Mothers For Women’s Lib

I was thinking about Penni’s f word article the other day. I too have a little boy and am trying to raise him no differently than I would a little girl. It’s more difficult than you might think. Our culture seems to hard-wire us to treat little boys and girls differently. In fact there have been numerous studies showing that we do treat boys and girls differently, from birth:

As a general rule, we are much stricter with boys. We put up with crying and whining less, we discipline harder and more physically. We respond to crying girls faster and with more comfort. But we’re also more tolerant of adventurous or dangerous behaviour in boys than we are in girls.

But the fact is, that in the early months – years, even – it can be quite difficult to tell a baby boy from a baby girl. We can only treat boys and girls differently when we know which are girls, and which are boys.

Thankfully, we’re helped by the prevalence of pink and blue clothes that enable us to tell the difference between little boys, and little girls. Thank goodness. Otherwise we might treat small children equally. Who knows where that might lead? More adventurous females? More nurturing males? Oh heaven forbid!

I appreciate that as girls and boys reach puberty, their bodies do start to differ, and they tend to star requiring different shapes in their clothing (although obviously the clothing industry exaggerates these differences ad nauseum). But babies, toddlers and small children have very few differences at all. Little boys have a penis, which requires a slightly different fold of booster in a cotton nappy than the little girls’ nappy. That’s it. Oh, okay, I also accept that culturally, dresses are very strictly “female only” (although boys are “allowed” kilts). But apart from this, why the huge differences? Why is it so essential that we can tell little boys from little girls?

And I do think it’s damaging to separate them like this, and so early. I’m not sure that the baby boy or girl can internalise the difference between “pink” and “blue” (although who knows for sure?) but the danger comes when we know what sex they are and treat them accordingly.

As an aside, I also think that a lot of boys’ clothes – in particular, shoes in mainstream shops – are simply quite ugly. In two major supermarket chains the baby boys’ clothes are very conservative. They are all quite dark colours; browns, blacks, khakis and the occasional blue. Whereas in the same supermarkets, the girls’ clothes are awash with bright colours; purples, raspberries, pinks, reds and also blues. And that’s before we even get started on shoes. Here, not only is it the colours that are different, but the styles too. Boys have clunky, solid, almost military-looking blues, browns and dark greens. Girls have flimsy pinks and sparkles. Neither is particularly satisfactory, come to think of it.

I’m talking mainstream shops of course; there are some shops – internet based, mainly – that go against the grain and offer baby and toddler shoes chosen by colour or material, rather than stripping it down to gender. But in the main, what are we saying to our children? You are a boy. You must not like pretty things. Your role is purely functional. You must not be adorned in any way. You are meant to be practical. And you, you are a girl. You exist purely as decoration.

And remember, we treat them how we see them. Boys or girls. Ugly or flimsy.

I said earlier that I understood to some extent that culturally boys don’t wear dresses, but that I didn’t see why the rest of baby clothes had to be split according to gender. But when I looked into it further, I discovered that once, baby boys did wear dresses.

In fact, this tradition, of dressing boys in girls’ clothes until they were an older toddler / younger child, went on until the late part of the nineteenth century. Indeed christening dresses may well be a remnent of this. When a boy was ready to be dressed in boys’ clothes, it was called breeching, which referred to breeches, which were similar to trousers.

Apparently this was the point where the child’s father was more prepared to take an interest in the raising of the boy. I wonder if perhaps it coincided with weaning (either the mother weaning the child from the breast, or the child returning full-time from the wet nurse) as we know weaning tended to occur much later than it does in breastfed babies these days. There does seem to be a similarity in ages, anyhow, and we know that the final weaning was a kind of early “rite of passage”; weaning from the breast meant a child was finally independent from its mother or its nurse, as it could survive on other foods and fluids instead and did not need to have constant access to the breast. It would not surprise me if breeching coincided with weaning as the little boy was able to spent more time with the father away from the mother or nurse.

I wonder whether young children, in the main raised by their mothers rather than their fathers, were treated as more “gender neutral” before they were breeched, in those days? Or even treated all as “little girls”; responded to quickly when they cried, disciplined less harshly, discouraged from danger? I’m not saying the way we treat little girls is the “right way” of course, but that we should attempt at least to treat all babies the same way and see where their natural personalities take them.

However, babies now tend to be breeched from birth; the advent of ultrasound technology means we barely have a need even for gender neutral newborn-sized clothes (although a few manufacturers still produce these, as not everyone chooses to discover the sex of their baby).

I’m not sure our culture has the appitite to bring back the days of dressing all young children in dresses. But please, please, please can we have far more “gender neutral” clothes? We don’t really need to split clothes into “boys” and “girls”; can’t we just have them split into type of item? Rompers, trousers, t-shirts, vests, dresses etc., all in a vast array of colours; red, green, yellow and yes, pink, and blue.

Because if we don’t know if a baby is a girl or a boy, we will have to treat it as a baby human.