Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  When my daughter was four, I remember taking my first trip to Hamleys toy store in London. There, the floors are absolutely divided; as you rise up the escalator you go into a pink and silver world of Barbies, tutus and fairies. Their catalogue explains: ‘Little princesses deserve nothing but the very best: at Hamleys we’ve got the finest selection of girls’ toys anywhere! We’ve all the dolls you could dream of and acres of accessories too. There are pony play sets, make-up and beauty boxes and much more to enjoy … In fact, everything a girl could wish for!’5 The website’s bestselling toys for girls were a baby doll, mouse babies, a changing bag and body glitter.6 These play into exactly the kind of femininity described by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949: ‘The little girl cuddles her doll and dresses her up as she dreams of being cuddled and dressed up herself; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvellous doll.’7

  One of the strongest branding exercises for this generation of little girls has been that of the Disney Princesses. What could be more traditional than this theme, which resurrects those heroines, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Belle, which were first created by Disney up to seventy years ago and which were relaunched as one pastel, smiling sisterhood in 1999? Yet it has taken off like wildfire; sales of Disney Princess products increased from $136 million in 2001 to $1.3 billion in 2003, and to $4 billion in 2007.8

  Given its appeal to such an old-fashioned femininity, the surge of this brand’s popularity has taken many by surprise. I had never seen a single one of these Disney Princess films until I had a child myself; although my parents didn’t try to edit Disney out of my life, it was simply the case that children in the 1960s and 1970s, without videos and DVDs, saw fewer feature films. How intensely and vividly, however, this brand has gripped our children. There must be hardly a little girl alive in Britain today who doesn’t have some possession stamped with the brand. If I go into my daughter’s bedroom I will see it on a music box, miniature dolls and medium-size dolls, a wand, a cup, a necklace, crayons and stickers. When I open her dressing-up box, I see the crackly nylon Cinderella dress, and the Snow White dress that is so worn it is falling apart, and the Sleeping Beauty shoes with their little pink heels.

  Of course it isn’t a problem that little girls are dreaming of being little mermaids with sweet voices, or of going to the ball in a puff of silver. I wouldn’t want to deny any girl these pleasures – so long as they aren’t all expected to do it, and so long as it isn’t all they are expected to do, and so long as boys are not seen as being contaminated if they so much as pick up a pink wand. Yet right now it is often assumed that boys and girls will play in absolutely distinct styles. For instance in 2003, Mattel launched ello, a pastel-coloured, curvy building range for girls which was to compete with Lego or Duplo, but ‘specifically made for girls’. Mattel’s resident psychologist, Dr Michael Shore, explained why girls needed their own building range: ‘While “building” is generally associated with boys’ play patterns, there are several ways that girls “build”. Girls also “build” stories and characters with their traditional doll play … The ello creation system … stimulates roleplay and storytelling in a way that is relevant to girls.’9

  Similarly, there have always been books aimed at girls and books aimed at boys, but these divisions are becoming even more vivid in this generation. Now, if you go into any children’s section of any bookshop you will find shelves and shelves of books aimed solely at little girls, all with pink glittery covers and an emphasis on fairies and kittens, ballet and theatre. Their plot lines are fantastically repetitive, reinforcing over and over again the traditional femininity of their young readers. Here is one typical heroine of one typical fairy book: ‘Evie took off her pyjamas … then she put on the blue sparkly dress and matching knickers – which both fitted her perfectly now that she was fairy-sized herself. There was a mirror on one wall and when she went to look at herself she couldn’t help smiling – she looked so pretty. Now all she had to do was fix her hair.’10 Beside such books, there will be examples of a genre aimed specifically at young boys, which feature scarlet and navy covers and scowling heroes. A leaflet published recently by Leapfrog explained to parents how boys’ and girls’ reading choices would naturally differ. ‘Let boys be boys and girls be girls’, it urged. It explained that: ‘Boys … Like reading to have a purpose, for example books that show you how to make things or tell you about things. Girls … Enjoy a bit of fantasy, magic and make believe – princesses, castles and so on.’11

  I am not saying that there are no differences between boys’ and girls’ preferences, on average, or that what differences there are would entirely disappear if children were given complete freedom in a completely equal world. Whatever parents do, and whatever changes we created in the wider society, it might be that we would never see the boys choosing the dolls and the girls the footballs in precisely equal numbers. But the expectations that we are laying on our children in this generation are failing to allow for their true variability, their true individuality, their true flexibility.

