been encouraged from the beginning of her life to feel free to behave as she chose. But they both believe that the culture around them is no longer enabling other women to find freedom in the same way. Biological explanations are currently squeezing out other explanations for differences between boys and girls, and contributing to a fatalism about sex inequality.

In the educational world, biological explanations for differences between the ways that girls and boys play and learn have become ubiquitous. For instance, when one educational consultant published a book on gender equity in 2004, she found herself talking to headteachers who told her categorically, ‘One would think there must be something neurological because people have tried very hard to, you know, change things with their girls, to make sure they are playing with trains.’ These teachers believed that non-sexist education, or equal opportunities for children, had been tried, but had been seen to fail. ‘It’s just not on,’ said one. ‘I used to believe it was possible to have all that sort of equal opportunities.’
¹⁹
You can see the same view in the work of the bestselling childcare expert Steve Biddulph, who has written, ‘For thirty years it has been trendy to deny masculinity and say that boys and girls are really just the same … New research is confirming parents’ intuitions about boys being different.’
²⁰
The causes for this difference, he suggests, are ‘the powerful effects of male hormones’ and ‘the ways in which boys’ brains are vulnerable’.
²¹

This interest in biology – ‘something neurological’ or the ‘effects of male hormones’ – as the explanation for differences between girls and boys means that far from exploring how social factors might create these differences, and how they could therefore be challenged, many people are retreating into fatalism about the innate and inescapable nature of these differences. Parents and teachers are now encouraged to avert their eyes from the influences of consumer marketing, parental reinforcement or
peer-group pressure on children’s behaviour. Instead, we are asked to believe that the exaggerated femininity and masculinity that we often encourage in our children is simply a natural result of their biology.