The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer Page A

through a difficult phase, but we may find evidence of the duration of this kind of resistance over years and years, until puberty delivers the final crushing blow. The tomboy as this energetic rebel is pejoratively called may be of any age from five to fifteen; she may not be a tomboy all the time, either because she enjoys the coddling that neat, pretty little girls get, or because she has come to realize that it is advantageous to operate in the favoured way, or because she is simply denied opportunity or

    incentive to discover how vigorous she could be. Generally it is the little girls who are given presents of pretty things and spoilt and flattered who capitulate to the doll-makers earliest. The pattern of reward is kept up: at first it might be sweets and dolls’ clothes, then dresses and shoes, and even the occasional perm and eyelash dyeing, and then pretty clothes for being seen at weekends in, outings, movies and all that.
    However, even the little girl who gives in to the pressures applied by her mother and the rest of the feminizers is subjected to conflicting influences. At school her pretensions to jewellery and cosmetics are severely frowned on. She is required to do some form of physical exercise for a fixed period every week, despite Mother’s notes pleading all kinds of delicacy and indisposition. She is given respons- ibilities, made to join in team efforts, all activities which, if her fem- inization is proceeding at good pace, she finds very unattractive. She would rather gossip and giggle with her confidantes in a corner of the playground than play soft-ball, even if soft-ball is a feminized form of a masculine sport. She does not like to get sweaty and dirty. Although her teachers praise her manners and her neatness, they lament her increasing dullness, and she may even feel the contempt of the more ‘masculine’, that is, active, girls in her class. She may be reviled as a cissy, a sook, a teacher’s pet, a namby-pamby, a sneak. But if Mummy’s darling has trouble at school, the successful and active members of the school community run into trouble at home. Out of school, there is not the scope for team activity and adventure that school provides. Housework seems intolerable, and domestic conflicts can become a source of serious anxiety, so that many a teacher has discovered that a good pupil comes back from the summer holidays changed beyond recognition, principally by the abrasion of her training at home. As she grows older she finds her activities more severely curbed; innocent exertions are ruled out because she is ‘too big for that sort of thing now’. Sometimes she
    feels

    that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behaviour. She may become unaccountably sullen or clumsy, long before the approach of puberty makes such changes explicable. Many of the changes thought to be intrinsically connected with puberty are actually connected with the last struggles of the little girl to retain her energy. The primary school has educated her as a person, making no distinction between boy and girl. We may expect the conflict to arise when she moves up to the junior school to find that, as a capitulation to womanly objections about the im- position of the masculine model of education on to girls, she has the unenviable options of studying dressmaking, domestic science and so forth. The bitter irony of having been inducted into a masculine- contoured form of education is counterpointed by

    Girls sometimes wish they were boys—You can see what man does—His work is wonderful—What is greater than man’s work? Man—Who made the man?—Made by mother’s training—Abraham Lincoln’s mother—Great responsibility to train future President—Cannot tell what any child may become—No greater work than child training—The wife may think the husband’s work greater than hers—Her work monotonous