Toys

The role of toys in the construction of gender ideals and identities is best understood within the context of cultural notions about childhood (girlhood and boyhood) as well as the social realities of children as girls and boys. Though the meanings and uses of toys are commonly assumed to be unchangeable, their social meanings and the roles toys have played in children's lives are historically contingent. While toys have ancient origins, the more recent historical forces that gave rise to the notion that toys had masculine-making or feminine-formulating potential include:

1. the decline of orthodox Christian precepts that associated play with sin;
2. the shift from a subsistence economy to an industrializing one;
3. the spread of Enlightenment notions about children among the emergent middle class;
4. increasing social equality for women and girls;
5. egalitarianism within the family; and
6. the development of a global consumer culture.

Though it is not clear which of the toylike artifacts archaeologists have unearthed at ancient sites figured in rituals and which were meant for recreation, adults have long produced and promoted toys encoded with dominant ideals that fostered normative gender roles in children. Since at least the eighteenth century, when toys entered the domain of children in the West, play with particular kinds of toys has been assumed to promote socially specific gender characteristics. "Boys' toys"—those that emphasize technology, science, transportation, combat, construction, and hunting—have been understood to foster such "masculine" attributes as assertiveness, dominance, heroism, and competition. "Girls' toys"—centered on homemaking and child rearing—have been thought to instill such "feminine" qualities as compassion, affection, adornment, and nurturance. The expectations of adults, however, have been known to conflict with the activities of children, who sometimes play in less socially prescribed and more "gender-inappropriate" ways.

METHODS OF GENDER CODING

For centuries, adults have used a variety of prescriptive, proscriptive, and punitive methods of transmitting information to children about which toys were gender appropriate and which were not. But since the emergence of toy advertisements during the early twentieth century and the advent of TV commercials aimed at children in the 1950s, the preferences of young consumers have been shaped by the prevalence of coded images of girls or boys at play with gender-specific toys. While the color pink signified boys at various times in the past (blood = bravery), color-coded toys and packaging since the 1950s have served to inform youngsters—too young to read but old enough to link color with gender—that pink (and pastel-colored) toys are for girls. This categorizing of merchandise by color has led to the gendering of toy store spaces, where color-coded layouts attract girls to eye-catching pink-colored aisles that repel boys fearing contamination and recrimination. While pink has long predominated as a girls' color in the West, it is a boys' color in South Korea where primary colors are associated with girls. Comparisons across time and place reveal that toys and their presentation have had very different cultural meanings. In North America, little girls of the Woodland Indians played with sticks in preparation for their role as the tribe's key agriculturalists (farmers).

TOYS FOR BOYS

Western toys designated as boys' toys: (1) contain distinctive themes drawn from the activities of men (e.g., war, transportation, construction, athleticism); (2) correlate with the skills and sensibilities associated with masculinity (e.g., aggression, courage, competition, strategy, mobility, agility); and (3) foster a wide variety of physical and intellectual developmental abilities. Though toy soldiers have been found in ancient Egypt, eighteenth-century emperors and kings bestowed upon their sons miniature armies made by high-end producers in Nuremberg, Germany, and later on in France. Toy soldiers served to instill imperial ambitions in royal and aristocratic sons and patriotic alliances in boys who played with uniformed soldiers, artillery, and transportation during the major wars of the twentieth century. Though plastic toy soldiers were poor imitations of those that had marched off production lines before them, their affordability made infantry men far more accessible to middle-class and poor children in whom they were to cultivate masculine nationalism.

Also having ancient origins that served more practical functions in times past, toy weapons (swords and guns) lead the boy toy market as symbols of adventure and heroism in their material variety and in virtual reality. While generations of parents have given boys toy guns in an effort to build sons' manly identities, adults' distaste of war and violence in the twentieth century also exposed the powerful social forces that shape the desires of boys for toys. Prevented by his parents from playing with toy guns, one determined four-year-old used a plastic "chip clip" he found in a kitchen drawer as a substitute for the gun he preferred.

Along with war toys, toy trains assumed a unique place in the lives of boys over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of technological innovation, improved production, expanded market distribution, and the power of advertising. Especially after the application of electricity in the mid-1920s, these machines inspired fantasies of mobility and taught boys about other scientific principles—both beyond the scope of what was considered important for girls to acquire and imagine for themselves. Making boys into builders of civilizations led to the commercialization of construction toys. By the early twentieth century, toy pioneers marketed toy trains to boys perceived to be in need of modern engineering and construction skills during the new "machine age." In addition to other products, LEGO sets of the post-World War II period were marketed to boys in gender-coded advertisements in which little sister, bewildered by her enterprising brother the junior engineer, stood outside the LEGO metropolis he alone constructed.

