{"id":2619,"date":"2006-08-14T13:50:13","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T20:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/08\/14\/how-to-raise-feminist-daughters\/"},"modified":"2006-08-14T13:50:13","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T20:50:13","slug":"how-to-raise-feminist-daughters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2619","title":{"rendered":"How To Raise Feminist Daughters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over on Moderately Insane<\/a>, Sailorman – who has two daughters, ages 2 and 4 – writes:<\/p>\n

I’m in a small new England community. We have a lot of well-minded liberal folks here. And that certainly helps. For example, their nursery school doesn’t permit any commercial images: No Barbie lunchboxes; no Dora shirts; no TV at all.<\/p>\n

We also do our best to encourage things on our own. We don’t EVER show them broadcast TV–not at all–though we do let them watch winnie the pooh movies on occasion. We teach them to like bugs and mud.<\/p>\n

But there are still plenty of confusing issues….<\/p>\n

What do you do when your daughter’s good friend wants her to come over and watch TV?<\/p>\n

What do I do about the fact the they always want to wear pretty dresses, not overalls? That they want to wear tutus? I *KNOW* they’re getting gender-socialized at school, but I don’t want to add to it if I can help things.<\/p>\n

What do I do about the fact that their mom is, for the moment, a SAHM doing the vast majority of childcare? She’ll be back at work in a year or two, but (we’ve got a new infant and I often work 12 hour days) doesn’t want to go back until then.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sailorman is particularly eager to hear specific advice, rather than general theory.<\/p>\n

As far as the clothing issue goes, my advice is not to sweat it. There’s a perfectly reasonable, nonsexist reason Sailorman’s daughters might like pretty dresses: Pretty dresses are cool. Hell, I liked wearing dresses when I was a small boy (much to my grandfather’s horror, when he discovered me playing dress-up in my granny’s clothes!).<\/p>\n

Raising girls to abhor the feminine isn’t really feminist. What’s feminist is allowing girls (and boys) to express their own tastes without regard<\/em> to if their tastes are stereotypically girlish or boyish.<\/p>\n

(Of course, as Sailorman points out, it’s not like his girls live in a vacuum; there’s no way, really, of knowing how much dress-preference is the girls expressing their individual tastes, and how much is gender conformity. I don’t know what the solution is to this, but I’m sure that feeling bad because many girls like dresses isn’t it.)<\/p>\n

Anyhow, there’s more I could say, but I’d rather throw it to comments for now. Even if not all “Alas” readers are parents, probably at least half have been daughters at some point in your lives. What’s your advice?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on Moderately Insane, Sailorman – who has two daughters, ages 2 and 4 – writes: I’m in a small new England community. We have a lot of well-minded liberal folks here. And that certainly helps. For example, their nursery … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families-structures-divorce-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}