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

Gender and Boyhood in the Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century, many middle-class Americans attempted to preserve young childhood as a period of life that was relatively uncontaminated by the forces of sexuality or the demands of sex-role socialization. Middle-class Americans dressed infants and toddlers so as to highlight the distinctions between adults and children, while downplaying the differences between the genders. (22) Mothers bore the major responsibility for rearing children of both genders up through ages six or seven and were often ambivalent about the transformation of their male youngsters into "boys." (23) They cherished the long curls of toddlers of both sexes, and boys' and girls' frocks were very similar. Boyhood did not properly commence as a stage of life until boys were outfitted in their first set of trousers, a momentous day for parent and child alike, and not always without trauma. (24) According to one mother, writing in 1881 about the day her five-year-old donned trousers: "He will be a noisy, shouting, out-of-doors boy and not a dear little house boy any more at all." (25) But even if boys assimilated to the culture of boyhood, ideals of behavior for both young boys and girls were somewhat similar. The qualities of tenderness, self-control, and self-sacrifice were celebrated for both genders in children's literature and prescriptive advice for parents. (26) While boys were associated with qualities such as roughness and cruelty to animals, the typical "hero" of a children's book embodied instead ideal feminine virtues: tenderness, refinement, and restraint. (27)

This is not to suggest that nineteenth-century middle-class boys grew up in a genderless world; rather, that gender played a different role in children's lives at different ages than it did in a later period. During early childhood, boys' identities as babies overshadowed their identities as boys, although class and race could foreshorten this moratorium from masculinity. Indeed, one of the markers of middle-class status was the frivolity of dress with which both girls and boys were adorned. As boys aged, donned trousers, and entered the peer culture of other boys, boy culture played a role in helping to patrol gender boundaries. (28)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich's popular memoir The Story of a Bad Boy, first published in 1869, was an important articulation of the idea that "real" boys--who were boisterous, mischievous, and pugilistic--were being held hostage by polite Victorian society and literature. Aldrich's text was oppositional for its time. He explicitly contrasted his book with the standard children's literature of the time: "I call myself a bad boy partly to distinguish myself from those faultless young gentlemen who generally figure in narratives of this kind ... I was a real human boy ... and no more like the impossible boy in a storybook than a sound orange is like one that has been sucked dry." (29) The idea of a bad boy as the normal and healthy boy entered the public arena at this early date, even as it vied with works such as the popular Little Lord Fauntleroy, first published in 1886, the story of a noble, refined, and self-effacing little boy. (30)