A "real boy" and not a sissy: gender, childhood, and masculinity, 1890-1940

13. On children's clothing, see Jo B. Paoletti, "Cothing and Gender in America: Children's Fashions, 1890-1920," Signs 13 (Spring 1987): 136-43; Clare Rose, Children's Clothing Since 1750 (London, 1989) and Henrietta May Thompson and Lucille E. Rea, Clothing for Children (New York, 1949) and Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-1850 (New York, 1996). On toys see, Gary Cross, Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of Girl Culture (Johns Hopkins, 1998).

14. Cross, Kids' Stuff; David I. MacLeod, Building Character in the American Boy (Madison, WI., 1983).

15. Anne MacLeod, "The Caddie Woodlawn syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century," in A Century of Chidlhood, 1820-1920 (Rochester, NY, 1984), 97-119. In an essay of the period by Ann Kohler, "How Children Judge Character," Studies in Education 1 (September 1896): 94-97, it was found that girls inevitably preferred girls in children's books who were "tomboys," over more quiet and demure characters.

16. See, for instance, Edward Strecker, Their Mothers' Sons: A Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia, 1946); David M. Levy, Maternal Over-Protection (New York, 1943); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York, 1942).

17. Bederman's Manliness and Civilization and Anthony Rotundo's American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993) are the key texts for this claim.

18. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.

19. Roberta Wayne, "When a Feller Needs a Friend," Parents Magazine 2 (March 1927): 21.

20. See, for instance, William Byron Forbush, The Boy Problem; J. Adams Puffer, The Boy and His Gang (Boston, 1912); Paul Hanley Furfey, The Gang Age: A Study of the Preadolescent Boy and His Recreational Needs (New York, 1926).

21. MacLeod, Building Character in the American Boy. See also Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870 (Urbana and Chicago, 1986).

22. In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990), Thomas Lacqueur argues that gender was primarily instrumental prior to the nineteenth century: "to be a man or woman was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume a cultural role, not to be organically one or the other of two incommensurable sexes" (8). What historians of nineteenth-century childhood have shown is the remnants of this earlier view in the education of little boys and girls.

23. Stephen M.Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican North (Baltimore, 1999), 33.

24. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999), 4, 103.

25. Karen Calvert, Children in the House, (Boston, 1992), 109.

26. Claudia Nelson, Boys Will be Girls: The Feminine Ethic in British Children's Literature (New Brunswick, 1991), 2.