Boys And Girls Forever

by Alison Lurie

  Superficially, Professor Thome’s methods are more detached than those of Iona Opie. She does not spend much time talking to kids, because she is not interested in individual behavior, but in what she calls “group life.”22 But in another sense her approach is far more personal. As she tells us, she is a feminist and the daughter of a feminist, and has been “active in the women’s movement.”23 She and her husband (who, like Iona Opie’s, is called Peter) are “alert to the forces of gender socialization” and determined “to help our son and daughter break through this kind of channeling.”24

  Barrie Thome’s approach to her subject is conscientious. She begins by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary with a magnifying glass to discover the possible meanings of the word play, and critically reading many of the studies that have preceded hers. In spite of her focus on groups, she is aware of individual differences and rejects the idea that all members of the same sex are alike. She complains that previous researchers have tended to concentrate on the most “masculine” boys and the most “feminine” girls, ignoring tomboys and sissies, thus exaggerating gender differences. In some cases, she sees “a skew towards the most visible and dominant,”25 and suggests that observers have tended to identify with the most popular kids and neglect to pay attention to the loners. She is also honest enough to see this process occurring in her own fieldwork, and tries to counteract it:

  After a few weeks . . . I realized that my fieldnotes were obsessed with documenting Kathryn’s popularity. . . . Then I realized the envy behind my note-taking and analysis and recalled that many years ago when I was a fourth- and fifth-grader of middling social status, I had also carefully watched the popular girl.26

  She finds the same bias in other researchers. “I detect a kind of yearning in these books,” she says of one group of studies, all by men; “when they went back to scenes from their earlier lives, the authors couldn’t resist hanging out at the top.”27

  Unlike Iona Opie, Barrie Thorne was ill at ease on the playground. “Several kids asked me if I was a spy, and, in a way, I was, especially when I went in search of the activities and meanings they created when not in the company of adults.”28 She also ran into trouble with her cover story. Mrs. Opie explained herself as someone with “the sensible and interesting hobby of collecting games, rhymes, and jokes,”29 a hobby that children, who are often collectors themselves, could identify with. Professor Thorne, in attempting to level with her subjects, repelled them:

  . . . as I crouched, watching and scribbling, on the sidelines of a basketball game, a girl came up and asked, “What are you doing?” “A study of children and what they play.” “Do you wanna be a teacher?” she asked. “I am one. I teach sociology, ever hear of that?” “No.” “It’s the study of people in groups.” “Well, goodbye,” she said, running off.30

  Many observers have noticed that children tend to separate by sex on the playground, even when they mix freely in classes and at home, and that their games and styles of play differ. Iona Opie takes this for granted, as if it were natural law. She remarks that boys are “more egotistical, enterprising, competitive, aggressive, and daring.”31 Girls “enjoy talking as a purely social activity, and take far more interest in people.”32 They are hospitable, helpful, conciliatory, and “infinitely cosy.”33 On the other hand, she notes that boys “are quite often to be seen crying (whereas I cannot remember ever having seen a girl in tears in the playground).”34

  Barrie Thorne also sees differences between the play of boys and girls. She finds that boys’ groups tend to be larger, that they form “‘gangs,’ ‘teams,’ or groups of ‘buddies,’ while girls organize themselves into smaller, more intimate groups and friendship pairs.”35 She also points out with some irritation that boys have ten times the play area of girls, and yet insist on invading and interrupting girls’ games.

  Iona Opie remarks that “food and sex are two of the children’s principal interests”36 and that the most exciting moments on the playground are when boys chase girls or vice versa. Professor Thorne also observed this activity, and others which brought the sexes together in what she calls “border areas” to engage in the antagonistic or mock antagonistic contacts she calls “borderwork.”37 Her account of these activities is one of the most interesting things in Gender Play. It also cannot help but remind some readers of the relations between the sexes that they have observed in so-called “adult” life.

  According to Barrie Thorne, borderwork is a form of “interaction across—yet based on and even strengthening—gender boundaries.”38 These actions, she says, “often teeter between play and aggression, and heterosexual meanings lurk within.” They arouse “excitement, playful elation, anger, desire, shame, and fear.”39 In a pattern she often observed, a member of one sex insults a member of the other, who then chases him or her. Sometimes several boys may chase one or several girls, or vice versa. The children Barrie Thorne watched often actively provoked these chases; indeed, she mentions one group of girls who spent their time on the playground “in an open-ended search for ritual contact with boys,”40 an activity that can also sometimes be observed at adult parties and professional meetings.

  In some of these chasing games, known as “catch-and-kiss,” the runner is kissed when caught. Such kisses, however, are more aggressive than affectionate, and may even be contaminating, as Barrie Thorne points out. The schools she visited had rigid pecking orders, and in each class there were one or more children whose rank was so low that contact with them was polluting; in the language of the playground, which some readers may recall, they had “cooties.” Girls low in the pecking order were known as “cootie queens,” and could infect anyone who touched them. Low-status boys might also have cooties, but were not called “cootie kings.”

