Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland 9780773573611

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Historical Note
Chapter 1 Introduction
The Importance of Gender Differentiation
Children's Play and the Gendered Subject
The Use of Children's Drawings
The Canadian-Polish Comparison
Chapter 2 Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland
Gender Inequality in Canada and Poland — The Labour Market
Gender Differentiation in the Home
Church and School
The School in Poland
Summary and Conclusion: Children in a Gender- Differentiated World
Chapter 3 Expressions of Gender: Play Practices
Initial Expectations
The Play Practices Depicted
Gender and Grade Differences
Setting and Gender Composition
The Element of Fantasy: A Note on Validity
Conclusion
Chapter 4 Expressions of Gender: Self Conception
Initial Expectations
Establishing Reliable Indicators
Focus on Self: Size, Prominence and Self Alone
Figures and the Environment
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Possibilities for Change: A Focus on Beliefs
Conceptions of Gender: Attempts at Change
Attempts at Change: An Evaluation
Activities Depicted — 1979 and 1986
Focus on Self— 1979 and 1986
Discussion
The School as Change Agent
Beliefs versus Practices
Chapter 6 Possibilities for Change: A Focus on Practices
Gender and Everyday Practices
Practices, Power and Pay-Offs
Room for Optimism: Contradiction and Variation
Contradictions
Variation: Inter-Societal
Variation: Intra-Societal
The Importance of Age
The Importance of Type of Practice
Joining the Threads: Towards Gender Equality
Changing Children's Practices
Females in Male Domains
The Colour War Model
Female Coaches and Referees
Males in Female Domains: Encouraging Autotelic and Cooperative Practices
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

Boys

And Girls

Apart Children's Play in Canada and Poland

THE CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES A series of original works, new collections and reprints of source material relating to Canada, issued under the supervision of the Editorial Board, Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press Inc., Ottawa, Canada. General Editor

David B. Knight Editorial Board

Bruce Cox (Anthropology) Irwin Gillespie (Economics) Naomi Griffiths (History) David B. Knight (Geography) Michael MacNeil (Law) Randy Newell (Political Science) Daiva Stasiulis (Sociology)

Boys

And Girls

Apart Children's Play in Canada and Poland by Stephen Richer

Carleton University Press Ottawa, Canada 1990

©Carleton University Press Inc. 1990 ISBN

0-88629-120-8 0-88629-121-6

(paperback) (casebound)

Printed and bound in Canada Carleton Library Series # 1 5 9 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Richer, Stephen, 1941Boys and Girls Apart: children's play in Canada and Poland ISBN 0-88629-121-6 (bound).—ISBN 0-88629-120-8 (pbk.) 1. Play—Social aspects—Canada. 2. Play—Social aspects— Poland. 3- Sex differences (Psychology) in children—Canada. 4. Sex differences (Psychology) in children—Poland. I. Title. II. Series. HQ782.R43 1990 Distributed by:

155.4'18

C90-090140-3

Oxford University Press Canada 70 Wynford Drive, Don Mills, Ontario. Canada. M3C 1J9 (416) 441-2941

Cover Design: Aerographics Ottawa Acknowledgement Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

For the children from both countries, in particular Eric, Adrian, and little Kendra, Laurie, Bill, and Brika, baby Rachel, Oriana, big Jeff, Michal and Marianna.

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Table of Contents Preface

ix

Historical Note

xi

Chapter 1 Introduction The Importance of Gender Differentiation Children's Play and the Gendered Subject The Use of Children's Drawings The Canadian-Polish Comparison

1 1 4 5 10

Chapter 2

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland Gender Inequality in Canada and Poland — The Labour Market Gender Differentiation in the Home Church and School The School in Poland Summary and Conclusion: Children in a GenderDifferentiated World

Chapter 3 Expressions of Gender: Play Practices .. Initial Expectations The Play Practices Depicted Gender and Grade Differences Setting and Gender Composition The Element of Fantasy: A Note on Validity Conclusion

13 14 20 26 31 36 39 40 43 53 66 78 80

Chapter 4 Expressions of Gender: Self Conception. 83 Initial Expectations 84 Establishing Reliable Indicators 87 Focus on Self: Size, Prominence and Self Alone 89 Figures and the Environment 96 Conclusion 105

Chapter 5

Possibilities for Change: A Focus on Beliefs 107 Conceptions of Gender: Attempts at Change 108 Attempts at Change: An Evaluation Ill Activities Depicted — 1979 and 1986 117 Focus on Self— 1979 and 1986 119 Discussion 120 The School as Change Agent 120 Beliefs versus Practices 122

Chapter 6

Possibilities for Change: A Focus on Practices Gender and Everyday Practices Practices, Power and Pay-Offs Room for Optimism: Contradiction and Variation . Contradictions Variation: Inter-Societal Variation: Intra-Societal The Importance of Age The Importance of Type of Practice Joining the Threads: Towards Gender Equality Changing Children's Practices Females in Male Domains The Colour War Model Female Coaches and Referees Males in Female Domains: Encouraging Autotelic and Cooperative Practices Conclusion

References

125 125 127 130 130 132 134 135 138 140 142 145 146 147 147 151 153

viii

PREFACE The cover of this text displays a reproduction of a picture drawn by a Grade 6 boy, a recent immigrant from Haiti. Despite his short time in the country, he has fully embraced the Canadian way of life. This is not only evident in his choice of hockey as his "favourite" activity, but in the ideological premises regarding western capitalism and patriarchy that underly his drawing. The high media visibility of professional/commercialized team sports is reflected in the picture, as is the centrality of the competitive ethic. Sticks and puck triumphantly raised, the smiling "heros" bask in victory. Their rivals, the "zeros," are despondent, beaten. In anger and frustration, one "zero" has apparently smashed his stick against the ice, breaking it in two. The protagonists are all male—although some females watch the contest, the arena itself is male territory. The second picture, drawn by a grade 6 girl, is in stark contrast. The skipper is singing and a benevolent sun shines down. Devoid of competitive intensity, the general feeling evoked is one of harmony and well-being. The drawing, however, is also sexually homogeneous — males are nowhere to be found. This book is about such images: children's images of gender in two societies, Canada and Poland. With the aid of over 300 drawings from Ottawa and Warsaw, I attempt to relate the patriarchal features of capitalism and state socialism to the way chil-

IX

dren structure their world by gender. These conceptions, which I term "gender expressions," are compared for boys and girls across and within the two societies. The book is organized as follows: Chapter 1, the Introduction, is a detailed discussion of the objectives and procedures of the study. Chapter 2 is a description, using both statistics and personal observation, of the major structural features of Canadian and Polish society. It provides the necessary background for the ensuing two chapters. Chapter 3 is an analysis of the types of activities portrayed by the children, focussing primarily on the expression of competition and images of domesticity. Chapter 4 examines differences in the ways boys and girls present themselves in their drawings; of major concern here is the connection between self and other that the images manifest. The last two chapters look at possibilities for change in the way children construct gender. Chapter 5 evaluates a school program designed to promote gender equality, while Chapter 6 uses these and other research findings to suggest several possible paths to a gender ^differentiated world. The book owes much to the following people: Eric and the other children mentioned in the dedication, who provided me with a personal motivation to try and understand their gender consciousness and my potential role in its development; Jennifer Quaile who, despite my abysmal handwriting, managed to type the manuscript; Jim Reil and Pauline Adams who provided superb editorial advice; Ann Hewitt and Laurie Richer, who helped with the coding of the drawings; Stefan Mieszalski, my friend, colleague and interpreter, who with generosity and patience led me through the complexities of a foreign world; Adam Podgorecki, Maria Los and Andrzej Lifsches, who helped me see Poland from the inside; the warm and hospitable people with whom I stayed in Poland, whose names, for their sake, are best omitted; Carleton International, which financed my trip; and, most importantly, all the children in Ottawa and Warsaw who drew the pictures and shared a part of their world.

x

Historical Note The research for the book was completed before the recent political changes in Poland. Some of the statements made about state socialism, therefore, and about state/Solidarity antipathy, are no longer as clearly tenable.

