Introduction
A child is born, a new woman has arrived. And her future is going to be different.
These were more or less the thoughts that I and women friends and acquaintances had when my daughter was born. It was like starting school, the New Year, a new Job or a new love affair; it was all going to be different this time – better. I was going to avoid all the old mistakes, or at least those we thought we understood. I would be cautious and diplomatic, would employ tact and the right sense of balance, so that a ‘new woman’ could unfold naturally.
I was, of course, simply following relevant theories of social conditioning, proceeding on the assumption that it is education which forms man and woman.1 For my daughter things were going to be different. She was not going to become like us, that is, women who were born in the post-war period. I did not want her to accept from her male contemporaries what we had accepted äs regards education, work and personal relationships. I did not want her to be compliant, to keep her opinions to herself and to smile sweetly instead of contradicting. I did not want her to be always checking and rethinking her ideas before daring to open her mouth, unlike her male counterparts who would say everything three times and then repeat it once again. And I did not want her to be completely devoted to some man who would be continually finding fault with and criticising her until she lost faith in herself. I wanted her to avoid having plans for the future which were modest and which fitted in neatly with the reality of women’s lives. My daughter was going to reach for the stars!
The theory was that our generation and the thousands of genera-tions of women before us had been prevented from achieving all these things by a process of gender conditioning determined by
centuries of patriarchy. This process had to be broken. My daughter’s socialisation was going to be different – this was to be a new start and traditional influences were going to be eliminated äs far äs possible. I myself was determined to make no mistakes in this respect and I really believed that I was capable of this. I thought that my involvement and growth in the second wave of the women’s movement in the late sixties, my own experience of personal relationships and of discrimination in my studies and in my profession äs a lawyer had made me proof against any risk of my bringing up a child to be a typical girl. I had thought and talked about it too much to believe myself susceptible to that. If everything were caused by education then everything could equally well be avoided through education – such was the conclusion I came to.
There was, however, no place in my Schema for a girl who was a good chap. I did not want that either. I painted myself a picture of a human being who had not been forced into adopting any gender role, according to Standard patterns of male or female, but who would unfold and develop free of stereotypes. There had been many Summerhills, but I feit that in all such experiments one aspect had been given too little attention: the main concern had been with mankind, whilst womankind had been lost and forgotten.
I kept a diary about the development of my daughter. In the course of time I grew less sure and began to doubt my premises. I was often on the point of abandoning my theories and accepting a belief in innate gender-specific behaviour, for so many ‘feminine’ aspects of my daughter’s behaviour could not possibly have been learned from me. And I was confirmed in this by many critical and emancipated mothers who were absolutely convinced that they were bringing up their children in a manner free of gender prejudice. For they too seemcd to find, especially if they had both a daughter and a son, that there really were innate boy and girl traits. Nothing could be done about this, it simply had to be accepted. We shared many a sigh. But the mothers of boy s seemed less concerned than the mothers of girls. One woman, who had written a master’s dissertation on this subject and had had a son in the meantime, put it like this: Tve abandoned all my theories and accept the fact that there really is an innate difference. The idea was even beginning to find favour in feminist writings and to gain ground.
Though not explicitly, these opinions seem to me to accept that education by the mother is the decisive factor in overcoming the restrictive gender role in girls. Such a belief has become fixed in the minds of the present generation of mothers. It had grown since 1968 along with the new women’s movement in the course of which gender role behaviour had once again become problemat-ical. One thing stuck in the heads of women:
We have made ourselves fully aware how ideology is passed from generation to generation and how it can survive all material realities: through education, handed on ironically almost exclusively by just those oppressed beings who have most urgent need of liberation: women … Who then is supposed to be responsible for this new education? Well, there can be only one answer to that: since the System makes use of women to hand down Images of themselves, then women must make use of the System to overcome it! So we stick with the theory that education is a means to emancipation.
Other academic positions and insights which considered the whole social complex4 were not taken into account by the majority of women and remained within the category of specialist literature. We insisted on the dominance of education, riddled though it was with the complexes of a Freudian nature we had long become accustomed to.