  Those parents who find that their children are happy to fall in with these traditional gender divisions often feel no need to question why their daughters’ bedrooms are hung in pink, and their sons’ wardrobes are unrelentingly sludge and navy; why their daughters’ T-shirts proclaim ‘Princess in training’ and their sons’ say ‘100 percent lazy’. But other parents feel very uneasy about the way that our culture is constructing such limited environments for each child, pink or blue according to their gender. Joanna Moorhead is a writer who lives in south London. She has four daughters. It was after the birth of her third, Miranda, she began to question the way that the whole family had supported such a stereotyped view of girls’ upbringing. Because Miranda is a rebel. Given pink dresses to wear, she decided she would prefer jeans; given dolls, she decided footballs suited her better. Instead of fairies and princesses, she decided her heroes were Horrid Henry and George from the Famous Five. She was a classic tomboy, but in a world, her mother thinks, that no longer celebrates tomboys.

  ‘Miranda has lifted the scales from my eyes,’ Joanna said to me over a coffee one afternoon. ‘Now, I look back on my older daughters’ early years, and I can’t really believe that I bought into those stereotypes without ever questioning them.’ Joanna gave her older daughters the classic upbringing of our times, full of pink and ballet and dolls. ‘It’s strange that our culture is so insistent that girls should be so girly, even though the opportunities have developed so much for women. You know, I go to work at a newspaper where men and women work together, and I’m usually wearing trousers, and there is no issue about that. We don’t assume as adults that we will have totally different interests and ways of dressing from one another. But for young children, it’s so much more divided. I do think it is led by the market, it’s very commercially driven.’ Joanna cited the gender division you can see in television commercials, which will flash up a vivid pink spectrum of dolls to dress up and cuddle, against the active toys for boys.

  Many parents believe that these expectations mark a shift towards more rigid beliefs, away from the freer childhoods which they themselves experienced. For instance, looking back on her own life, Joanna Moorhead believes that a generation ago her tomboy daughter, Miranda, would have found it easier to get through her childhood. ‘I wasn’t a tomboy myself,’ she said, ‘but I just don’t think it was a big issue. There wasn’t all this big pink frilly thing about being a girl then. I grew up with brothers, we shared toys, I had a trainset, I don’t think that being girlish was something all girls had to fit in with in the same way. Boys and girls had the same toys.’

  We can see why it might be tricky for a girl like Miranda to find a way through contemporary culture, but it can be equally tricky for boys who do not fit the mould. Fenella is a 42-year-old mother who currently lives in Belgium; I contacted her through the problem pages of a newspaper, to which she had written for advice. She has one son and one daughter. She w
as brought up by a mother who was influenced by feminism’s second wave and who took it for granted that children could follow their own preferences without pressure to conform. ‘Apparently I never played with dolls,’ Fenella told me. ‘And my brother was quite feminine in some ways – I mean, he did ballet when he was young, he wore make-up in his teens. He is now an artist, and he always was a bit of a rebel in that way. I think people now often assume that means gay, but he isn’t – he has a female partner now and has always had girlfriends. My mother was very keen to reject stereotypes; she had been brought up in a conventional way herself but she responded to the feminism around her. She wanted us to cross conventional boundaries – she encouraged my brother to do housework and treated us very much the same.’ Before she had children herself, Fenella assumed that this freedom would only have increased for this generation. ‘I honestly didn’t think that anyone would have a problem any more with a girlish boy or a boyish girl. I thought my children would be living in an even freer time than I did in my childhood.’ But she has found the opposite, and for her son, a six-year-old who prefers dolls to cars and ballet to football, the problems are now very real. This is a generation in which many boys are encouraged into a stereotyped masculinity at an early age; for those who resist, life can be uncomfortable.

  ‘He can’t be accepted for who he is,’ Fenella says sadly. ‘My husband, who isn’t exactly macho himself, says he will be teased at school if he behaves like this, and he reacts with absolute fury when he sees him being girlish, as he sees it. My son desperately wanted an Ariel Barbie so in the end I bought him one and told my husband it was a present from a friend. My son absolutely loved it, but one afternoon my husband cut all its hair off, in an effort to try to make it a more suitable doll for a boy.’ For Fenella, she sees anger at her son’s choices coming partly from her husband, and also from the peer group. ‘My son will spend the morning dressing up one of his teddy bears like a ballerina and when a boy comes to play he’ll show him so enthusiastically and the boy will say, pink is for girls, and my son is so downcast.’ For a while her son had a group of female friends at school, but then they closed ranks and wouldn’t play with him because he is a boy.

  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 pickin
g 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.’