XI

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION The Importance of Gender Differentiation This book focusses generally on inequality. The problem of documenting the extent of differences in power, prestige and wealth, and attempting to explain them, is arguably the major preoccupation of sociologists. Yet, for much of the history of the discipline, one axis of inequality has dominated sociological attention—that of social class. Whether thought of as ownership or non-ownership of the means of production as with Marx, or as control of property as with Weber, or as a position in an occupational hierarchy as is characteristic of North American writers, emphasis has been placed on the role of class in perpetuating inequality. Recently, however, attention has shifted to a second axis of differentiation, that of gender. Due mainly to the work of feminist scholars, we are beginning to understand that one's gender may be as important in influencing where we end up in society's mosaic as is the class origin of our family. Indeed, there is some evidence that gender may be more important than social class Examine, for example, the following table of average salaries of male and female workers in Canada for various categories of father's occupation.

1

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

Table 1.1:

Annual Salary by Gender and Father's Occupation, Canada,

1981

Female

Male (in dollars) Father's Occupation Professionals, Managers Clerical, Sales, Service Manual

26 ,228 23 ,178 21 ,947

18,241 15,217 14,961

X = 22 ,776

X = 15,497

Source: Quality of Life Study, Institute for Behavioural Research, York University.

Certainly the class origin of one's family has a considerable impact on one's later earnings. A son of a professional or managerial father earns, on the average, roughly $4,000 more per year than the son of a manual worker. For females, the corresponding difference is slightly over $3,000. Yet these differences pale in comparison to the differences in income due to gender. In every category of father's occupation, men earn approximately $7,500 more than women; or, to put it another way, women earn about two thirds of what men do, a situation that has not changed in almost 100 years (c.f. Eno 1985). We must also bear in mind that these statistics refer to full-time workers only; since women are over-represented among part-time workers, the inclusion of these workers in the table would increase the gender differences. Clearly, because wealth is a fundamental source of power in our society, the overall subordinate position of women is irrefutable. There is much debate on the origins of these inequities, but this text will not touch on the subject except tangentially. As interesting as such an exploration might be, it would bear only indirectly on our contemporary situation. My concern is with

2

Introduction

the forces that maintain gender inequality, forces best understood as ideological in nature. By ideology, I mean a set of beliefs and practices that grant legitimacy to a given system of power. In our case, the system of power is patriarchy—the domination of women by men. The relevant beliefs include all notions about males and females that perpetuate patriarchy. Many people, for example, believe that females are less rational than males, are more emotional, and are more suited to the raising of children. Reinforcing and reinforced by these beliefs are a set of genderbased practices—familiar and repeated patterns of behaviour that are the stuff of our daily lives. Playing hockey, cooking dinner, changing the baby, are examples. It bears emphasizing that beliefs and practices are mutually reinforcing. Whenever a wife cooks a meal she is reinforcing a set of beliefs about gender relations, which in turn increases the likelihood of the practice being repeated. Whenever an NHL hockey team takes to the ice, the belief that this practice is male territory is strengthened, which in turn increases the probability that ensuing games, in and out of the NHL, will be all-male affairs. Of crucial importance for us is an awareness that the beliefs and practices that compose gender-related ideological systems are inextricably related to people's self-conceptions. A central, if not the central component of one's self-conception is our selfdefinition as a male or female. Beliefs and practices regarding gender provide us with information for developing nothing less than our self-identity. What kind of person should I be by virtue of my sex? What does it mean that I am a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? These questions can only be answered with reference to social phenomena. The transformation of biological sex into a gender role, and this in turn into a gendered consciousness, is a process of social construction. We are social creatures, we seek confirmation of who we are in the verbal and non-verbal cues of significant others in our lives (Mead 1934). We learn about what "boyness" and "girlness" means from others around us. By being exposed to beliefs about gender, by observing and

3

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

participating in corresponding gender-based practices, we come very early to define ourselves as boys or girls, and to incorporate these ideological elements into our own taken-for-granted reality. This is not to say that this is an automatic process. The very notion that gender is a social construction implies variation by social setting and among individuals based on the extent to which archetypal gender roles are presented and internalized. There is undeniably struggle, resistance and contradiction as this process unfolds (c.f. Gaskell 1985; Kessler et al. 1985). Yet to dwell on variation is to underplay the very real power of ideological forces to influence our conceptions of gendered self and other. As we shall see, this power is conspicuously evident, even among very young children.

Children's Play and the Gendered Subject An understanding of gender inequality is predicated upon an understanding of how beliefs and practices are instrumental in its reproduction. The focus of this book is on practices. Although some work has been done in identifying and analyzing salient gender-based practices (c.f. Hollway 1984), conspicuously absent are analyses of practices that occur in the earliest stages of gendered consciousness. These practices are carried out by young children, particularly in patterns of play. Children's play, however, has been relatively ignored by sociologists. Much of the existing work has been conducted by anthropologists, and falls into three categories: a) problems of defining play (Norbeck 1969; Gilmore 1966; Bateson 1972; Sutton-Smith 1972); b) providing theoretical explanations for play at the systems and individual level (see Schwartzman 1978; Gilmore 1966 for extensive reviews); and c) classifying and describing children's games, largely through ethnographic-type methods (see Opie and Opie 1959; 1969; Newell 1889; 1903; Howard 1958a; 1958b; 1959; 1960a).

4

Introduction

What is lacking is an attempt to link children's play to central social issues, in particular patterns of structured inequality. Yet it is within the playworld of children that the earliest beliefs about gender are presented and reinforced, beliefs that affirm the naturalness of horizontal and vertical gender differences. As Cahill (1987) points out, " . . . play, both solitary and conjoint, is the most important mechanism in the learning of gender expression. In play, children learn to express gender by taking sex-specific roles, by presenting and defending their gender identity, and by constructing social worlds around sexual classification" (9). The present work seeks to capture children's expressions of gender through their depictions of play. More specifically, the objectives are to: a) present the salient play practices of boys and girls; b) present their conceptions of self, and indicate the extent to which these and the play practices, as gender expressions, contribute to the maintenance of patriarchy; c) explore the possibility of cross-societal variation in these results, and; d) discuss the limits to, and the possibilities of, changing the way we structure our world by gender. The key tools for accomplishing these tasks are drawings done by Polish and Canadian children. We now turn to a description and discussion of this technique.

