Compare the young girl’s thoughts on gender stereotypes in ‘Boys and Girls’ to the discussion provided by Stevie Cameron in her essay ‘Our Daughters, Ourselves’ how do both authors regard “being female” in their given circumstances?
There are huge differences between these two texts: one is fictional and first published in 1968 and set in an even earlier period (the 1940s when Munro was a young girl), while the other is about a real incident and published in 1990. These differences in genre and date are important and need to be explored, not least because Cameron is writing at a time when opportunities for women were much wider and more varied than they were in the period when ‘Boys and Girls’ is set. However, despite their differences, both texts present misogyny as a social problem and women as victims of that misogyny.
Cameron makes clear that opportunities for women have widened enormously by 1990. She is writing in a period when it is possible for women to become “fire-fighters, doctors, policewomen, lawyers, scientists, soldiers, athletes, artists.” (Cameron, 139 – 140). Cameron admits that to achieve these things will not be easy, but it had become possible by 1990 for mothers to see their daughters “competing with the boys for spaces in engineering schools, medical schools, law schools, business schools.” (Cameron, 140). Cameron’s own career as a highly successful writer and journalist is proof of these wider opportunities for women. This is in complete contrast to the opportunities for women presented in ‘Boys and Girls.’ The female narrator of ‘Boys and girls’ despite her closeness with her father and her fascination for his work, is expected, as she gets older, to help her mother in the home – mainly in the kitchen. The narrator makes her feelings clear: “It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father’s service, was ritualistically important.” (Munro, 125) The narrator’s parents, however, have their own sense of what is appropriate work for a woman and their preconceptions limit what the narrator will be allowed to do as she grows older. At one point her mother says to the father, “Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you’ll have a real help.” (Munro, 125). Laird is the narrator’s younger brother; the mother’s remark about “real help” suggests that the narrator’s work for her father is not “real” and that only a boy can do it properly. The mother then goes on to say, of the narrator, “And then I can use her more in the house....I just get my back turned and she runs off. It’s not like I had a girl in the family at all.” (Munro, 125). As the narrator grows up she is socially conditioned to accept a diminished role as a woman. We can see this in the stories she tells herself at night before she goes to sleep: when she was younger, the stories featured her as a brave, resourceful heroine: “I rescued people from a bombed building....I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard....Rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism.” (Munro, 119). But as she gets older she stops being the active agent in her own stories and becomes passive – just as society expected women to be and instead of being the heroine the story involved “somebody rescuing me. It might be a boy from our class at school, or even Mr Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under the arms. And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I looked like – how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on.” (Munro, 129). Thus the narrator starts to adopt the superficial values by which society will judge her as a woman – her appearance.
Both texts contain a shocking degree of violence. In Cameron’s case this is largely because she is writing in response to the Montreal Massacre, which took place on December 6th, 1990 and involved the shooting of twenty-eight people, mainly female engineering students. However, Cameron’s whole text is peppered with references to the violence that men do to women and the anxiety that this causes their mothers. At every stage of their daughters’ lives, Cameron suggests, they are potential victims of male violence: this extends from the earliest warnings given to their daughters as small girls: “don’t talk to strangers, run to the neighbors if a man tries to get you in his car” (Cameron, 139) to the continued warnings as they become adults and begin to live independent lives – “park close to the movie, get a deadbolt for your apartment, check your windows, tell your roommates where you are. Call me. Call me.” (Cameron, 140). Cameron argues, essentially, that women are still always the potential victims of male violence and that the Montreal Massacre was merely an extreme version of the misogyny that women face in society. In ‘Boys and Girls’ violence is part of the way of life on the farm where the narrator lives, and she is not shocked or at all squeamish about what has to happen to the animals – whether it is the silver foxes he father breeds and slaughters for their skins or the shooting of horses which are fed to the foxes. The narrator describes what happens to the animals without sentimentality or a sense of shock. There is, however, one moment in the story when the narrator seems to side with the animals: she allows the horse, Flora, to escape from the field in order to avoid death, albeit temporarily. This occurs near the end of the story and it is tempting (because of the horse’s gender and the narrator’s growing awareness of how trapped she is by society’s expectations of women) to see the horse as a symbol of the narrator and her desire to escape the constricting role that awaits her as a woman. The narrator briefly identifies with the horse who is about to be the victim of violence, and at the very end of the story, when her brother reveals that she deliberately allowed the horse to escape, her father dismisses her with the words, “She’s only a girl.” (Munro, 135)
Cameron writes as an adult, painfully aware of the misogyny that women face; Munro writes from a child’s perspective – one who gradually becomes aware of her lack of freedom. However, both writers portray the misogyny that society takes for granted.
Works Cited
Cameron, Stevie. ‘Our Daughters, Ourselves’.1990. The Globe and Mail.
Munro, Alice. ‘Boys and Girls.’ In Dance of the Happy Shades. 2000. London: Vintage. Print.
