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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2004 by Julia Grant

An example from a book written by a reformer of juvenile detention homes in 1877 helps to illuminate this contrast. In discussing his methods of rehabilitation at a Massachusetts reform school, Joseph Allen highlighted those moments when boys were brought to tears by stories of human death and virtue as redemptive. He wished to awaken the boys' tender sentiments, through exposure to flowers and music, in order to rehabilitate them. Later reformers would try to enlist "boy nature" in their efforts to turn rebellious young boys into upstanding young men, but Allen argued that boys needed "gentle and refining influences" in order to become properly manly men. (31)

Debates about the perils of the "feminization" of little boys in churches, homes, and schools were common in the late nineteenth century. As America's foremost psychologist in the late nineteenth century, G. Stanley Hall was extremely influential in articulating a scientific justification for the rowdy behaviors and activities of little boys. Hall contended that children's [in particular, boys'] development reenacted the various stages of civilization, beginning with savagery. Boys' development had been stunted by mothers' and teachers' attempts to foist feminine notions of niceness and refinement on savage little boys, he argued. Early nineteenth-century educators believed that their task was to tame the savage impulses thought to be the basis of boy nature; Hall and many turn-of-the-century thinkers insisted that educators must capitalize upon the "barbarism" of boy nature along the route to civilization. (32)

Hall demanded that education adapt to the nature of boyhood by incorporating activities that appealed to boys' primitive instincts, such as playing cowboys and Indians, boxing, camping, and reading adventurous stories. Bederman's account of the mixed reaction to Hall's views illuminates the earlier paradigm. After a presentation by Hall at the Chicago Kindergarten Meeting in 1899, an anonymous author in the Chicago Post expostulated: "The idea among the uncivilized people of the world to-day is that boys and men should fight ... To these people we send missionaries ... and just as we are beginning to congratulate ourselves on reclaiming some men from barbarism Dr. Hall gets up and advises us to teach our sons to do what we have been endeavoring to teach the savage to avoid." (33) Hall's spin on evolutionary science--that boys must recapitulate savagery on the road to civilization--was by no means uncontested. The civilization that many Victorian men and women celebrated was not reserved for a particular gender or stage of life.

Henry A. Shute's The Real Diary of a Real Boy, which was first published in 1902 and went through sixteen editions by 1914, went beyond Aldrich's "bad boy" by suggesting that so-called bad boys were in fact real boys. This immensely popular fictional diary of a rambunctious and pugilistic eleven year-old growing up in New England, whose days revolve around a series of "lickens," "fites," and pranks, did more than anything else to catapult the terminology of the real boy into popular discourse. In Shute's text the model boy who obeyed his mother and exemplified Christian forbearance serves as an unfavorable contrast to the little "tuff" who narrates the diary.