The Use of Children's Drawings The study required a methodology that met various requirements. First, it had to be compatible with the young age of many of the children (six- and seven-year-olds constituted roughly one third of the sample). Second, it had to accommodate a comparison between Polish and Canadian children. Practically, this

5

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

implied that verbal communication be kept to a minimum (to lessen the possibility of distortion of meaning), and that data be collected from a relatively large number of subjects. Finally, as indicated above, the method had to capture the dominant play practices of children and give cues as to underlying conceptions of self. We concluded that a graphic projective technique would meet all of these criteria, and settled ultimately on drawings. Indeed, the first requirement led us to eliminate rather quickly questionnaires and interviews—we regarded these as simply inappropriate for young children. Observation was a possibility, but such an approach, while appropriate for documenting play practices (with the qualification that it would be extremely labour intensive), would not have enabled us to get at children's selfconceptions. (In fact, as will be discussed later, we did carry out some observation, primarily to validate the drawings.) Drawings seemed a perfect solution. As Hammer (1986) argues, "Projective drawings, basically a nonverbal technique, have the obvious advantage of greater relative applicability not only to young children but to the more poorly educated child, ... the non-Englishspeaking child ... and the child from a relatively barren and underprivileged sociocultural background" (240-241). Drawings can be obtained using very few instructions (several sentences are all that are required), thus minimizing the potential problems of linguistic and cultural differences. Also, a large number of drawings can be obtained in a relatively short time, keeping research costs reasonably low. To get at dominant play practices, we asked children to draw "their favourite sport, game, or other activity." In a pilot study of 30 Ottawa children, the drawings obtained displayed high consistency with our observational data on the same children (Richer 1984). It appears then, that drawings can provide valid renditions of children's activities. (See also Hammer 1986, 246.) Furthermore, when asked several weeks later to draw another set of pictures, the children produced virtually identical draw-

6

Introduction

ings, indicating that the technique possesses high reliability over time. Of central interest to us are gender-related patterns in the practices depicted. What differences and similarities are evident in the drawings of male and female children ? When there are strong relationships between gender and certain practices, we may begin to refer to these practices as gender expressions, as important elements of gender differentiation. The final requirement of our method was that it provide us with some indication of children's views of themselves. This led us to the self-concept literature, in particular studies making use of drawings of one kind or another. The vast majority of these studies turned out to be based in clinical psychology1 — they are primarily concerned with revealing the personality characteristics of children for therapeutic purposes (see Rabin 1986). Somewhat surprisingly, we found almost no studies that explicitly asked for a self-portrait. Rather, children were typically asked to draw a person, the assumption being that the person drawn would be a projection of salient characteristics of the young artist. The most commonly used instrument is the Goodenough "draw a person" test (Willsdon 1977), which has been used for two major purposes—to study children's intellectual development and to study self-concept. The former is not of concern here, although we might point out that the basic strategy is to use inclusion or exclusion of basic body characteristics, as well as spatial patterns and sequencing, as indicators of various stages of cognitive growth (c.f. Goodnow 1977). The instruction "draw a person" does not, however, give one grounds for interpreting the drawing as a manifestation of selfconcept. Nevertheless, early users of the Goodenough test have attempted such an inference. Machover (1971), for example, saw the drawings as possibly revealing various aspects of self: "... the perception of the body image as it has developed out of personal experience, must somehow guide the individual who is drawing in the specific structure and content which constitutes his offering

7

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

of a 'person'" (5). Similarly, Heinrich and Triebe (1972) focussed on same-sex preference in the person drawn. They found a fairly consistent pattern of same-sex drawings, although there was some cross-sex preference. Among these, girls were more likely to draw boys than boys were to draw girls. This may indicate a more positive self-evaluation for males. As the authors suggest, "there might be ... some kind of learning as to the synonym for 'human being' which seems to be 'man/male' rather than 'woman/female'" (266). Swenson (1965), however, questioned the legitimacy of such inferences, and indeed subjected several of Machover's hypotheses to empirical tests. He concluded that there was no support for viewing the Goodenough test as a self-projection instrument, and suggested the instrument be used only as "part of a diagnostic battery" (647). The only group of studies we were able to find that explicitly asked for self-portrayal were those using versions of the Family Drawing Test (FDT). Originally developed by Hulse (1951), FDT involved the drawing of self as well as members of the immediate family. This measure captures, then, a social relationship dimension, which I would argue is an essential component of self-conception. Such a measure in effect allows interpretation of the self-drawing to be guided by its relative position and attributes vis-a-vis others in the picture. For example, Britain (1970), using the FDT, attempted to gauge the effects of periods of stress and criticism on self-concept. He found that after such periods the size of the child's drawing of self decreased while the distance between self and others increased. In short, because our self-concept is fundamentally based in our assessments of others' evaluations of us (Mead 1934), it is imperative that the drawings contain both self and other. Burns and Kaufman (1970) greatly improved on the FDT by suggesting that a kinetic element be added. They performed a Freudian analysis of children's drawings of the child and family doing somethi together. Although their emphasis on the abnormal renders most of their discussion irrelevant for our purposes, the authors argue

8

Introduction

convincingly that requiring movement in drawings provides a more valid measure of the relationship between self and others than a simple static depiction. Because we ask children to draw their favourite sport, game or other activity, our own measure incorporates the action component considered important by Burns and Kaufman. This means that the relationship component held as essential by Hulse, Burns and Kaufman and Schmiedeck (1978) is likely incorporated as well, since children's play activities are predominantly collective (Schwartzman 1978). In addition, we saw no reason why children should not be asked explicitly to draw them selves, rather than leaving this to unmeasured chance. The second instruction to the children was therefore the following: "Put yourself in the picture and draw a circle around yourself." We are thus able to locate the artist in the picture and look at gender differences in the depiction of the circled figure. Differences between boys and girls in their self-portraits can be seen like the play practices, as expressions of gender, indicators of what it means to be a boy or a girl in contemporary Canadian and Polish society. For the final sample, the children were from one elementary school in Ottawa and one in Warsaw. These schools were of similar size (250-300 students) and both served children of predominantly university-educated parents. Although the schools are typical in the sense that they display no idiosyncratic curricula or resources, one should exercise caution in generalizing our results beyond their walls. The drawings were secured during regular art periods and were administered by the classroom teacher, thus incorporating the study into the everyday routine of the subjects. This 'natural' incorporation minimized, we suggest, the anxiety typically associated with the administration of projective instruments (see Rabin 1986, 7-8).

9

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

The Canadian-Polish Comparison One of the major threads in this book is an examination of similarities and differences in the drawings of Canadian and Polish children. While in Poland in May 1987, I had the opportunity to visit two elementary schools. In the six hours spent in each school, I observed several classes, watched the children at play, and interviewed children, teachers and the school director. School officials also agreed to procure the drawings, eventually providing us with 315. (The 230 obtained from the school most similar in size to the Ottawa school are included in the analysis.) The Polish visit presented the rare opportunity to compare children in societies with very different ideologies. The emphasis on inter-individual competition in capitalist Canada contrasts vividly with the collectivism of state socialist societies such as Poland. As a corollary to collectivism, the goal of full sexual equality has always been on the socialist agenda, while in the liberal democratic West it has arrived rather late as a policy focus (Heitlinger 1979). This is not to imply, of course, that these beliefs are fully manifested in everyday practices. As we shall see, sexual equality is a long way from actuality in Eastern Europe, and capitalist activity occurs in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries. Nevertheless, socialist beliefs are central components of state institutions such as the school, and must be taken into account in any discussion of childhood socialization. On the other hand, perhaps counteracting state-inspired beliefs, are a set of patriarchal values entrenched in the Catholic Church and in a recently transformed peasant society. Some possible results of these conflicting influences will be examined in the ensuing chapter when we compare the domestic and labour market participation of women in Poland and Canada. This, in turn, will allow us to develop some tentative expectations of the children's drawings gathered in the two societies.

10

Introduction

Endnotes 1.

For a sociological exception, see Reeves and Boyette (1987). Although not explicitly concerned with self-conception, they examine the form and content of drawings as reflections of gender socialization.

