Demise of the Tomboy : Experts Disagree: Victory in the Battle Against Gender Stereotypes or Surrender to Dominant Male Culture?

Internationally acclaimed operatic soprano Carol Neblett remembers the pride with which she called herself a tomboy when she was a girl.

Now 42, Neblett plays the role of mother to her teen-age son and two young girls with the same tough resourcefulness she brought to bear when she elected to sing the title role in a scene in Jules Massenet’s “Thais” nude.

But Neblett--a self-professed jock--realizes that the offbeat existence she remembers may forever be denied her daughters.

It’s because, she acknowledges with a mix of ruefulness and thankfulness, the term tomboy is far less relevant to today’s girls than to their mothers.

In fact, sociologists and behavior experts who monitor such things suggest it all represents a significant benchmark in social evolution: The concept of the tomboy may have reached obsolescence.

“I’m going to put a tennis racquet in her hand,” Neblett says of her 2 1/2-year-old. “But you don’t hear tomboy very much. People just say, ‘It looks like you’ve got a jock for a kid.’ ”

Tomboy has been part of the language since Shakespeare chose to have the character Iachimo use it to describe Imogen, daughter of the king of England, in “Cymbeline.” Then it meant “prostitute” or “a wild, romping girl” and had possibly existed in the vernacular for almost a century before.

Once strictly derisive--with overtones of homosexuality--the term has survived to the late 20th Century. But with girls finding their way into previously all-boys’ team sports and, eventually, into male-dominated professions, a variety of experts agree that tomboy has become a term largely irrelevant to the girls for whom it would most likely apply.

It is used, according to observers like Barrie Thorne, a sociology professor in USC’s Program for the Study of Women and Men in Society, by contemporary mothers to describe daughters who may find the term meaningless since it describes behavior now broadly normal among their peers, and not at all deviant.

Many experts see the demise of the concept of tomboyism as something of a sign of victory in the fight to eliminate artificial gender role stereotypes. According to this reasoning, as young girls and teen-agers grow up in social systems in which pejorative gender identities are increasingly rare, the term loses more and more of its relevance.

But some observers like Thorne fret that the changing situation may also mean that females are only accepted to the extent that they conform more with the dominant male culture. So in this sense, the end of tomboyism, Thorne contends, may symbolize capitulation as much as equality.

“One still hears adults (using the term) talking about their childhoods,” said Thorne, one of only a handful of academic researchers to have explored tomboyism. “But I think tomboy is moving to obsolescence among children. It is no longer seen as a form of defiance for a girl to be physically active.

“I think the main reason for the shift is that the term lady has been undermined. It is no longer held out as an ideal for little girls. And when you undermine lady , it leaves tomboy dangling.”

Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and director of the women’s studies center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported in a 1977 study that 78% of a group of undergraduate college women she interviewed said they had been tomboys when they were girls. Another 51% of a sample of adult women said the same.

Hyde’s original research, published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, was one of the first projects to call into question the societal notion that tomboy-like behavior is somehow aberrant.

Today, Hyde, 39, says the situation has changed. “Back in the early 1970s,” she said, “there were lots of tomboys because we were in a stage of traditional sex roles.

“But now, sex roles have liberalized so much. All the kids wear jeans and play on athletic teams. It (tomboy behavior) just isn’t an issue. The term feels dated to me.”

“I was an only child for nine years until my sister was born,” recalled opera singer Neblett, who now lives in Coronado. “I did everything with Daddy. I never thought about being a tomboy. I just did what he did. If he went hunting and fishing, I went hunting and fishing.

“I worked under the car with him. I was big, muscular and tall but we also had music in common. He was a mixture of jock and musician.

“The funniest memory I had was in the sixth grade. I never thought of myself as a guy, but I was playing baseball and the teacher sent a note home that said, ‘If Carol is going to play baseball with the rest of the boys, she better wear pants.’ ”

Jill Angel, a California Highway Patrol officer whose voice is widely familiar in Southern California from her daily radio station traffic report broadcasts, has similar memories.

“I was called a tomboy by girlfriends,” said Angel, 31. “From Day 1, it was such a derogatory statement. I played every team sport. In my elementary school, they had boys’ noon-time softball and no girls were allowed to play. But I could hit so they’d sneak me into the games. I ended up in the principal’s office several times.

“I played with guns and trucks, but I was into Barbie dolls, too. But then my mother would look out the front window and I’d be in the street playing football with 10 guys.

“Now, it’s difficult being a woman in a male-dominated field. (But) I feel I have an advantage because I’ve learned to interact with men, gain their respect and win them over.”

For some grown women from tomboy backgrounds, females who were raised in traditional gender roles are an object of derision. The term dollplayers is a common putdown. But other former tomboys choose not to wear their identities in such badge-like fashion.

For Helen Bartlett, 28, now director of project development at Tony Bill Productions in Venice, growing up as a tomboy in Washington meant that, “I spent all of my time around boys and we used to do things like skip church and go down to the Potomac River and look for dead bodies. They (the boys) would blow up my dolls.

