There's A Good Girl

 

I had a feeling I'd read Marianne Grabrucker's There's A Good Girl before and parts of it were definitely familiar, but it must have been thirty years ago, and having had two daughters in the interim, it certainly bore a revist. Subtitled Gender Stereotypes in the First Three Years of Life: A Diary, this memoir really covers about two years of Grabrucker's daughter's life, from the time she starts speaking until she starts pre-school and Grabrucker returns to full time work after Anneli turns three.

Although the diary was mostly written in 1983/4, and some observations have dated, it's horrifying to see how many still feel relevant forty years later. Perhaps Anneli's grandmothers might not be so keen to encourage her to play with dolls (or perhaps they would!), and perhaps the mothers of the little boys that Anneli plays with might not stress so hard the need for boys to not cry; and parents of both sexes might be less relaxed about the violence that the little boys mete out on the girls, and might not insist that the children have to 'work out their squabbles for themselves.'

In daily entries, Grabrucker observes and records the hundred little nudges that small children experience, pushing them toward inflexible gender roles: the advertising billboards that show naked women and powerful men; the fathers who fix things around the house; the urge to dress up little girls and tell them how pretty they look; the little boys who get away with snatching toys and how the girls are told to 'hold on more tightly next time.' Even for progressive, feminist German parents in the 1980s, who are convinced that they're bringing up boys and girls the same, and who are well aware of stereotypes, time and again they fall into the trap.

This is a slim book but it packs a punch far more powerful than its size suggests. Well worth reading, or re-reading, even now.