The Gender Trap

A detailed account of how gender is learned and unlearned in the home From the selection of toys, clothes, and activities to styles of play and emotional expression, the family is ground zero for where children learn about gender. Despite recent awareness that girls are not too fragile to play sports and that boys can benefit from learning to cook, we still find ourselves surrounded by limited gender expectations and persistent gender inequalities. Through the lively and engaging stories of parents from a wide range of backgrounds, The Gender Trap provides a detailed account of how today’s parents understand, enforce, and resist the gendering of their children. Emily Kane shows how most parents make efforts to loosen gendered constraints for their children, while also engaging in a variety of behaviors that reproduce traditionally gendered childhoods, ultimately arguing that conventional gender expectations are deeply entrenched and that there is great tension in attempting to undo them while letting 'boys be boys' and 'girls be girls.'

"Emily Kane shows clearly that most parents understand children's personality to be some combination of nature and nurture, and many wish they could help nurture their children to escape gender traps. Yet these parents are themselves trapped by the gender structure itself, especially the accountability they feel to other people's expectations, and the fear that if their boys are free to explore activities usually associated with girls they will be punished by the world around them. The author shows clearly that to help parents navigate childrearing, we have to change the world around them. A good read, perfect for the undergraduate classroom, and clear enough even to give to those new parents in your family or the neighborhood."--Cover.

Investigates the effects of feminine and masculine gender

This book provides an account of fatherhood and changing parental roles in Sweden and Poland. It uses a comparative perspective to show what men understand a father’s role to be, and how they seek to live up to it. Fathering, the author argues, is a social phenomenon grounded in cultural patterns of parenting, gender roles and models of masculinity, and also shaped by family policy. Being a father today, she demonstrates, is longer connected solely with being the main breadwinner. Rather, it has become increasingly common for fathers to take on duties traditionally regarded as the domain of women. This means that men often face conflicting expectations based on different models of fatherhood. The aim of this thought-provoking book is to track these models, analysing their origins and their consequences for gender order. It will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, the sociology of families and social policy studies.

Traps is the first anthology that historicizes the writings by African American men who have examined the meanings of the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality, and who have theorized these categories in the most expansive and progressive terms. Traps contains the landmark speeches, essays, letters, and a manifesto by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American men who have examined the complex terrain of gender and sexuality within the historical and cultural matrix of the United States.