“It never stopped. When my brothers were older, they’d take me along to the pub. We’d sit down and they’d pick out what women they were interested in. I would go and make conversation and bring them back to the table. I really thought that I was one of (the guys). Then I started to realize at a certain point when their friends started taking an interest in me that I was one of them (women). It was a very disturbing and painful and interesting awakening.

“I didn’t feel a lack of friendship with women. I’m very feminine, but I still do things that are very boyish. I work with mostly all men and I have a very easy rapport with them. I tend to engage in conversations about airplanes, sports, even women.”

Watching Children Interact

As part of her research for a chapter on tomboys to be included in a forthcoming book, Thorne spent 11 months observing boys and girls as they interacted on an elementary school playground. Only twice, she said, did she hear children use the word tomboy, though adults did so fairly commonly.

Many children, she found, were “clearly unfamiliar with the term” and several children said they had never heard it. Within the next decade, Thorne predicts, the term tomboy “may simply disappear.”

“It grew out of a system where there were more rigid stereotypes and a whole kind of imposition on girls of the idea of being a lady and being confined,” she said. “It no longer fits the reality. . . . On the other hand, we should remember that social change is very complicated.

“Boys and girls by and large are still not friends with one another. By fourth and fifth grades, they have separate worlds. Girls are not as valued in our culture as boys. All of those painful facts are still with us. It troubles me when women come up and say, ‘I was a tomboy. I’ve always done well with men. I’m accepted.’ It’s a way of saying ‘separated.’ It’s male-identified.

“In feminist thought, one strand is to have gender not make a difference. As I watch (young girls and boys interact) as an outsider, I see girls do things that boys would do well to learn from. What’s going to happen to the culture if the future is based only on girls getting access to what the boys are doing?”

Intriguing Questions

To Richard Green, a UCLA expert on the implications of tomboys and their approximate male counterparts-- sissies --the questions raised by tomboys are intriguing. But more than anything, perhaps, he said, comparison of the two terms underscores the different ways similar behavior is viewed in males and females.

Through much of its contemporary history, said Green and co-researcher Katherine Williams, tomboyism has been perceived as a backhanded compliment. A girl’s future sexual preference is in no way presumed by her being a tomboy and she is seen as the object of at least grudging admiration.

Sissy , on the other hand, implies something much more socially ominous in a boy who prefers girls as playmates, likes dolls and seeks out female role models. Such a boy is viewed far more pejoratively than the comparable girl, Green said.

In a paper published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1982, Green and Williams found that tomboys play more often with trucks than with dolls and frequently with toy guns, too. When tomboys play house, they take the role of the father or brother most often and they gravitate to their fathers as favorite parents.

Tomboys, the 1982 study found, are slightly shorter and lighter weight than non-tomboys. Overwhelmingly, they join with boys in sports. A third of tomboys say such boys’ games are their favorite activities.

‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’

It has generally been easier to obtain funding for research on sissies, said Green, whose book, “The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality,” was published in 1987 to significant critical acclaim.

But a research project in which Green, Williams and other collaborators sought to follow the social evolution of 49 tomboy girls and 50 control subjects for a period of as much as 15 or 20 years was brought to a halt three years ago when the National Institutes of Mental Health decided the project was not enough of a priority to warrant additional financing.

Green and his co-workers defined a tomboy as a girl called that by her family, with an equal or greater number of male playmates as female, who rarely plays with dolls, who more often takes male roles than female in make-believe games, who plays in predominantly boys’ sports, who prefers boys’ clothes and who has verbally expressed a wish to be a boy.

The last specification, said Green, clearly is not part of the self-image of many women who considered themselves tomboys, and co-researcher Williams suggested it was not essential to the understanding of tomboy behavior.

NIMH officials declined to discuss the decision to withdraw support for the research project. Green said the project was essentially placed in mothballs after researchers had observed the two sample groups for about five years. However contact addresses were preserved, he said, and the project could be resumed when the girls in question reach college age and young adulthood.

Social Hierarchy

“It’s a sexist society and being masculine is preferred to being feminine,” Green said, “and so people who move up the scale of social hierarchy (women acting like men) don’t get teased. They’re actually doing what society considers is good to be, which is masculine.

“Whereas boys who behave in a way society disapproves of--being a girl--are essentially in a socially downwardly mobile set of behaviors.”

Too, he said, while being a sissy is accurately identified with subsequent homosexuality, there is probably a far less direct connection between tomboyism and being a lesbian. In fact, he said, tomboys probably most commonly develop heterosexually. This difference, he said, contributes significantly to the social unacceptability of sissies and the far different reception accorded tomboys.

But “There are many things we’d be interested in more (than sexual preference),” Green said, “like issues of career choice versus homemaking. What career? What marriage plans? At what age? What about the marital role divisions? What about child-rearing?

“All are major life issues somehow related to early-life psychosocial development. I think those questions are interesting and they are unanswered.”