  Both boys and girls could give cooties, but boys did not give cooties to other boys. Most significant, perhaps, all girls, no matter what their social rank, could contaminate boys; in the Michigan elementary school cooties was also known as “girl stain.”41 Barrie Thorne observes that even objects associated with girls, like valentines, could be contaminating. Though she does not mention this, the belief sometimes survives into adulthood. Men can be contaminated by wearing women’s clothes, or reading “women’s novels” or magazines. Not long ago many men were told by writers like Robert Bly that modern urban life as a whole is intrinsically feminine and therefore weakening.

  At the schools Barrie Thorne studied, there were ritual cures for “cootie” contamination, the most interesting of which was a contraption made of folded paper called a “cootie catcher,” with which one could pick off invisible cooties from the infected person.42 Adult men too can be decontaminated, according to Bly—though with considerable expenditure of time and money—by going into the woods away from women, chanting, and beating drums.

  The idea of the female as intrinsically polluting, of course, has a long history. In many cultures menstruating women are dangerous, and among gypsies women below the waist are marimay (taboo); a man can be polluted merely by stepping over their legs. Urban and suburban Americans are supposed to be free of such beliefs, but Barrie Thorne’s book suggests that this is not the case. She also notes, as others have, that the girl who joins boys’ games and is identified as a tomboy does not lose social status or become contaminated, whereas the boy who is seen playing jump rope is called a sissy and moves to the bottom of the pecking order. The same processes, of course, can be observed in adult life.

  The flip side to this magical belief system, as Barrie Thorne remarks, is that persons who are identified as polluting have power because they can threaten to pollute: “If a girl is designated as having cooties or threatens to plant a dangerous kiss, it is the boy who has to run.”43 Of course it is not always gender that makes someone possibly contaminating. I recently heard students at Cornell discussing the problems involved in inviting “creepy” relatives to a wedding. Naturally, they did not use the word pollution, but they vividly pictured how unpleasant it would be to
have Uncle X or Cousin Y sitting at the table or slobbily kissing the bride and groom, and said that “everything would be spoiled” if they were there.

  In The People in the Playground Iona Opie does not mention observing a belief in the contaminating effect of some children on others. It is hard to know whether it did not exist, or whether it seemed so obvious that she did not report it. Given what we know about British society, the latter seems most likely; but it is also possible that in England children remain ignorant of such magical theories until they reach secondary school. It would be most interesting to know whether Barrie Thorne would find a system of infectious touch operating in Hampshire; and to discover what Iona Opie would make of an American playground.

  POETRY BY AND FOR CHILDREN

  THERE are two main sorts of children’s poetry. The first, which we all still know and enjoy, unless we have wholly forgotten our own youth, is composed by children themselves and by grown-ups who recall what it was like to be a child. The second sort is written for children by adults who wish, often with the best intentions, to educate, inspire, or caution the young. A few of these poems are enjoyed, but most are remembered, if at all, because we were forced to read or even to memorize and recite them when we were in school.

  Whatever the prevailing adult taste in poetry for children, girls and boys themselves have continued to choose and create hundreds of wonderful anonymous rhymes. These verses survive sometimes for hundreds of years, and are passed on from generation to generation. Often their authors are lost, and they can only be dated approximately by internal evidence or by the time of their first appearance in print. For example:

  I asked my mother for fifty cents

  To see the elephant jump the fence.

  He jumped so high

  He touched the sky,

  And he never came back till the Fourth of July.

  Nobody knows for sure who wrote this, or when, but it would be a good guess that the lines were composed in America, because of the reference to our national holiday, and between 1880 and 1920, when there were still many small traveling circuses and an entrance fee of fifty cents would have been reasonable. It has one of the classic marks of the nursery rhyme: the matter-of-factly described but fantastic event.

  The anonymous verses that are passed down from one child to another often seem trivial if not irrational, but some of them are full of meaning. They are more than just a kind of primitive art: they are also primitive magic. Children are ritualists; they believe in the power of certain gestures and words. Oaths and promises are binding; charms influence events; counting-out rhymes call upon the powers of fate. Even the simplest verse can have an almost magical effect. The child who is taunted with the rhyme “April fool’s gone past/You’re the biggest fool at last”1 may—as I know from experience—feel contaminated with stupidity until she or he has shouted back the magical counterspell:

  Sticks and stones

  May break my bones,

  But words will never hurt me.2

  The great achievement of Iona and Peter Opie, the famous British folklorists, was to recognize years ago the power and fascination of children’s rhymes, games, and pastimes. When they were young and unknown, living in the depths of the country and so poor that they occasionally dined on nettle soup, they began to study the origin and meaning of children’s folklore. Today their works, from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes on, are classics in the field.

