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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2004 by Julia Grant

Yet both model boys and real boys posed challenges to reformers. While the model boy's fate was to be a Casper Milquetoast or worse, the real boy's pranks were only one step away from delinquency. An outpouring of literature on boy work, the boy problem, and "real boys" emerged to address these dilemmas, accompanied by the appointment of boy workers at settlement houses and numerous clubs and activities organized around the premise that boys required a specific kind of cultivation in order to develop into manly men. Theorists of boyhood attempted to define "boy nature" and to recommend activities and child rearing practices designed both allow for the expression of boys' instinctive selves and to harness these powers constructively.

These theories found practical application in the development of boy scouting, which was inaugurated in the United States in 1910 and spread with amazing rapidity. Boy scouts provided organized activities that organizers hoped would both cultivate and restrain traditional masculine "savagery." Even the boy scouts agreed, however, that little boys were the province of their mothers. After reaching the age of ten or twelve, when boys could join the scouts, masculine leadership was required. (34) Indeed, the Scouts were quite vociferous in their attempt to extinguish the feminine influence from their organization, arguing that "No Miss Nancy [s] need apply" to head their troops. What they needed, in stead, were "REAL, live men--red blooded and right-hearted men--BIG men. " (35) It was not only feminism but femininity that threatened the development of "normal" manhood.

Early boy workers, however, still viewed little boys as having many of the qualities associated with girls. They articulated a conception of the emergence of masculine identity that was developmental, maintaining that boys acquired gendered attributes and instincts at specific ages. (36) In The Boy and His Gang [1912], J. Adams Puffer described the transformation of male children into boys: "Little girls and little boys, as they emerge from babyhood, are not so unlike. But somewhere around the age of ten, the little boy begins to undergo a transformation, which in the girl never takes place at all." (37) In other words, boys became increasingly masculinized, while girls retained their feminine interests as they developed. Joseph Lee described four ages of play in his classic text Play in Education [1929]. The first two stages, through age six, were the same for boys and girls, the third fairly similar, with the fourth stage of play being dramatically different for the two genders. (38) Catholic boy worker Paul Hanly Furfey argued in The Gang Age [1926] that prior to age eight or ten, boys were apt to play with girls, were uninterested in team sports, and were happy to play "quietly about the house." He contended that little boys shared with girls an "effeminacy of disposition," which drew them to girls as playmates. This period of life ceased shortly after boys began school, when they were no longer gender-neutral children and began to become men. (39) When the gang age approached: "He plays the group games with extraordinary ardor. Baseball almost becomes a religion. He is now very much a boy." (40) Thus boys, who prior to age eight or ten were content with unorganized play of various kinds, were hard wired to enter into organized gangs as they approached boyhood.