11

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CHAPTER 2

GENDER DIFFERENTIATION IN CANADA AND POLAND In all known societies men and women can be observed doing different things—gender and activity are strongly connected. This connection is not fleeting, but is recurrent and regular; it is part and parcel of our everyday taken-for-granted world, the way things are and, by implication, the way they ought to be. Such structured activities are called practices, and reflect the inst tutionalized dimension of human behaviour. If one is distressed by gender inequality, the division of men and women into different activity spheres is in itself no cause for alarm. The distribution of groups in societal activity may reflect only horizontal differentiation; that is, each group special izes in activities of equal societal value. In such a context a particular activity, such as work, does not convey a message about the social worth of those doing it. It is much more common, however, especially in industrial societies, for activities to be unequally valued—this is vertical differentiation. What has aroused the ardour of feminists and others concerned with social justice is that activities in which males specialize are imbued with greater societal value than female activities. This is, of course, partly because femaleness itself is less valued than maleness, so that the mere involvement of females in an activity will

13

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

lower the value of that activity. Still, a major route to redressing gender inequality is thought by some to lie in the societal recognition of the value of women's labour. This recognition has been defined primarily in financial terms, so that the major thrust has been to equalize salary levels in the labour market. The idea of granting housework and child care the same status as labour market participation, thereby making it worthy of remuneration, has not received serious policy attention. Domestic labour remains unpaid labour (but see Oakley 1974; and Kome 1982). Similarly, little policy attention has been paid to the two other traditional dimensions of differentiation, power and prestige, or to persistent gender inequality within the sphere of domestic labour. In ensuing pages I want to examine, for all these areas, the extent of gender inequality in Poland and Canada.

Gender Inequality in Canada and Poland—The Labour Market I suggested earlier that full equality for women has been a major cornerstone of communist policy. The policy originated with Engels' 1884 text The Origin of the Family: Private Proper and the State, the only work by the founders of communism that treats the gender issue explicitly and in some detail. According to Engels, the oppression and exploitation of women is a specific form of the general exploitation and oppression found in all capitalist societies. To quote Saunders (1988): ...For Marxists, these [capitalist} relations exploit the female as a worker in the labour force and oppress her as a form of property in the family institution. Her exploitation, according to Marxism, has no specific features outside of the general mechanisms which exploit all workers, and her oppression or powerlessness in the family is determined by factors in capitalist society which are external to the family institution. Thus, Marxist analysis sees the female as simply one more victim of

14

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

capitalism, and the material conditions which are perceived to underly her victimization are seen as identical to those which underly exploitation in general. (162-163)

According to the Marxist view, equality for women will thus automatically be achieved when capitalism is eradicated. Specifically, the abolition of private property would mean the end of women's oppression, while full participation in a socialist economy would release women from the home and engender financial independence. A necessary prerequisite for these changes is the socialization of domestic labour—i.e., the taking over by the state of the tasks of household maintenance and child care : "private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not" (Engels 1972, 139). These preconditions of women's emancipation have been taken seriously by Eastern European states. As Wolchik (1985) summarizes: ... there is legal recognition of women's equality in all of these countries, and women have, formally, equal rights to education and careers. Communist leaders are also committed, at least on paper, to ease the conflict between women's domestic and work roles by providing public childcare and maternity leaves and improving services (8).

Post-World War II Poland reflects these general trends. In particular, the 1952 Constitution recognizes the fundamental equality of men and women as Polish citizens (Mogey and Piotrowski 1980). This was manifested in the rapid growth of women's participation in two related spheres—higher education and the labour market. Ignoring for the moment differences in type of education, Polish women have actually surpassed men in enrolment in institutions of higher education (Adamski 1980). Canada has a similar pattern. In the post-war period, women have been entering universities in increasing numbers, and by

15

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

Table 2.1:

Canadian and Polish Women in Selected Economic Sectors*

Women as Percentage of Labour Force

Industry Agriculture Manufacturing Construction Transportation, Communications and other utilities Trade Finance, Insurance and Real Estate Public Administration Teaching Medicine and Health All industries

Canada 29.4 28.8 8.5

Poland 26.6 37.2 18.7

22.9 43.6

27.4 71.5

59.4 38.6 59.3 78.1 42.2

84.0 65.9 76.0 80.4 44.3

*

Based on 1983-84 data for Poland and on 1983 data for Canada. The sectors reported above are classified in virtually identical ways in the two countries. The absence of the "services" category reflects a lack of comparable data. Source: Canada, Statistics Canada, Women in the Labour Force: 1986 Edition, Part 1 "Participation", Tables 1-9- Poland, Statistical Yearbook, 1985, Warsaw, GUS (Main Statistical Office), Table 3 (90).

1985 represented 48.8 percent of all full-time undergraduates in Canada (Educational Statistics, Statistics Canada 1985). When one looks at type of higher education, however, gender differentiation is strongly evident. In both countries, women are over-represented in the humanities, social sciences, education, and health-related fields but are conspicuously under-represented in engineering. In 1985/86 in Canada slightly over 10 percent of engineering students were female. In 1985 in Poland the corresponding figure was just over 20 percent (Statistics Canada, op.cit.; GUS 1985.) In Canada, but not in Poland, women are

16

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

significantly under-represented in mathematics and the physical sciences—in 1985/86, only 21 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in these fields in Canada were women (Statistics Canada op.cit.). It is clear, then, that simply looking at participation rates in education does not convey a true picture of the extent of gender differentiation. In both societies women have achieved equality of participation in universities; they are equally likely in Canada and slightly more likely in Poland to be university students than are men. Yet significant gender differentiation exists within university education. The same pattern is revealed when one examines labour market participation. Using only the general category "employed worker" would lead us to the conclusion that women have achieved virtual equality in labour market participation — in both countries approximately 43 percent of the labour force are women. Again, however, this information obscures the significant qualitative differences present within the labour market. Table 2.1 shows that women in Canada and Poland are concentrated in teaching, health care, and in finance, insurance and real estate. In Poland, there is an additional heavy concentration of women in trade and in the public administration sector. In general, gender differentiation is more pronounced in Poland, where females make up at least two thirds of the workers in the five categories already mentioned. In Canada the clustering of women in certain fields, though pronounced, is not as striking. For example, although women account for almost 60 percent of Canadian teachers, the figure for Poland is over 75 percent. Similarly, almost 60 percent of those Canadians employed in the finance, insurance and real estate sector are women, compared with over 80 percent in Poland. This specialization by gender is accompanied in both societies by a vertical component. Not only do men and women carry out different activities, but these activities are differentially valued. I have already indicated in the previous chapter that in

17

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

Canada full-time female workers earn approximately two thirds of the salary of men. David and Mclntyre (1981) point out that the figure for Poland is virtually identical—"the average pay of women is more than 30 percent lower than that of men" (132). (See also Sokolowska 1976.) Hand in hand with financial inequities go inequities in occupational prestige and power. Studies of occupational prestige in Canada indicate that Canadians rank male-dominated occupations higher than female-dominated ones (Armstrong and Armstrong 1978), a phenomenon that begins with very young children and appears even in university students. This differential ranking occurs with both males and females—both genders attribute greater prestige to spheres dominated by males (Brown 1957; Goldberg 1968; Markle 1974; Kalin et al. 1980). I was unable to find Polish studies of this kind, but observers of Eastern Europe generally agree that female-dominated labour is accorded lower prestige (Meyer 1985; Siemenska 1985; Adamski 1980). Finally, research in both countries indicates that women are significantly under-represented in positions high in political and economic power. For example, only five percent of employed women in Canada are in managerial and administrative positions, with a considerably smaller percentage in high-level management (Mackie 1983, 259). Less than one percent of Clement's corporate elite are women (Clement 1975), and women are considerably under-represented among cabinet ministers, senators, and Members of Parliament. In Poland, as in other Eastern bloc countries, senior positions in both the economy and the polity are occupied by men. Siemenska (1985) reports that women are significantly under-represented in top economic positions (808). The proportion of women in the Communist party is small and decreases the closer one gets to the top. According to Nelson (1985), at most 30 percent of party members are women, while "one in four or five Central Committee members may be a woman" (152). It would appear