Inwardly I began to resist this. This maternal fatalism! This Submission to fate! At the end of each day I began to make a precise account of everything that had happened, what I had said and done and what had been passed on to Anneli and her male and female friends always from the point of view of what part these trivial, often insignificant, events might play in role creating. My sensitivity grew in direct ratio to my understanding. Day s teemed with role-enforcing events, concealed and obvious, for which I was only rarely responsible.
An accumulation of such experiences provides the child with a pattern, in accordance with which it is bound to adjust its own behaviour within its environment. Only when I had gained this general view from three years of observing quite chance events, and grasped all the details äs part of a whole picture, did I realise that I and the world around were building brick by brick a woman governed by patriarchy, and not a human being with female or male components. And so much of this happened unconsciously, unintentionally, without reflection or real understanding of the Situation. For these reasons the mothers I spoke to about it denied that their approach to their children’s upbringing was gender dif-ferentiated, äs I would also no doubt have done without the diary. For the first time I recognised many things in everyday life äs being gender stereotyped and realised that everything happened like a Computer program set to ‘girl upbringing’.
I am therefore now convinced that mothers who proceed from a belief in the innate differences in behaviour of the sexes are falling victim to a mechanism which keeps on reproducing itself. Behaviour patterns are handed on unconsciously. The result is then lab-elled ‘innate’ and it is here that the mistake is made. I therefore think it both mistaken and dangerous when progressive and thought-ful mothers begin to believe that there are innate differences just because, despite the best of intentions, they themselves are having no apparent success in rearing their children differently from traditional patterns.
It is the many tiny events that create a total picture, and at the end of it all we stand amazed at our typical ‘girl’ or ‘boy’. It is also clear that it takes more than simply giving a boy a doll to make a girl of him. That is achieved only by the sum of all influences over a long period of time, of years. It cannot be over-emphasised that it is not only mothers trying to bring up their children in an emancipated fashion who influence their children, but that the young grow up in an ‘atmosphere’ which without any doubt favours one sex.
In a male-oriented society all conditions are better for bringing up boys rather than girls. This is no hollow assertion. I feit that the daily preoccupation with events helped me to begin to understand this ‘atmosphere’. Everybody denies that they make any distinc-tion in the rearing of girls and boys. Boys also have to help in the house, mothers assure me; they have to do the dusting and by the age of four they are already able to make the coffee. This is all stressed äs being particularly progressive, and pronounced with suitable emphasis and applause for the boy! Of course he gets a doll; of course he can cry! Such mothers would never say to their sons ‘boys don’t cry’.
Nowadays it is taken for granted that girls run around in trousers, play just äs wildly, get dirty and have the same toys äs boys. Everybody is aware that there is such a thing äs gender specific upbringing – but it is Happening somewhere eise, in other, more conservative, families. Perhaps with mothers with a traditional image of the world which has never become con-fused or been questioned, somewhere eise anyway, not in our family. Later on, when the children go to kindergarten or school, we are aware from our reading of relevant literature that there is gender specific education and that we shall have to react against it at home. But until then, äs long äs we have the rearing of our children in our own hands, there are no differences. The very worst that can happen is that we might reject the idea of sending a boy to ballet classes or perhaps allow a girl to wear a dress instead of trousers on a hol summer’s day. But that’s all, we would swear to it.
We were therefore rather dismayed to read Elena Gianini Belotti on conventional parental behaviour. We cannot believe that the examples she quotes in her book, Linie Girls, which appeared in Italy in 1973 and is based on Italian educational practices, could be relevant to the Situation in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s. Our opinion is shared by the Publishing collective, Women’s Offensive, and by Ilse Brehmer who writes in an essay on feminist pedagogics:
Many of the results quoted seem dubious (for example, that mothers in general give less attention to daughters during breast feeding, that pink clothing for girls has some special meaning). Some of the results were based on laboratory experiments in America and France. Few general conclusions can be drawn from results achieved in such an artificial framework, and other observations are probably significant only within specific cul-tures. All other things have probably become outdated because of the developments of recent years, in particular the renewed women’s movement. More detailed investigations and inter-cultural comparisons are needed here.
