A "real boy" and not a sissy: gender, childhood, and masculinity, 1890-1940

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2004 by Julia Grant

Maurice, a ten-year-old "sissy," had a chapter devoted to his dilemma in The Problem Child at Home, published in 1928. A victim of relentless teasing and taunting by his peers, Maurice was described as having a "soft, feminine face" and an unathletic build. As a small child he had suffered from a range of health problems, from rickets to pneumonia, and his frequent illnesses had drawn him closer to his mother. Maurice's physician referred him to a child guidance clinic, identifying the child's most pressing problem as the "over-solicitude of his mother." Upon further investigation, the clinic personnel concurred with the doctor's diagnosis. Clinicians portrayed Maurice's mother as insanely preoccupied with her son's health and his father as ineffectual. This infelicitous parental combination had produced a timid, nervous son whose prognosis for healthy adulthood was poor. Investigators reported the neighbors' claim that the mother "used to skip down the street with her son when he was seven or eight years old, pick him up in her arms and cover him with kisses in full view of the entire neighborhood." Both the neighbors and clinicians agreed that Maurice was lacking in the ingredients of the "real boy." According to one of the clinicians: "This 'perfect little gentleman,' this 'carefully nurtured flower' ... needs more than anything else to be helped to become a real boy." (1)

As this narrative suggests, the "sissy," a term that had emerged out of the boy culture of mid-nineteenth century America, increasingly became not only an epithet hurled by school yard bullies but a clinical term suggestive of psychological pathology and sexual inversion. (2) While effeminate or unmanly boys were not artifacts of the twentieth century, the meaning attached to them shifted in conjunction with the politics of masculinity and transformations in child rearing, gender socialization, and the new sciences of human development. (3) Nineteenth-century sissies were castigated by their peers, but twentieth-century sissies bore a clinical as well as a social stigma. As the peer group loomed ever larger as a means of the socialization of children, conforming to the code of boyhood became increasingly central to establishing the normalcy of boys' personalities and behaviors. (4)

The sissy embodied a cluster of attributes that were endemic to the architects of modern child psychology. In the literature of the normal child the "real" or "regular" boy emerged as a psychological ideal, while sissies were frequently characterized as sickly, timid children who were overly dependent on their mothers. (5) Psychiatrist Edward Strecker [1926] characterized the mentally healthy child as possessed of "a strong leaven of curiosity, an appreciable love of power, a dash of savagery" and "emotional virility," qualities that were unlikely to be appreciated in the female child. (6) Historian Peter Stearns contends that girls' and boys' "emotional cultures" were becoming less distinct in the 1920s, as child-rearing literature portrayed children of both genders as displaying many of the same emotional responses to common childhood travails. However, boys still paid a heavy price for departures from predominant conceptions of masculinity. While both boys and girls experienced fear and shyness, according to the advice literature, boys' fearfulness and timidity elicited greater concern and carried a more gender-specific clinical meaning. (7)

Politicians and figureheads as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt and G. Stanley Hall had raised the specter of effeminacy as a threat to the progress of American civilization at the turn of the century. The child guidance practitioners who arose to prominence in the 1920s embedded these concerns in their treatment of young children. The timid, nervous boy who clung to his mother's skirts was seen as emblematic of larger problems in the psychic health and masculinity of the American nation and its children. (8) In her study of Boston's Judge Baker child guidance clinic, Kathleen Jones discovered that boys formed 2/3 of the clinic's caseload as of 1935, a phenomenon that was replicated in many child guidance clinics of the period. The question of how to turn problem boys into "real boys" was a central concern of child guidance professionals. (9) The vociferous debate about the "feminization" of American boys that marked the turn of the century had subsided by the 1920s, because the debate had been won by those who sought to provide a more masculine upbringing for little boys. While individual parents, educators, and professionals no doubt resisted the new paradigm, their voices were largely silenced in the advice literature of the period.

This essay traces the convergence of social and psychological conceptions of sissies and "real boys" during the early decades of the century. My focus is on boyhood prior to adolescence, when masculinity is in the making, when the transition from babyhood to boyhood and adolescence is in process, and when gender boundaries are somewhat more fluid than in later years. During the early decades of this century, little boys--once thought to be exempt from the demands of masculinity--were recast as men in the making, placing their behaviors, characteristics, and temperaments under a microscope for manifestations of gender deviations. In fact, just as the traditional gender roles of adult men and women were being challenged by the politics of feminism and the transformations in work and leisure that accompanied urbanization, little boys became the object of intensified scrutiny by both parents and professionals for signs of gender deviations. (10)