18

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

from this last figure that Polish women have made greater strides in acquiring political power than have Canadian women. The Canadian cabinet has never had more than 10 percent women members, and between 1917 and 1978 less than one percent of all Canadian legislators were women. This has changed only moderately in more recent times (Brodie and Vickers 1982; Kome 1985). When at first glance major equality inroads appear to have been made in particular spheres, a closer look reveals the familiar pattern of men at the top and women at the bottom. A prime example is medicine and health. In both societies women are strongly concentrated in this field. In Canada, this is because nurses make up the majority of such workers, and, in 1985, 97 percent of all employed nurses were women (Canadian Nursing Association 1985, 3). Despite overwhelming female numerical dominance, male nurses were twice as likely to be directors or assistant directors of nursing, more likely to be supervisors, and almost twice as likely as women to be head nurses (Statistics Canada and Canadian Nursing Association 1986, 31).' In Poland and in Eastern Europe in general female overrepresentation in medicine also reflects the preponderance of female nurses. However, women are actually over-represented among physicians and dentists; in the USSR fully 70 percent of physicians are female, and the corresponding figure for Poland is 55 percent (Heitlinger 1987; GUS 1985). Yet once again a more refined analysis shows a greater proportion of males among hospital administrators and in the more prestige sub-fields of medicine, such as surgery. Thus it is fair to conclude that, despite an official policy that encourages gender equality in all spheres, Poland is strikingly similar to Canada in the extent of vertical differentiation in the labour market. Is this also true in the domestic sphere? We turn now to an examination of work in the home.

19

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

Gender Differentiation in the Home As we have seen, more women are now in the labour market than at any other time in recent history, both in Eastern Europe and the West. As mentioned earlier, this participation is one of two major pre-conditions for the emancipation of women identified by Engels. Yet the subordinate position of women within the labour market belies the female liberation envisioned by early Marxists. A good part of the reason for this lies in the failure, in both East and West, to meet the second major precondition— the participation of the state and husbands/fathers in domestic labour. Regarding the state, it is worth quoting Lenin on the socialization of domestic activity: The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin o where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socia economy begins ... Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens—... here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish ther inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life (1965, 4).

For Lenin, then, the state was to assume considerable domestic responsibility, particularly in child care. To what extent has this been achieved in Poland ? The first point to be made is that the availability of state-sponsored child care appears to be less a response to women's needs than to the needs of a changing economy. As Adamski (1980) points out, during the years of extensive industrialization in Poland (1947-1954), when demand for industrial labour was high, the emphasis was on "the building of creches, kindergartens, and other facilities in order to liberate women from household slavery" (214-14). In the ensuing several years, as demand subsided, resources for child care declined, and

20

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

"instead, the attempt was made to increase wages and family allowances" (213). A very similar pattern is evident in Canada. During the war years, when women were badly needed to replenish a greatly depleted labour force, state-subsidized child care was a prime policy concern. When male workers returned after the war, however, the importance of the family and the centrality of the mother's role was emphasized, and some gains in availability of child care were reversed (Heitlinger 1979, 112-13). However, the similar impact of economic factors on Poland and Canada does not translate into similar child care availability. Poland (and Eastern Europe in general) appears far more advanced in this respect. In 1979, for example, 32.2 percent of Polish children aged five months to three years were in nurseries, and 97.8 percent of four and five year olds were in kindergartens (Mieczkowski 1985, 259). A child can actually be left in some nurseries from Monday morning until noon on Saturday. Most importantly, particularly in contrast to the West, virtually all of these children were in state-subsidized and state-supervised facilities. These data clearly reflect considerable gains for women. Yet researchers are in agreement on conspicuous inadequacies. To quote Mieczkowski (1985): Polish data indicate that a larger number of children use these facilities than there are places in them, a fact which testifies to overcrowding and to excess demand ... The insufficiency of childcare facilities is likely to indicate a social benefit/cost evaluation by the central planners in Eastern Europe who apparently decided that the addition to women's and possibly children's welfare and the expected increase in women's labor force participation rates created by new nurseries and kindergartens would be smaller than the incremental cost of such new institutions (259-61).

Compared to Western nations, though, the extent and qualit of child care in Eastern Europe seems more than acceptable. In 1981 fully 47.2 percent of Canadian women with pre-school aged

21

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

children were in the labour market, yet Eichler (1983) estimated on the basis of 1979 data that less than 10 percent of children under the age of six actually attended licensed day care centres. A detailed Saskatchewan study in 1980 indicated that in that province 92.8 percent of "needed and desired" day care spaces were not available and that day care centres and licensed family care were able to service "only 12.4 percent of the children up to the age of six who had employed mothers" (Eichler, 252). The vast majority of children in Canada are in fact cared for in a variety of non-licensed, privately arranged settings. Costs for child care are thus extremely high, recent estimates indicating that 34 percent of the $84,000 minimum cost required to raise a child until age 18 goes toward child care (Eichler op.cit. 262-63). Although, as Eichler points out, approximately half of all day care spaces in Canada are subsidized, such subsidization is tied to income, and the assessment procedures tend to be integrated with the welfare service. Far from a "right," then, subsidized child care is dependent on the family being defined as a "problem," with all the attendant labelling implications (Clifford 1975). Canadian parents, particularly women who bear the brunt of child care responsibility, are thus forced to find their way through a welfare bureaucracy and a myriad of child care structures of variable and often unknown quality. The socialist state's role in assuming domestic tasks other than child care is virtually non-existent. A. Kollontai, an early Bolshevik feminist, writes that during early motherhood, "Society must arrange all forms of'aid stations' for women that will give them moral and material support during this very important period of their lives" (reported in Heitlinger 1979). Among the 'aid stations' suggested by Kollontai are laundries, dry cleaning facilities, canteens, and supermarkets with prewrapped and pre-weighed goods. Although such facilities exist in Eastern Europe they are few in number, requiring lengthy waits. As well, the quality of services rendered is generally viewed as poor. An overall estimate for the Soviet Union is that

22

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

household services "cover only 5 percent of the domestic labour requirements" (Heitlinger 1979, 87). Paradoxically, these services are both more available and of better quality in the West, despite the explicit commitment of Eastern European states to the socialization of domestic labour. As Heitlinger says: ... it is ironic that advanced capitalism has produced more significant changes in the nature of domestic labour than state socialism. Semi-processed foods, expanded and rationalised shopping facilities, dry cleaning and laundering services on the one hand, and specialised household appliances such as washing machines, mixers, vacuum cleaners, freezers and microwave ovens on the other, are much more developed in the West than in the East (26).

If the Eastern European state does not play a conspicuous role in household labour, what of the male head of the family? To what extent are tasks shared in Eastern bloc households ? In her review of the relevant Soviet literature, Heitlinger concludes: "The fact of men's unwillingness to undertake an equal share of housework emerges from all surveys and discussions in the mass media" (90). She then goes on to present detailed examples and statistics showing the pronounced gender differentiation in household tasks: The findings of a sample survey of 280 women in two Vilnius plants revealed that men's contributions to domestic work were limited to minor repairs, bill-paying, and helping with dishes and tidying. The contributions of husbands to the preparation of food and general child care were but a fraction of those of their wives (91).

The Canadian situation is markedly similar. For example, the Meissner et al. (1975) Vancouver study revealed a virtually identical pattern : Only 39 per cent of the husbands contributed to any regular housework on a workday and 5 1 per cent on a weekend day in comparison to 97 per cent and 95 per cent of their wives. Only

23

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

seven of the 340 husbands reported doing laundry in comparison to nearly half of their wives: men's inclination for machine technology does not extend to the washing machine. The largest proportions of men can be found in two of the irregular items of domestic work whose characteristics often approximate a state of leisure and where discretion is greater: repair and maintenance, and sundry services such as animal care, small errands, and work related to leisure activities (430-31).

