Sissies, Dolls, and Dancing: Children's Literature and Gender Deviance in the Seventies

Abstract

During the late 1960s and the 1970s in the United States, discourses on gender were proliferating; creating a charged, unstable category that formed the center of much scientific, academic, and social inquiry. The nation’s first “gender identity clinic” opened at Johns Hopkins in 1965 and the first sex reassignment surgery was completed in 1966 (Wexler). Second wave feminism—and its serious questioning of gender roles— increasingly influenced both society and academia (Duberman xi). The National Institute of Mental Health awarded funds to several institutions around the country to conduct various forms of research on childhood gender problems; the largest of these projects took place at the UCLA Gender Identity Research and Treatment Clinic (Burke 32–33). This federally funded scrutiny of children’s gender behavior was a precursor to the institutional pathologization of gender deviance. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association added a new diagnosis to its latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III, 1980): “Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood.” The seventies were an era in which gender became a vibrant, contested domain that acted as a cultural battleground of competing ideologies. Interestingly, this era saw a large output of gender non-normative children’s literature—literature that staked out a particular space in society’s discourse on gender by presenting children’s books that contested notions of traditional gender roles and identities. A Guide to Non-sexist Children’s Books lists eighty-three early childhood books published between 1976 and 1980 that deal with characters of both sexes who do not conform to strict gender norms. This body of literature seems largely influenced by much feminist work of the era that maintained that gender roles do not flow naturally from one’s biological sex, but instead that people are