Such athletic equipment as balls, bats, hoops, and nets have long been targeted at boys for the masculine attributes—the spirit of competition and the skills of achievement—they are thought to instill. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits, boys from well-to-do families posed with athletic props while their sisters dressed in floor-length gowns clutching dolls, flowers, or little animals. Throughout the nineteenth century, fears that activity would precipitate sexual desire in girls led experts to discourage girls from riding hobbyhorse toys and to recommend limiting them to wand-waving callisthenic exercises as demonstrated in prescriptive manuals.

TOYS FOR GIRLS

Among the toys designated as for girls only, those playthings with obvious domestic purposes and maternal themes have enjoyed unchallenged dominance. Whether the purposes of ancient human figures were spiritual or secular, it is certain that as symbols of fertility, dolls have had an indomitable place in the history of girls. Cultivating the fabled maternal "instinct" by instilling the skills and sensibilities of mothering (caring and grooming) and instructing girls in homemaking, dolls and symbols of domesticity have long dominated as a cultural priority over time, across periods, and from one society to another. Expected to take their place within the home and not outside of it, to adorn the body, and to cultivate the heart and not the mind, girls' toys—including dolls, dollhouses, and household utensils and technology—have been intentionally attractive, diminutive, intended for indoor passive play, and purposely unscientific, unmechanical, unintellectual, unadventurous, and unathletic.

While adults have promoted and produced girls' toys, male and female producers have not always shared the same gendered values nor used the same materials, methods, and models. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, Germany, and England, women doll producers had more in common with each other than they did with their commercial countrymen. Women doll producers across national borders were more likely to make realistic-looking, portable, pliant, and useful cloth-bodied dolls modeled after real babies for girls and for boys. Similarly on both sides of the Atlantic, businessmen who drew upon more masculine skills and sensibilities were more likely to make hard-bodied dolls (wood or metal) with fragile China heads and limbs that reflected prevailing Victorian feminine ideals of delicacy, domesticity, submission, purity, piety, and leisure. In the twentieth century, women doll designers and producers mounted significant challenges to gender stereotyping with dolls. Though the Barbie doll, pioneered by Ruth Handler, cofounder of Mattel, emphasized adornment and consumption as much as had Victorian French fashion dolls, the exalted femininity of the postwar teenage fashion model nevertheless embodied autonomy, empowerment, and sexual agency. Girls have received more than one billion Barbie dolls since Barbie's debut in 1959. Since the end of the twentieth century, feminist ideals have been represented as sexual agency in female dolls, while antifeminist fears have led to the embodiment of hypermasculinity in male action figures. A 1998 study (Harrison G. Pope Jr., et. al.) revealed that between the 1960s and late 1990s, G.I. Joe's bulging biceps doubled in size.

CHILDREN'S RESISTANCE TO PRESCRIPTIVE NORMS

While many children play with toys in ways that meet with adult approval, girls who ditch dolls for trucks and boys who swap whips for wigs traverse accepted boundaries of gendered play. Although many girls demonstrating domestically useful sewing skills contented their mothers, even Catherine Beecher, the nineteenth-century architect of domesticity, detested sewing stints. Beecher was not unlike other girls in rural and small-town America who preferred active outdoor activities to sedate indoor ones and playing with toys and games that required power not propriety. While many girls loved dolls, others loathed the ones that were forced into their arms by adults committed to the dominant gender ideology. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, girls' extensive funereal play (as opposed to wedding play) generated pleasure among embryonic feminists who broke and buried dolls.

While some boys preferred dolls to soldiers and dressing up to standing down, "gender-inappropriate" behavior historically has been met with disapproval and discouragement from parents and peers. Few toys, including stuffed animals—principally the iconic teddy bear—have inhabited a "gender-neutral" terrain. As representations of domesticated nature and childhood innocence, stuffed animals have been as acceptable for baby boys as for girls, but brothers are expected to outgrow their affections and attachments long before their sisters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Formanek-Brunell, Miriam. 1993. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

McClintock, Inez, and Marshall McClintock. 1961. Toys in America. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.

Pope, Harrison G., Jr., Roberto Olivardia, Amanda Gruber, and John Borowiecki. 1998. "Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image as Seen through Action Toys." International Journal of Eating Disorders 26 (1): 65-72.

                                             Miriam Forman-Brunell