We therefore do not feel that most of this research has any relevance for us. Deluded by the fact that there are no empirically proven points on the question of gender Stereotyping in the FRG we conclude that it does not exist here, or at least not in this form. So many things have changed, we say. Gender Stereotyping is not true of people like us, fairly progressive, politically aware individuals.
Moreover, there are no detailed studies relating to the first three years of life, based on the experiences of a small child in the private world of the family.7 The treatment of children is not public until they Start to go to playgroup.
All the adults who had any pari in the making of this book are open-minded, liberal people, some of them politically active and like myself members of the 1968 generation, who want to bring up their children to be free of the chains of gender. Their goäl in education, they say, is to encourage self-confidence, pleasure in decision-making, an ability to hold one’s own, critical insight and sensitivity.
But then it all turns out quite differently – as this diary has shown me, and will, I hope, show other mothers of both girls and boys. It will, it is to be hoped, be a signal to all parents and, above all, to those who like myself reject the idea of conscious gender Stereotyping in their children’s upbringing.
The events described here happened principally in Berlin and Munich. Our hörne is in Munich and there Anneli lived in the father-mother-child nuclear family, where her father earned the money and was away from hörne from Monday to Friday and was available only in the evenings and at weekends. Since I was not earning and had more freedom I took the opportunity to visit friends and family in Berlin quite often, and there Anneli lived in the society of emancipated feminist women, with me but without her father. We also spent some time each year in the nearby Alps, in villages in the Tyrol or Switzerland. Anneli was thus exposed to a wide spectrum of behaviour and attitudes, between the progressive north and the ultra conservative south.*
Of course, the scenes described here form only one pari of Anneli’s early life. It would be possible to write a similar diary about a child growing up in our society referring to other
*The north has always feit itself to be politically far in advance of the agricultural south. Even today, Berlin feminists are inclined to consider that the women of Bavaria lag behind. In the agricultural areas of the South Tyrol traditional opinions regarding women are still p redominant. (Translator’s note.)
Processes, cleanliness, for example. Aspects of my daughter’s sexuality are not included, although they were in my original notes; the subject and the conclusions are so extensive that they need a book of their own.
Munich 1985
The response to my diary has made it clear how great the interest in its themes is; in Germany the first edition sold out in less than two months, and it has now sold over 100,000 copies, and been translated into Finnish, as well as English. It is a Standard text in German universities, on women’s studies, psychology and pedagogics courses. It was widely and encouragingly reviewed and since the diary first appeared many groups of women (students, young mothers, teachers) have contacted me with Support, questions or a request that I should speak with them.
Of course, there have been a few critical responses. I have been taken to task for not providing a better planned, more energetic and decisive intervention in her upbringing; for presenting myself as a passive, housewifely model to my daughter, for not writing more of her father’s (Klaus’s) pari in her upbringing. But the diary was, as well as a record of some of Anneli’s experiences as I saw them, an account of learning processes of my own; I do not believe I have minimised my own shortcomings, but in the course of writing and learning over three years, I have become more aware of the effect of my own part in the story and I have tried to correct and improve it. Much that influenced Anneli was in any case beyond my control. I recorded Klaus’s part in the story when it appeared to me relevant, but only he could write about his feelings, opinions and reactions. Some people regretted not finding a prescription for gender-neutral child rearing in the book, but this, of course, was never my intention. Only when we have pooled and shared our experiences and opinions might we come closer to this.
The overwhelming response to the book has been positive and hundreds of women have written, both humorously and in anger, confirming my experiences with examples from both their own and their children’s upbringing. One of the more positive effects has been a modification of approach to children’s play in many playgroups, at least locally, and a desire to give greater support to little girls.
I was both surprised and grateful to The Women’s Press for making the diary available in English for the first time in 1988. There are no doubt differences in methods of bringing up children in Great Britain but not so great, I believe, as to make my experiences unfamiliar. I am now very pleased to see a revised edition appear, some ten years after I completed my diary. My new afterword includes a commentary from Anneli, enabling us both to assess the longer-term benefits of my approach to her upbringing. I hope a lot more women enjoy reading the book.
Munich 1994
Afterword
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