Who Made the Rules?

I remember being very little, maybe about three years old, when I started hearing that some clothes and toys were for girls and others were for boys. I didn’t understand why, and I hated the rules. My brother, who is six and a half years older than I am, had his toy cars, trains, and tractors, and I had stuffed animals and dolls. The trouble was that I liked toys that did stuff. My toys just sat there. My brother’s toys sped around race tracks, dug holes in the sand, had whistles and horns, and more. I loved the tiny cars that had working tires and doors that opened. Those were the toys I wanted, but I was a girl.

As I got older, my parents understood that I liked toys that actually did something. So, they bought me a child sized ironing board and iron. I loved that. It did bug me, even as a very small person, that this was a “girl’s” toy, but it worked! At least until I burned myself on the iron, and then my dad cut off the electrical cord. As soon as it didn’t work, I never touched it again. Then they gave me an EZ Bake Oven. That was great until I ran out of the tiny cake mixes that came with it. My parents had to work all the time in order to support our family and home. So, there wasn’t time to spend with me making tiny cakes from scratch. After three uses, the oven sat there, never to be plugged in again.

One year, my brother got a camera, and eventually a dark room. I got a toy vacuum that didn’t work. I did play with that for a while because it had balls inside that would bounce around when I pushed it. So, it did something, just not anything real. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why, besides age, did my brother always get toys that functioned and had something to do with life outside the house, and my toys only functioned if they had to do with a chore inside the house. When I got old enough to realize that it was a boy/girl thing, I thought that was the most stupid concept I could imagine. What real difference was there between my brother and myself that should mean he gets to be part of the world, and I had to stay home?

As much as I hated the rules, I bought into them to a certain extent. I accepted that I should be more focused on finding a husband than a fulfilling career, for one thing. However, I wanted both. So I went to college, and I also got married half way through. I finished, and started my life as the woman who follows her man. I gave up every dream I ever had, until I forgot that I ever wanted most of it. My kids would ask me why I wasn’t pursuing something I was obviously good at and had a passion for, and I never had a satisfying answer for them. I told them I was happy with the way things were. But I wasn’t. Not even a little bit.

So, here I was, intelligent, educated, capable, and trying ever harder to be the “good wife and good mother.” Somehow, I had bought into the belief that to be good at either of these things, I couldn’t follow my dreams. My kids could see what I couldn’t. Following the gender rules had made me afraid of not being good enough, not just at being a wife and mom, but at anything I wanted to try. But, as happens with many people who follow the gender rules, I finally reached a point where I questioned if the rules were valid. I remembered wanting more to play with my brother’s toys than my own. I remembered how excited I was about teaching. I remembered enjoying feminine clothes, getting bullied for being too much of a girl, and not caring one bit. Most of all, I remembered that I used to be a person with dreams and passions and goals, and that I had no idea why I had let that all go.

Who made the rules? When? Why? And why are we still obeying them to a certain extent? Future blogs will have some of those answers. For example, before ownership occurred in early societies, people worked together to survive. There was little or no gendered hierarchy. If anything, many early societies valued women above men because they bore children and ran much of the home and agriculture that allowed everyone to live. But when those same cultures started defining land ownership, not only did successful neighbors start to become enemies, but ownership became more about power, and so included anyone that could be dominated. Physical strength determined if one was owner or owned. Then they started writing the rules about who could be owned. Etc, etc, etc.