Doing Away with Sex Stereotypes

By Jane O'Reilly

More Dad, less Mom, urges a guide to raising liberated children

For ten years, the question that has dogged the women's movement has been "But who will raise the children?" The answer from feminists: both parents. More Dad and less Mom, they say, would result in greater equality, not only for parents but also for the next generation. This is fine in theory, but the actual how-to-do-it has remained a puzzle. Now the first real guide to nonsexist child raising has appeared: Letty Cottin Pogrebin's innovative and exhaustive Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80's (McGraw-Hill; $15.95). Even the eminent Dr. Benjamin Spock, who invented modern parenting, describes the book as "essential" for rearing liberated children.

For Pogrebin, a feminist writer and a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the parental example of an egalitarian marriage is a step toward doing away with sex stereotypes, which "bang people together with a cultural sledgehammer." What is an egalitarian marriage? One in which, for starters, both spouses can correctly answer the following questions:

Where is the grapefruit knife?

When is Grandma's birthday?

Which child hates broccoli?

Did we pay the mortgage this month?

Who are our children's best friends?

Where is the screwdriver?

Growing Up Free reassures both kinds of parents, the old-fashioned ones who worry that a son who plays with dolls will be a sissy, and the new-fashioned ones who worry that a son who doesn't play with dolls will never be a caring, involved father. Nonsexist, writes Pogrebin, is not the same as unisex or sexless. It is a way of freeing individualism, of "opening all possibilities to children so they are not predestined by gender."

What is the difference between gender identity and sex-role identity? Can a child's sexuality be affected by whether or not Father does the dishes or Mother drives a truck? "Unwittingly, the feuding experts and conflicting experiments testify to the truth: we will never have a Sears catalogue of sex differences because human beings are too diverse for labels and measurements," writes Pogrebin. "For every trait studied, the differences within each sex are greater than the average differences between the two sexes."

How, then, to help each child become not as "masculine" or as "feminine" as possible, but to "become the fullest possible person"? Some of Pogrebin's practical suggestions:

Even before a baby comes, start checking for bias. "Describe a day in the life of your child at age five, age twenty-five. Does gender affect your imaginings?" Later, beware of furniture that talks. Television's lesson that Mother is to blame for the ring around Father's collar may overwhelm the example of a real-life father's dutiful diaper changing. To find out how your children perceive you, ask them to role-play being you. Watching your children act out "the living room is a mess and company is coming--what happens?" can provide hours of family fun.

"Use the status quo the way the oyster uses sand, as the irritant that produces pearls of wisdom," suggests Pogrebin. Ask your children how a play might have been different if the leading character had been of the opposite sex. Ask why some school recreation programs still offer dancing only to girls and camping only to boys. Or why some PTAs still schedule meetings at hours when working parents cannot attend.

Pogrebin, 41, has done her homework: eight years of research and writing, 16 of marriage and 15 of child rearing went into the book. She says of herself and her husband Bert, 46, a labor lawyer: "For the first few years I'm sure we raised Abigail and Robin, our twins [girls, now 15] the regular way, surrounded by dolls and carriages." In 1970 Pogrebin, a Brandeis graduate at 19 who had risen to vice president of the publishing firm of Bernard Geis Associates, wrote a book called How to Make It in a Man 's World. Preparing for a publicity tour, she and Bert read the radical feminists -- whom she then perceived as "the opposition." "We both argued ourselves into feminism," she recalls."I would say, 'They say a woman has a right to keep her job if she is pregnant.' Bert would say, 'That's absurd.' And then we would both realize that I was working and pregnant."

In 1971 she began writing a working-woman column for the Ladies' Home Journal, helped start the National Women's Political Caucus and worked on the launching of Ms. Assigned by the magazine to do an article on nonsexist child raising, she noticed herself giving a basketball to her infant son instead of the athletic girls, and heard David, now an enlightened twelve, announce: "When Daddy isn't home I'm in charge because then I'm the man of the house."

"Surely," she writes, "I was an inauthentic social reformer if I hadn't even managed to set things right in my own life with my own children." She began attending seminars and teacher-training courses and observing children; she served as a member of a commission charged with eliminating sex bias from the New York City schools; and along the way she worked with Marlo Thomas on the TV special and accompanying LP Free to Be . . . You and Me.

Today the Pogrebin family is the best advertisement for Growing Up Free. Letty and Bert, sitting around the dinner table in their turn-of-the-century, oak-paneled apartment on Manhattan's West Side, look slightly abashed when they talk about their successfully egalitarian marriage. "Things have turned out very well," says Bert, who credits luck and economic good fortune, as well as Letty's "overactive metabolism." Says he: "She never accepted efficiency as a means of allocating responsibility. I could never say she should do the dishes because she did them better." Replies Letty: "But he never thought he was entitled to special privileges because he was a man." Needless to say, both score very high on questions about grapefruit knives and mortgage payments.

--By Jane O'Reilly

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