Michelson (1985), in a review of more recent data from a variety of Western nations, suggests that little has changed in the division of household labour. Despite the increasing employment of women, men continue to contribute little to housework and child care. In his own Toronto survey there is some evidence that men devote more time to housework when their wives have full-time jobs, but "the differences are emphatically small given the actual amount of housework women do" (65-6). The amount of time men spend on child care surprisingly exhibits no relationship to their wives' employment. In general, Michelson's data show that women who work full time outside the home still devote roughly three times as much time as do their spouses to housework and child care. (See also Luxton 1980.) Past studies in Poland and my own observations in that country echo the above descriptions. The persistence of traditional conceptions of gender roles is documented by Siemienska in her 1979 attitude survey of Warsaw men and women. She concluded that "Respondents of both sexes from all socio-occupational groups replied in line with traditional models of gender roles and agreed that women should give up work if it meant prolonged absence from the home" (1985, 311). Even her hypothesis that better-educated respondents would more readily accept women in non-traditional roles was not supported, a strong indicator of the pervasive acceptance by Poles of vertical differentiation by gender.

24

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

My recent experience in Poland is consistent with tnese data. During the almost three weeks I spent in the country gathering data for this study, I had the opportunity of living with Polish families. These were families of the "intelligentsia" — both husband and wife in all the families I stayed with were university educated. Both spouses worked full time in these families (for all practical purposes they are compelled to work because it is virtually impossible to survive on one salary), yet child care and housework was done almost exclusively by the woman. A typical work day would go as follows. The entire family arises early, usually at 6:30 a.m., although the children may be permitted to lie in bed somewhat longer. The woman makes and serves breakfast, cleans up (sometimes with the help of her daughter{s}), and gets the children ready for school. Everyone leaves—the children for school, and the husband and wife for work, but the wife must stop on her way to drop the pre-schooler at nursery, and to do some preliminary shopping. After work the woman usually makes a more complete round of various shops to get the main daily meal together, no easy task in Poland. Securing even basic goods is a constant struggle—many foods are scarce, food and household supplies become abruptly and inexplicably unavailable, and everywhere there are line-ups. Indeed, lining up and circumventing line-ups have been elevated to fine arts in Poland. One pays people to line-up in one's place— students, the elderly, and the handicapped are prime sources. There is considerable cooperation among families in sharing line-up chores, and the goods successfully retrieved from the daily hunt. Long-range meal planning is thus virtually impossible— one cooks what one can find or borrow on any given day. After perhaps two to three hours of shopping, the woman retrieves the children from the nursery and heads for home. All this is typically done on foot, or by public transport, since individual car ownership is a luxury. Once at home, the food must be prepared. As with purchasing, food preparation is not a simple matter. Meats, for example, are rarely pre-packaged

25

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

or trimmed. Bones must be removed and the meat minced, or at the very least cut into servable portions. My hostess on one occasion was determined to cook minced veal for the main meal. She spent over one hour painstakingly chopping and grinding the meat by hand until it could be formed into patties. I was not permitted to help in any way—not with preparation, serving, tablesetting or table clearing. Such is the nature of Polish hospitality. Cleaning up after dinner is primarily the woman's responsibility, with the children and husband helping by carrying some dishes into the kitchen. Her work day continues unabated as children are prepared for bed and clothes are washed and ironed. Throughout most of this post-dinner period the husband, with pipe in mouth or the omnipresent Polish cigarette, reads, does some office work, converses with the guest (myself), or spends some time in conversation or story-reading with the children. In both East and West, then, women are the domestic labourers, even when both partners work outside the home. What one must emphasize, however, is that in Eastern Europe, because of the greater difficulty of domestic labour, women bear a much greater burden than their Western counterparts.

Church and School The preceding discussion has revealed surprisingly similar gender differentiation in Canada and Poland. Despite differences in the extent of gender differentiation in particular labour market sectors, the general pattern is the same—women remain overrepresented in traditional female occupations, under-represented in traditional male occupations (and by implication in positions of authority), and bear overwhelmingly the brunt of domestic labour. It is beyond question that a child growing up in either society will very quickly come to the realization that the world

26

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

is unambiguously divided into a masculine sphere and a feminine sphere. This cognitive apperception is reinforced daily as the child observes and participates in countless gender-based practices in the home, in school, and particularly in Poland, in the church. The Catholic church in Poland is infinitely more than a locale for the expression of religious commitment. In a very real sense it is Poland. The church is a symbolic link with a pre-Soviet Poland, and is the prime focus of resistance to the "regime," as Poles call the Marxist-inspired government. Church attendance, then, is as much an expression of Polish patriotism as of religious fervour. The most conspicuous manifestation of this confluence of religion and nationalism is the church of St. Stanislaw Kostka in Warsaw. It is commonly referred to as "the Popieluszko Church," since it is here that Jerzy Popieluszko preached before his murder in 1985 and it is here that he is buried. This church has become both a memorial to him and a symbol of Polish resistance to the Soviet presence. The grounds are bedecked with flowers, and a multitude of banners declare alliance with Solidarity and the Polish heritage. Prominently displayed is a powerfully realistic sculpture of Popieluszko's blood-spattered body, surrounded always by fresh flowers (Plate 1). The inscription reads: "Priest Jerzy Popieluszko, born September 14, 1947. He died a tormented death for the truth on October 19, 1984. He devoted his life to God and our fatherland. We remember, Solidarity, Gdansk, 1985." A visit to St. Brigitta church in Gdansk, the parish church of the shipyard workers, conveys the same patriotic intensity. Here, however, the Solidarity emphasis is pronounced, with banners and posters calling for the ultimate victory over the regime. The centrality of the Church is of course reinforced by a Polish pope, whose picture appears everywhere. As one woman intellectual commented to me, "He has already attained mythical status here. It is beyond love." Plate 2 is a photo of the Pope in Gdansk in June 1987. The platform he stands on looks like a boat, complete with towering sail. The connection between

27

Plate 1

Memorial to Popieluszko.

Plate 2

The Pope in Gdansk, June '87.

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

the shipyard workers (and hence Solidarity) and the church is explicitly and powerfully made. Such is the Church's importance that over 93 percent of Polish children take communion. Yet it was suggested to me by a sociologist that this exceeds by several percentage points the actual proportion of Polish children who are Catholic. This must mean that many communist party members are sending their children to church. As one member of the party confided (rather prophetically), "Look, it's better to be safe. Who knows who will be in power tomorrow?" In sum, the centrality of the church in Polish life means that virtually all Polish children spend a good part of their time in church-related activities. Hence they are continually exposed to institutionalized patriarchy in the rigidly gender-differentiated church hierarchy, and in doctrine emphasizing the sacredness of motherhood and the centrality of the family. This exposure is manifested in extremely traditional conceptions of women's place. As reported earlier, in the Warsaw attitude survey (Siemienska 1985) a very large majority of respondents of both genders held extremely traditional views on gender roles. For example, only rarely did respondents of either sex express a preference for a "woman boss." A more historically-focussed discussion by Haavio-Mannila and Sokolowska (1978) underscores the role of the combined feudal-peasant and Catholic heritages in maintaining contemporary Polish patriarchy: In Poland, 'sexist' attitudes are an ingredient of the cultural tradition and heritage. Gallantry, 'cavalier' manners and behaviour and romantic chivalry are almost basic traits of the traditional Polish male personality ... the male plays the role of a 'cavalier' kissing a woman's hand as an expression of welcome, farewell, sorrow, gratitude, etc., a custom which is also observed by political leaders ... Even today, Polish men in leading positions still admire the image of a wise woman, with 'female wisdom', brave, hard-working, economical, self-denying and devoted, guarding angel of children, the aged and family

30

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

sick, ruler of pots, pans and washtub, confidante of man's troubles — his lifetime companion (188-89).