  The Opies’ first collection, I Saw Esau, appeared in 1947. For a long time this book was out of print and unavailable; finally, ten years after Peter Opie’s death, it was reissued with abundant colored illustrations by Maurice Sendak that are as entrancing—and sometimes as shocking—as the text. The contents of I Saw Esau are not the traditional songs of Mother Goose, but verses like the one quoted above, many heard firsthand from contemporary British children. Most of them, as Iona Opie puts it in her new introduction, “were clearly not rhymes that a grandmother might sing to the grandchild on her knee. They have more oomph and zoom; they pack a punch.”3

  Because this is a British collection, some of its contents may be unfamiliar to American readers. Among my favorite discoveries is a curse disguised as an apology:

  I beg your pardon,

  Grant your grace;

  I hope the cows

  Will spit in your face.4

  I also liked the matter-of-fact correction to a well-known proverb:

  The rain it raineth all around

  Upon the just and unjust fella:

  But chiefly on the just because

  The unjust stole the just’s umbrella.5

  I Saw Esau also draws on the remarkable depth and breadth of information that Iona and Peter Opie brought to all their works. Its lighthearted notes reveal an impressive knowledge of British history and literature, biblical legends, detective fiction, rural dialect, and music-hall songs—among other specialties. “Thomas a Didymus, hard of belief,” who “Sold his wife for a pound of beef,”6 for instance, turns out to be Doubting Thomas, the apostle who was not convinced Christ had risen from the dead. The notes also contain information on juvenile fortune-telling and the best way to make a bonfire.

  Equally remarkable is the Opies’ unfailing identification with the child’s point of view. I Saw Esau includes several versions of the well-known rhymes that counter the “ridiculous, oft-repeated enquiry by people who no doubt know the answer perfectly well.”7 As an American version has it:

  “What’s your name?”

  “Butter and tame.

  If you ask me again

  I’ll tell you the same.”

  Many of the entries relate to school and lessons, usually taking an unfavorable view of them. Often they parody the Latin that children in Britain, for centuries, have been made to learn at an early age. When spoken aloud these serious, incomprehensible lines resolve into a Cockney chant:

  Brutus adsum jam forte,

  Caesar aderat.

  Brutus sic in omnibus,

  Caesar sic inat.8

  Translation:

  Brutus ’ad some jam for tea,

  Caesar ’ad a rat.

  Brutus sick in omnibus,

  Caesar sick in ’at.9

  As children understand instinctively, ritual language (like poetry) is different from ordinary language. Speaking the correct words in the correct order is essential, and when this is not done, the force of the rhyme or spell or taunt dissolves. To Americans some of the verses in I Saw Esau, though familiar, may sound painfully wrong. “That’s not right!” they may cry, just as they would have done as children. “That’s not the way it goes!” This primitive reaction, of course, only proves how important these apparently simple rhymes once were to us, and how much we owe to Iona and Peter Opie for preserving them.

  A good sampling of the sort of “children’s poetry” that is written by adults for the instruction of the young appears in The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, edited by the gifted American poet Donald Hall. His anthology provides a fascinating historical record of how both poetry and childhood have been viewed from The Bay Psalm Book to Shel Silverstein and Nancy Willard.

  The poems thought suitable for boys and girls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Hall points out in his fine introduction, “appear to twentieth-century eyes wholly impossible for children.”10 Their message is almost unrelievedly moral and gloomy. As The New England Primer puts it:

  In Adam’s fall

  We sinned all.

  While Youth do cheer

  Death may be near.11

  The doctrine of original sin as interpreted by the Puritans justified the damnation of infants who were not of the elect, even though they personally had committed no fault. Their fate was described by Michael Wigglesworth in what now sounds like the curse of a maddened parent whose baby will not stop howling:

  But get away without delay

  Christ pities not your cry:

  Depart to Hell, there may you yell,


  And roar eternally.12

  Of course, as Donald Hall says, this was not the only message received by children of the period; they also must have heard the old nursery rhymes and songs, and their lessons were often taught by means of lighthearted mnemonic verses that can still be found in some collections of Mother Goose rhymes.

  Great A, little a, bouncing B,

  The Cat’s in the cupboard and can’t see me.

  By the early nineteenth century the message of doom had given way to a more moderate piety leavened by sentiment. Gradually, the influence of the Romantic movement was taking over. The child was no longer a helpless, possibly damned soul or an imp of Satan, but a holy innocent—sometimes too holy for this world. Popular nineteenth-century poems were full of good little girls and boys carried off by the angels; a late but at the time tremendously popular example of the type is Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue,” which describes the loyalty of the dead child’s abandoned toys: