Abstract
Scholar Hilary Levey Friedman investigates how parental decisions result in different classed forms of femininity for girls who learn to be either “graceful girls” through dance, “aggressive girls” through soccer, or “pink warrior girls” through chess. She finds that parents higher up in the hierarchy of the middle class promote a more aggressive femininity, and we see this with both soccer and chess.
Charlotte, age 9, told me about her experiences playing competitive soccer: “At recess I’m like the only girl playing soccer. Everyone else is doing something else. So usually they call me a tomboy because I’m playing with the boys. But I’m NOT a tomboy. A tomboy is somebody who like wants to be a boy and is like always being with the boys and stuff. I have dolls and I like pink. I really like girl things, like I painted my nails.”
To Charlotte, being a tomboy is a negative label. She is more eager to identify with her femininity, pointing out how she paints her nails and wears pink. She wants a strong femininity, the kind that lets her be an aggressive soccer player, too. “We play soccer against boys sometimes because it’s better for the girls to learn to be more aggressive,” she told me. While Charlotte thinks girls can be just as good as boys at soccer, she thinks they’ll only improve if they become as tough as the boys.
Her mom Marie agrees. Looking ahead, she sees competitive sports as a way for her daughter to become aggressive—not just in the athletic arena, but also in life. Marie told me, “We have no illusions that our daughter is going to be a great athlete. But the team element [is important]. I worked for Morgan Stanley for 10 years, and I interviewed applicants, and that ability to work on a team was a crucial part of our hiring process. So it’s a skill that comes into play much later. It’s not just about ball skills or hand-eye coordination.”
“When I was interviewing job candidates at Morgan Stanley,” Marie, a white woman with two Ivy League degrees, told me, “if I got a female candidate—because it’s banking and you need to be aggressive, you need to be tough—if she played, like, ice hockey, done. My daughter’s playing, and I’m just a big believer in kids learning to be confidently aggressive, and I think that plays out in life assertiveness.”
Many parents like Marie believe that being cutthroat and aggressive sets girls on a path to the corner office as a company executive. The higher up you go in the class hierarchy, the more likely you will encounter parents like Marie, who believe in teaching their daughters what I call “aggressive femininity.” They are taught to be both physically and competitively forceful, actively subsuming aspects of their femininity; many of their parents define their daughters in opposition to “girly girls.”
As Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook and author of the bestseller Lean In, declared that “Instead of calling our daughters bossy, let’s say, ‘My daughter has executive leadership skills!’” Girls today grow up in a world with an unprecedented set of educational and professional opportunities, and many look up to successful women like Sandberg. More girls will graduate from college and earn advanced degrees than ever before, and nearly all professions are open to them, even combat careers in the military.
Successful women want to raise daughters who share the qualities that have brought them success—qualities that some liken to bossiness.
Nice Girls Competing
When I studied 95 families with elementary school-age children who were involved in competitive afterschool activities—chess, dance, and soccer—I met parents like Marie who saw their kids’ participation in competitive afterschool activities as a way to develop certain values and skills: the importance of winning; the ability to bounce back from a loss to win in the future; to perform within time limits; to succeed in stressful situations; and to perform under the gaze of others—what I call “Competitive Kid Capital.”
One of the most striking findings was that upper-middle class parents of girls often perceive a link between aggression and success in athletics, and are more likely to enroll their daughters in soccer or chess, rather than dance—activities that are deemed more cooperative and less competitive. Like Sheryl Sandberg, they believe that executive leadership skills can be effectively developed and honed on soccer fields and basketball courts, even when the competitors are wearing pink shoes and jerseys.
Illustrations by Sam Grinberg
Malcolm, an African-American lawyer with three Ivy League degrees, believes that sports don’t just steer his seven-year-old daughter toward assertiveness, they actively drive her away from more traditionally feminine pursuits. “She’s a cute little girl, but I don’t like her to be a girly-girl,” he explained. “You know, I don’t want her to be a cheerleader—nothing against that—but I want her to prepare to have the option, if she wants to be an executive in a company, that she can play on that turf. And if she’s kind of a girly-girl, maybe she’ll be a secretary. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let her have the option of doing something else if she wants.”
Many parents believe that being cutthroat and aggressive sets girls on a path to the corner office as a company executive.
Malcolm thinks being a “girly-girl” means less desirable, more traditionally feminine occupations. The images he evokes related to being an executive, such as “play on that turf,” suggests the importance he places on athletics to help his daughter follow a historically male career path. And he identifies cheerleading—which was once a male-dominated area and still has an athletic and competitive component, even as the athletes are now expected to wear make-up, curl their hair, and often bare their midriffs—as being too much of a girly-girl activity.
Sports Make the Girl
Today, sports are an important element of American upper-middle-class culture and child-rearing practices. But as recently as a century ago, organized team sports were limited to males. Women and girls were generally seen as physically inferior and mentally unable to handle competition. Even when they were allowed to participate, competition was off-limits, and seen as damaging.
When New York City’s Public Schools Athletic Girls League was founded in 1905, for example, the director was opposed to keeping records, arguing that girls could easily injure themselves if they got too aggressive or tried to break a record. All-girls’ elite schools were among the first to break with this view of women and competition, though they called competitive organizations “associations” instead of “leagues,” lest people complain a league was too masculine.
Much of this changed, along with social attitudes, after the passage of Title IX 40 years ago. With time, young women who had once been focused on the arts came, in the twenty-first century, to see athletics as especially important tools for development. Two recent studies, one by the Women’s Sports Foundation and the other by the Oppenheimer Foundation, have found that 82 percent of executive businesswomen played organized sports in middle school and high school. Of female Fortune 500 executives, 80 percent said they were competitive tomboys during childhood. The Oppenheimer study also found that, while 16 percent of all American women describe themselves as athletic, among women who earn over $75,000 annually, the number rises to about 50 percent.
These conclusions are consistent with the studies like those of economist Betsey Stevenson, whose work on Title IX finds that participation in high school sports increases the likelihood that a girl will attend college, enter the labor market, and enter previously male-dominated occupations. She suggests that sports develops such skills as learning how to compete and how to become a team member, which are both key as women navigate the traditionally male-dominated labor market.
But competition, athletic or otherwise, is still seen as a masculine attribute. In 2010, the journal Sex Roles published a study on high school boys and girls that found that even today, “boys are ‘trained’ from an early age to be competitive… Research suggests that girls are less comfortable than boys in competitive circumstances and that girls are socialized to mask overt competitiveness and aggressiveness more generally.” David Hibbard and Duane Buhrmester, both psychologists, argue that a mentality of “competing to win” is at odds with the “nice girl” ideal. Girls who engage in head-to-head competition may have more social difficulties, even as they become prepared for a fast-tracked, upper-middle-class life.
Pink Girls and Dancing Queens
Parents of chess-playing girls also encourage their daughters to be assertive and competitive. As one chess mom explained to me, “We’re raising her… to be feminist. And so she says she wants to be a Grandmaster or the President [of the United States]. She doesn’t have any ideas about gender limitations and I think that’s a good thing.”
Chess girls don’t have to be as assertive as soccer girls like Charlotte. Partly because it is not a physical game, chess allows girls to be what one mother of two sons described to me as a “pink girl”: “These girls have princess T-shirts on,” she said. They have “rhinestones and bows in their hair—and they beat boys. And the boys come out completely deflated. That’s the kind of thing I think is so funny. That girl Carolyn, I call her the killer chess player. She has bows in her hair, wears dresses, everything is pink, Barbie backpack, and she plays killer chess.”
That a winning girl can look so feminine has an especially strong effect on boys, and sometimes their parents. Another chess mom told me how a father reacted negatively when his son lost to her daughter: “The father came out and was shocked. He said, ‘You let a girl beat you!’”
In competitive dance, it’s more common to see girls win, if only because the activity is dominated by girls. Dance is a physical activity that, like cheerleading, “no girly-girls” dad Malcolm would like his daughter to avoid. Competitive dancers are expected to wear make-up when they compete. While this has a practical purpose—to make sure the dancers’ faces are not “washed out” by the stage lights—lipstick, blush, and mascara also accentuate feminine features; their practices are among those sociologist C. J. Pascoe would identify as part of “normative femininity.”
As I sat in the audience at dance competitions, I often heard teachers and parents remark, “Wow, she looks beautiful up there,” or, “They look very good.” In addition to make-up, girl’s dance costumes featured sequins, rhinestones, ribbons, and other decorative embellishments, and, at most competitions, costume and appearance are evaluated as part of the final score.
In contrast, in chess and soccer, appearance matters little to the outcome of the competition. Although soccer girls’ appearances are regulated, it is done in a way that de-emphasizes femininity. Soccer girls must remove all jewelry (for safety reasons), and coaches direct girls to make sure all of their hair is out of their faces. To keep their view unimpeded, girls pull their hair back in ponytails, using headbands or elastic bands. This has become a fashion and identity statement itself—perhaps a way to assert femininity in a less-than-feminine environment, and to keep shorter hair and bangs off the face. And, of course, female soccer uniforms are not easily distinguishable from male uniforms. Many traditional markers of femininity are absent from the pitch.
While 16 percent of all American women describe themselves as athletic, among women who earn over $75,000 annually, the number rises to about 50 percent.
It is not surprising, then, that although both soccer and dance parents mentioned lifelong fitness and health as a motivation for their young daughters’ involvement with these activities, only dance moms linked their kids’ participation to obesity and appearance. Dance mom Tiffany told me about her concerns about her daughter’s future body: “My short-term goal for her is to keep, believe it or not, physically fit. Because, she’s an eater, across the board… [Dance] keeps her at a nice weight. You know what I mean? And she struggles with that [weight], that’s going to be her struggle, I told her.”
Gender Scripts and Classed Lessons
Another set of scripts—those about femininity—helps explain how parents (especially dance and soccer parents) choose among activities for their daughters. I call the dance script the “graceful girls,” the soccer “aggressive girls,” and the chess “pink warriors.” When dance, soccer, and chess parents draw from different gender scripts, they are shaped by class, producing classed lessons in femininity for their girls.
Though nearly all of the families I met are part of the broadly defined middle class, parents higher up in the hierarchy of the middle class promote a more aggressive femininity, as seen in both soccer and chess families. Dance mothers, who generally have lower status than the chess and soccer parents, promote a femininity that is less competitively aggressive and prioritizes physical appearance. Lower-middle-class and working-class families place a greater emphasis on traditional femininity.
Today, there are three times more female soccer players than Girl Scouts in the United States.
Among the 38 families I met who had competitive young girls, the vast majority of soccer families were upper-middle-class. None of the dance families were upper-middle-class, and over a third were lower-middle class; dance was the only activity of the three that had any working-class participants. Chess families with daughters who compete tend to look the most like soccer families, as the majority of families are upper-middle-class.
These upper-middle-class families had at least one parent who has earned an advanced postgraduate degree and work in a professional or managerial occupation, and both parents had earned a four-year college degree. The lower-middle-class families have just one parent with a college degree; neither parent works in a professional or managerial occupation.
Recall Malcolm and Marie. The former is a lawyer, and the latter was an investment banker who recently stopped working to spend more time with her five children. Both attended elite universities, and were representative of the rest of the parents. Most of the soccer parents had similar occupations, or they were professors or doctors.
It is not surprising that these highly credentialed, competitive parents have similar occupational aspirations for their children, including their daughters. They are trying to impart particular skills and lessons to their daughters at a young age to help them succeed in the long term. As Malcolm made clear, upper-middle-class parents do not want their daughters to end up as secretaries, so participation in competitive activities, where aggression is inculcated, becomes a priority so the girls can maintain their family’s status in the future.
Bossy is Best?
Today, there are three times more female soccer players than Girl Scouts in the United States. This trend is due, in part, to the fact that upper-middle-class families are trying to strategically maintain their family’s class position, preparing their daughters to enter what are traditionally male worlds. Parents are choosing afterschool activities that will give these girls an advantage in college admissions and beyond; they are more likely to have the resources to enable their daughters to travel and compete.
But aggressive femininity can come at a cost. A recent study of the long-term effects of sports participation on adolescent girls by psychologists Campbell Leaper and Elizabeth Daniels found that many girls “struggle to reconcile their athleticism with traditional standards of hegemonic femininity that emphasize maintaining a thin body ideal and adhering to a rigid definition of beauty.” Aggressive and pink warrior girls, along with graceful girls, face what psychologist Stephen Hinshaw calls the “triple bind” of being supportive, competitive and successful—and effortlessly beautiful.
In her work on female litigators, sociologist Jennifer Pierce similarly found that successful women had to become either “very male” or “very caring.” She describes this binary: “Whereas men are praised for using intimidation and strategic friendliness, women who are aggressive are censured for being too difficult to get along with, and women who are nice are considered ‘not tough enough’ to be good litigators.” Women need to be aggressive to succeed, but not so aggressive that they get labeled bitchy. It’s a delicate balancing act for women in the work force, and for parents who want to raise girls who can be the boss.
These classed gender ideals also have long-term implications for inequality. Girls from upper-middle-class families seem better equipped with the skills they need to succeed in more lucrative careers, and in leadership roles as adults. Better understanding of socialization practices at the upper end of the class structure may open up real opportunities for others as well.
Sheryl Sandberg wasn’t a soccer player. She wasn’t even athletic, in an aggressive sense, at all. She was once an aerobics instructor who succeeded by leading others in a silver leotard. Her story suggests that soccer and contact sports aren’t a direct path to the corner office, and that dance and cheerleading don’t shut the door on success.
The future is not cast in stone: Tiffany’s dancing daughter may yet become an executive, and Malcolm’s daughter may become her assistant. That doesn’t stop many affluent parents from being convinced that leaning in while wearing pink cleats produces girls with executive leadership skills.