The pervasiveness of such beliefs and practices in Poland is well-documented. Church and state leaders alike, despite obvious ideological disagreements in other spheres, concur on the subordinate position of women, despite a state policy to the contrary. The message in school, however, is somewhat less clear.

The School in Poland The separation of church and state in Poland is quite evident when one enters a Polish school. Crosses and pictures of the Pope are common adornments of schools in Catholic countries, but Polish schools are devoid of such displays. Instead, pictures of major political leaders and historical figures are omnipresent, with most schools in fact named after Polish heroes. (One of the elementary schools included in this study was named after Stefan Starsinski — the Polish president killed in 1939.) State influence is also exerted by party members in positions of authority. The directors of all the schools I visited, as well as members of the councils of teachers, which form a kind of school executive committee, were party members without exception. It is not surprising, then, that Polish schools contain explicit elements of socialist pedagogy. In the two elementary schools in which I spent most of my time, I conducted one-anda-half to two-hour interviews with the director and the teacher council, focussing, among other things, on educational philosophy and practice. A particularly useful pair of questions proved to be: 1. 2.

What kind of child would you say you were trying to produce ? How do you organize student curriculum, activities and pedagogy in order to produce this kind of child ?

31

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

Very similar answers were obtained from the two interviews. Common answers to the first question were: ... We want our students to develop habits of cooperation ... to live with others ... to understand one another ... not to be egocentric ... to be engaged in voluntary social activity and friendship ... to be able to argue confidently and rationally and support with facts his opinions.

Scientific rationality, the faith in an accessible empirical world particularly via mathematics, was a major theme in these interviews and in my talks with individual teachers. As these quotations suggest, though, the chief objective of schooling is to develop in the child a collective conscience, a sense of belonging to a unit of greater importance than oneself. Both curricula and the organization of student competitions reflected this focus. On one visit I sat in on two classes—one in history and one in poetry. In the history class the topic was the French Revolution. The teacher's questions to the children, as well as the textbook itself, emphasized the Tightness and inevitability of the collective resistance of the French masses. The French aristocracy, as well as their bourgeois supporters, were depicted as evil and exploitative, interested only in their well-being. The French proletariat, on the other hand, were viewed as sensitive to the collective good, and motivated by the purest of ideals. In the poetry class the poem for that day celebrated the interdependence of all workers. The mutual reciprocity and respect of railway worker, farmer, architect and carpenter, were used as metaphors for the linkages through work of all Poles. Strident collectivism is also evident in the structure of student competitions and in a wide variety of neighbourhood "projects." In the tradition of the Russian philosopher and educator, Makarenko, a major form of competition is inter-group in structure. That is, classes compete with one another in various spheres, including decorating classroom walls, cleanliness,

32

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

sporting events, plant cultivation, and developing slogans for certain themes (e.g., "He who keeps clean keeps well"; "To help oneself is good, to help another is better"). At the same time the children in the school are involved in various community projects, a regular part of their weekly activities. These projects include collecting paper for recycling, working for the Polish Red Cross, and shopping and making Christmas gifts for elderly people. These activities bring to mind Makarenko's fundamental premise that "optimal personality development can occur only through productive activity in a social collective" (Bronfenbrenner 1968, 59). These activities are meant to foster a cooperative and collective orientation, possibly diminishing, therefore, the importance of intra-group differences such as gender. One would expect that because both boys and girls are involved in inter-class competitions and in neighbourhood projects, the salience of gender as an axis of differentiation would be reduced. The group is the major unit of work and competition, and hence internal divisions are ostensibly counter-productive and should be minimized (Coleman 1961; 1962). Allocating rewards for success (e.g., the class's name on an honour chart) on a group basis should reinforce this muting of individual differences. Female authority figures in the school may further reduce the propensity for vertical gender differentiation among the children. Unlike Canada, virtually all directors of elementary schools in Eastern Europe are female. In the Soviet Union, for example, 83 percent of all directors of primary schools are women. Although men are in the majority among directors of K-8 and K-10 year schools, over 60 percent of deputy directors in these schools are women (Heitlinger 1979, 104). While I could find no comparable data for Poland, all the elementary directors I met in Warsaw, and all the members of the teacher councils, were women. My sociologist/translator said that this was generally the case in Poland, although in secondary schools directors were primarily male. In Canada, over 70 percent of

33

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

elementary teachers are women, but most principals and viceprincipals are male (Mifflin and Mifflin 1982). In the Ottawa school board district (researched for this book) less than 30 percent of primary principals and vice-principals are women. The school from which the drawings were obtained replicates this pattern of a female labour force and male administration—83 percent of the teachers are women but both the principal and vice-principal are men. While female authority figures and collectivization of student activities may contribute to a conception among Polish children of relative egalitarianism between the genders, another aspect of Polish schooling contradicts this message. This is intra-class competition for grades. Prizes are regularly given to top students in marked contrast to Makarenko's insistence that children compete in groups (typically pupil rows) for grades and other symbols of scholastic success (Bronfenbrenner op.cit.). This individualism may offset the collectivism already discussed. This co-existence of socialism and liberalism in schooling has a parallel in the wider society itself. After a relatively short time in Poland, one cannot help observing that the society is a curious mixture of individual entrepreneurship and socialism. In an avowed state socialist economy, evidence of capitalist activity is everywhere. Many taxi drivers own their own cabs, private boutiques and shops exist, and the collective farm is giving way to farms privately owned and operated. These activities are openly pursued and have largely been legalized by a state reconciled to their inevitability. Prompted largely by extremely low salaries and the scarcity of goods, one also finds a thriving network of barter, exchange, pervasive moonlighting and bribery. I have already referred to the exchange systems that develop among families to provide a range of fundamental supplies. (Toilet paper, for example, was in extreme shortage during my visit, and became a major exchange commodity.) Another dimension of this network, involving mainly tourists and Poles in the service sector, is a

34

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

flourishing currency exchange. One cannot walk a block in the major cities, take a taxi, or eat in a restaurant without being continually approached with the whispered question: "Change money?" Foreign currency, particularly American dollars, is extremely valuable, commanding black market prices four to five times the state-established bank rates. Foreign currency also gives Poles access to the state-controlled tourist-oriented "Pavex" stores, which contain a plethora of goods not available in regular shops. The pervasiveness of these illegal currency dealings, and their positive impact on Poland's economy, results in officials by and large turning a blind eye to the practice. The attractiveness of foreign currency results as well in the phenomenon of Poles working periodically in Western countries. For example, an academic I befriended held no less than three jobs—moonlighting is a must for survival, particularly among educators. (Teachers' and professors' salaries are considerably below the national average. This particular individual earned 30,000 zlotys a month—roughly 120 American dollars at official exchange rates.) He held a full-time position at the Warsaw Academy of Sciences, translated French philosophy texts into Polish on the side, and for three months of the year picked grapes in French vineyards. French francs allowed him, in his words, to "have a little extra beyond food and a roof over my head." Bribery is another component of the underground economy. The scarcity of goods and high-level positions are catalysts for this widespread activity. Getting one's name higher up on the lottery list for a television set or flat; paying a "little extra" to ensure a lean cut of meat; giving one's child's teacher a "gift" for reasonable grades—these are examples I observed directly. The shortage of post-secondary positions and low teacher salaries combine to make teacher bribery a common occurrence. As one high school teacher confided, "Every second staff member in this school accepts payment from parents." In short, beneath the socialist veneer Poles participate in an economy that rewards individual initiative, entrepreneurship,

35

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

and the judicious circumvention of state officialdom. That the schools also embody these individual/collective contradictions is not surprising; schools in all societies reflect dominant societal beliefs and practices.

