trust girls and to praise them for being good, whereas the boys were
all treated as discipline problems. Ruth Hartley ["Sex-Role
Pressures and the Socialization of the Male Child". in Joseph H.
Pleck and Jack Sawyer, Eds., Men and Masculinity NJ: Prentice-Hall
1974, pp. 7-13] writes,
. . . the demeanor of the women with whom he is forced to associate is
often such that the boy feels that women just don't like boys. We found
many indications of this belief in our subjects' responses to a hypothetical
adoption story that they were asked to complete. Almost invariably mothers
were assumed to prefer girls to boys. The reasons given for this were
drawn from the boys' own experiences with their mothers: "She says
boys are rough." "A girl wouldn't be so wild - she would not
run so much and play rough . . . a girl is more kind."
(p. 9)
(return)