{"id":2230,"date":"2011-03-07T16:03:07","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T21:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2011-03-07T16:03:07","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T21:03:07","slug":"mama-wpen-lifelong-feministmidlife-mama-asks-whether-were-all-too-isolated-to-fight-the-pink-v-blue-battle-in-the-world-outside-our-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2011\/03\/07\/mama-wpen-lifelong-feministmidlife-mama-asks-whether-were-all-too-isolated-to-fight-the-pink-v-blue-battle-in-the-world-outside-our-homes\/","title":{"rendered":"MAMA W\/PEN: Lifelong Feminist\/Midlife Mama Asks Whether We\u2019re All Too Isolated to Fight the Pink-v.-Blue Battle in the World Outside Our Homes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Ask me five years ago and I\u2019d have told you I\u2019d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0minore<\/em>d\u00a0in feminist cultural studies!\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0believe<\/em> boys and girls are made, not just born!\u00a0 But sixteen months into parenting my boy\/girl twins, I\u2019m starting to wonder how I\u2019ll ever ensure that my boy grows up sensitive and my girl stays, as one of my favorite organizations <\/a>has trained me to say, strong, brave, and bold.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an unfortunate moment for complacency.\u00a0\u00a0Children are boxed into hyper-gendered categories at ages younger than ever before.\u00a0\u00a0Just last month, Disney infiltrated the delivery room<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0New research shows that girls as young as three are internalizing the thin ideal.\u00a0\u00a0As blogger Pigtail Pals reports<\/a>, a study by Dr. Jennifer Harriger, published in 2010 finds that preschoolers are attributing stereotypes to others because of their weight.\u00a0\u00a0The news is distressing.\u00a0\u00a0Gender-aware parents can cleanse our daughters\u2019 bedrooms of pale pink and defend a love for Tinkerbelle in our sons<\/a>, yet the clutch of our pink-vs.-blue culture seems only to tighten its hold.\u00a0\u00a0Why, we’re all asking, is this so?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s ample proof that since the utopian hope of “Free to Be You and Me” in the 1970s, as a culture we’ve slid backwards.\u00a0As Peggy Orenstein documents so thoroughly and well in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie Girl Culture<\/em><\/a> (reviewed here this week by Elline<\/a>!), things are far worse than they were when we grew up.\u00a0 The hyper-marketing of gendered purchases target kids at an increasingly vulnerable age, and it\u2019s enough to make any parent tired.<\/p>\n

We can blame Disney and we can fight the princesses, but perhaps two additional reasons that a generation of parents raised\u00a0on feminism feels like we’re losing the war is that 1) we\u2019re confused and 2) we\u2019re alone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re confused by \u201cscience.\u201d <\/strong> Fighting gender-based discrimination has morphed into dealing with science<\/a>, which carries boldfaced authority\u2014and many feminist scientists themselves are now fighting this fight too.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes I wonder about the effects.\u00a0 Have Gen X parents grown convinced of children\u2019s innate gender sensibilities?\u00a0\u00a0Decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nurture debate that second-wave feminism famously upstaged.\u00a0 Have the things we\u2019ve heard about gender affected a new generation\u2019s parenting behavior?\u00a0 \u201cThe more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,\u201d suggests neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book\u00a0Pink Brain, Blue Brain<\/a>,<\/em> (which argues, by the way, that social expectations\u2014not biological differences\u2014have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.)\u00a0\u00a0Sensational, whiplash-inducing headlines tell us gender is inborn\u2014no, wait, made\u2014no, born.\u00a0\u00a0Unless you\u2019re steeped in this research, it\u2019s often hard to know what\u2019s what anymore.<\/p>\n

But our biggest problem, I fear, is that when it comes to resisting the hyper-genderfication of childhood, <\/strong>we\u2019re largely fighting it alone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the past sixteen months, as my babies have progressed from a crawl to a walk and now to words, it\u2019s slowly dawned on me how much the premise of my previous book,\u00a0Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild<\/em><\/a>, applies to my new situation: As parents, and especially as new parents, we don\u2019t always feel plugged into a\u00a0movement to change the larger culture in which we raise our kids.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, we\u2019re left to focus on ourselves\u2014in this case, our familial microcosms\u2014on our own.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there\u2019s a burgeoning movement out there. I\u2019m a huge fan of initiatives like SPARK<\/a> and the Geena Davis Institute<\/a> and efforts to redefine girly like Pigtail Pals<\/a> and of course the longstanding work of Girls Inc<\/a>.\u00a0 I voraciously consume every new book by educators like Lyn Mikel Brown to learn what we can do to resist (See Packaging Girlhood<\/em>,<\/a> Packaging Boyhood<\/em><\/a>, and also the resource page<\/a> at the wonderful Peggy Orenstein\u2019s site.) But these initiatives aren\u2019t as mainstreamed as they might be.\u00a0 I can control my growing babies\u2019 media consumption and control what comes in the house, but control only goes so far.\u00a0 I fear that as a new mother, I\u2019m long on feminist parenting ideals, short on ways to make them stick in the world outside my home.<\/p>\n

I hear that change feels more possible once your kids hit kindergarten. \u00a0My friends there tell me that they feel successful in their attempts to provide a larger context in which it\u2019s natural for their girl to love Star Wars and their boy to take ballet.\u00a0 They feel effective.\u00a0 They feel their actions span far.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, we mothers of babes\u00a0continue our preparations for the good fight by lining our children\u2019s bookshelves with\u00a0The Sissy Duckling<\/em> and No I Will NOT Wear a Dress <\/em>and painting our nurseries sage.\u00a0 But short of a massive and visible movement<\/a>\u2014you know, like the political ones we see right now on tv\u2014sometimes I worry.\u00a0 Are we all just focusing on the equivalent of wardrobes and walls?<\/p>\n

What do YOU think?\u00a0\u00a0Do you see a new generation of parents taking on the battle against the hyper-genderfication of childhood in spades?\u00a0\u00a0Is\u00a0there a movement?\u00a0\u00a0Or are we all basically out here on our own?\u00a0\u00a0If you have strong thoughts on this either way, for a writing\/blogging\/thinking project I\u2019m working on (The Pink and Blue Diaries<\/a>), I\u2019d love to hear from you.\u00a0\u00a0Please email me at deborah@shewrites.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ask me five years ago and I\u2019d have told you I\u2019d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0minored\u00a0in feminist cultural studies!\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0believe boys and girls are made, not just born!\u00a0 But sixteen months into parenting my boy\/girl twins, I\u2019m starting to wonder how I\u2019ll ever ensure that my boy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21107],"tags":[2397,21387,21395,129,3109,4374,5007,1528],"class_list":["post-2230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mama-w-pen","tag-boys","tag-gender-studies","tag-girls","tag-media","tag-motherhood","tag-parenting","tag-pop-culture","tag-sexism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}