When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

Genderfication Starts Here Dispatches from My Twins’ First Year

137 Genderfication Starts Here Dispatches from My Twins’ First Year Deborah Siegel “He looks like a boy and she looks like a girl,” say my parents over and over again at the hospital as the four of us peer over two bassinettes at my newborn twins on their first day of life. “Her features are just so fine!,” my mother explains. My husband, Marco, and I sit there, beaming and dumb. Our boy and our girl have arrived. The hospital has furnished each of our babies with a pink-andblue -striped hat and blanket. And how quickly we replace that headwear with hats of our own, carefully selected from a bag of hand-medowns tucked into the hospital suitcase along with my toothbrush and socks. Right up to the last week, I felt too sick to feign interest in baby clothes. Choosing these hats and now placing them on two tiny skulls is my first step toward understanding these kids, now on the outside, as real. The hat for Baby Boy is yellow and too big and sits perched on his head, giving him the semblance of a miniature rapper. He looks, dare I say it, macho. Baby Girl’s hat is girly—white with pink and green flowers. Uh oh. As I stare down at these new life forms, my postpartum brain goes wild: Did I choose these hats to adhere to gender norms? Maybe. Who cares? The stuff was free. Dear friends gave us those hats. Should I have put the flowery one on Baby Boy to make a point? Oh, stop worrying about color and pattern as long as it’s clean and warm. We’re talking a hierarchy of needs. It’s clothing. Did I mention that it was free? To hell with color. Color obsession is an affluent woman’s craziness. The feminists don’t know I’m here. It’s a maternity ward. No one’s noticing these hats. Except . . . me. I go in and out of ideological awareness the way I go in and out of alertness, thanks to the heavy dose of Percocet I’m on. Part of me cares only that my babies are healthy and safe. And part of me cares—very much—about what they’re wearing. Because that part of me knows that this same morning, babies at hospitals across the land are undergoing the same process: induction into a highly gender-differentiated 138 Deborah Siegel world. Raised to believe that boys and girls are created by the expectations of their culture and not just born that way, I, for one, know better than to stereotype by rote. What, dear goddess, is going on? And that’s when it hits me: Forty years after the gender-equitable child-rearing anthem Free to Be . . . You and Me unleashed its utopian vision, well-intentioned new parents like me are reproducing gender stereotypes as instinctively as our newborns wail. Over the next weeks and months and ultimately my twins’ first year, I’ll become obsessed by this conundrum. I’ll move through phases in my thinking as my babies graduate from breast milk to formula to milk. At times I’ll think that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,” writes neuroscientist Lise Eliot in Pink Brain, Blue Brain, a book that argues that social expectations—not biological differences —have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.1 Yes, at certain moments during this surreal first year of parenthood , I’ll come to believe that we sons and daughters of feminism have grown convinced of children’s innate gender sensibilities, even as we take pains to surround our boys with dolls and our girls with trucks.Three decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nature-nurture debate, the side that our mothers’ women’s movement famously upstaged. All that noise about biological determinism has to have some effect on our psyches. No? Sometimes I’ll start to think, during early dawn feedings when I haven’t had enough sleep, maybe we’re just lazy. Maybe my generation just isn’t interested in fighting our mothers’ battles once we become parents—older ones, many of us—ourselves. Or maybe it’s just those of us coming to parenthood...