Summary and Conclusion: Children in a GenderDifferentiated World What emerges from the above discussion is a picture of two societies with more similarities than differences in the structure of gender relations. Data on labour outside the home reveal conspicuous specialization by gender. In both societies labour market segregation reflects traditional gender activities. Moreover, despite official state commitment in Poland to gender equality and the pervasiveness of equality of opportunity ideals in Canada, men continue to occupy most high level political and managerial positions in both countries. Labour market segregation is mirrored in the household, where in both Canada and Poland women bear the brunt of childrearing, food provision and preparation, and house cleaning. Male domestic labour is largely confined to minor repairs, bill-paying, occasional help with the dishes, and running errands. Gender differentiation is reinforced in Poland through the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church. Labour market, home and Church, in powerful concert, present to the child an image of the Tightness and naturalness of patriarchy as a way of life. Although female authority figures in school and the collectivization of some student activities may to some extent exert an opposing influence, this influence is minor in the face of overwhelmingly patriarchal images in Polish society. North America, though not pervaded by a sacredly-legitimated patriarchy embodied in a national church, conveys similar messages via an androcentric Judeo-Christian tradition, the media

36

Gender Differentiation in Canada and Poland

(c.f. Kilbourne 1979, 1987) and the gender-stratification inherent in school organization. All this is to say that Canadian and Polish children are immersed in a gender-differentiated world. Messages from labour market, church and home are mutually reinforcing, helping the child develop a clear cognitive map of gender relations. Moreover, the more visible and unambiguous the cues for appropriate gender behaviour the greater the child's capacity to form strong gender identification (Kohlberg 1971). Thus we would expect gender expressions of Polish and Canadian children to reflect the similar gender structure of the two societies. More specifically, we would expect the practices portrayed in our drawings to mirror the sharply demarcated male and female worlds of the wider society. As Caillois (1961) observes, "What is expressed in play is no different from what is expressed in culture" (64). Finally, we should not be surprised if the children's self-depictions reflect the dominance of males in both countries. The extent to which these expectations are borne out is the subject of ensuing chapters.

Endnotes 1.

Data compiled by Margaret Laing, 1987.

37

CHAPTER 3

EXPRESSIONS OF GENDER: PLAY PRACTICES Going to the beach, what should I wear? Top, bottom, bikini, nothing Who do I meet? (Name three boys) What do we do? Kiss, hug, blank, nothing What do I wear on my wedding night? Silk, cotton, satin, nothing Girls' skipping song Ottawa, 1987 (Thanks to Philana)

Children's play can be conceived of as a set of practices carried out among age-similar peers. These practices embody several features important to bear in mind. First, play is the child's first experience of groups in which participation is largely voluntary. Participation in one's family, by contrast, is typically prescribed from birth, and leaving the family unit is virtually impossible for the young child, both at the symbolic and physical levels. Second, play practices are more likely than other group practices to be characterized by relations of equality. This is not to say there is no vertical differentiation in children's play groups, but rather that such differentiation is not societally-legitimated

39

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

(as is parent/child or teacher/child inequality). This means that changes in power relationships are more likely in peer groups, and individual input into both the form and content of play is always a possibility (see Garvey 1974: 179). Third, because they embody peer relations the beliefs and values underlying play practices are reinforced throughout a person's life. In other words, the centrality of age in societal organization (manifested most conspicuously in an age-graded school system) assures continuous exposure to peer-based culture. These factors point to the potential of play practices to influence children's conceptions of their social world. Classic studies in social psychology (Lewin 1958; Raven and Rietsema I960; White and Lippitt I960; Deutsch I960) have established the connection between voluntary participation, which produces a sense of control over activities, and enhanced motivation and commitment. To the extent that children's play practices and their underlying beliefs reflect dominant ideologies, then, they are salient forces of social reproduction: This leads to the question addressed in this book: To what extent can we consider the play practices of Polish and Canadian childre to be traditional expressions of gender, and hence salient in the repro

duction of gender inequality? To answer this, the children in a Ottawa and a Warsaw elementary school were asked to draw their "favourite sport, game or other activity." The children's teachers solicited the drawings during a regular art period to make the request part of a typical school day.

Initial Expectations Our method of analyzing the drawings proceeded from a set of informed expectations of both gender and national differences. There is a small but relatively consistent literature on the types of play practices characteristic of boys and girls. My own work, as well as that of others (Richer 1984; Schwartzman 1978; 1980;

40

Expressions of Gender: Play Practices

Sutton-Smith and Savasta 1976; Lever 1976; Maccoby and Jacklin 197'4), suggests that boys in virtually all societies are more likely than girls to engage in competitive rather than other types of activities. By "competitive" I mean activities in which one person or team wins at the expense of another's loss (what game theorists call a "zero-sum game"). Virtually all high- profile North American sports are of this type, although one should bear in mind the distinction between inter-group or team competition and inter-individual competition. The former, embodied in sports such as football and soccer, requires competition betwee teams but cooperation within them. This means that individual success (e.g., scoring a goal) is negatively valued by the other team but positively valued by one's own, a departure from the pure "zero-sum" type. In inter-individual competitive sports (such as tennis), one person's success automatically translates into the other's failure, with no qualifications necessary. A first expectation of the drawings then, is that boys will be more likely th girls to portray competitive practices.

Our decision to focus on competition derives partly from previous research on gender differences in play, and partly from the capitalist/socialist comparison that is a major theme in our study. The centrality of competition in capitalist ideology, particularly the inter-individual variety, led us to expect differences in the pictures within each gender group. That is, we tentatively hypothesized that a greater emphasis on competitive activities would characterize the Canadian drawings, and that this would be true of

both boys and girls. Indeed, Eifermann's study (1970) of play i socialist-inspired Israeli Kibbutzim supports this position. Her hypothesis that "since Kibbutz children are raised in the spirit of cooperation with other members of the Kibbutz, their games tend to be of less competitive types", was by and large supported (581). The first comparative category, then, is the degree to which competition of both types is depicted in the drawings. The second category is if the practice portrayed is set indoors or outdoors.

41

Boys and Girls Apart: Children's Play in Canada and Poland

This category derives from the large body of literature on the gender division of labour; a characteristic of gender differentiation that appears virtually universal is the association between maleness and the world outside the home, and between femaleness and the world inside the home. This distinction, variously expressed by sociologists (who thereby contribute to its reproduction) as public versus private spheres, labour for exchange versus labour for use, or instrumental versus expressive roles, has tremendous ideological importance. The distinction carries with it other dichotomies that have become part and parcel of our taken-for-granted beliefs about how gender relations are structured. These dichotomies include work/non-work, active/ passive, non-nurturant/nurturant, and rational/emotional. Further, these beliefs are manifested in daily practices. We have already seen how women in both Canada and Poland bear the brunt of domestic labour even when there is female involvement in the labour market. The few existing childhood ethnographies indicate these patterns are also evident in the practices of children. For example, among the Hopi girls spend a large part of their day helping their mothers in the traditional tasks of pottery-making and basket-weaving, while boys are in the fields with their fathers (Havighurst, 1959). The outdoor/indoor pattern is also found among the !Kung, where older girls are engaged predominantly in child care and water-carrying, while boys aid in herding in fields outside the village (Draper, 1976). Whiting and Whiting (1975) confirmed these findings in their study of six societies. In all six, girls are typically found closer to home than boys and perform domestic chores under close supervision while boys interact more with peers without close adult scrutiny (see also Barnouw 1973 and Gaulin and Hoffman 1987). These pre-industrial societies are consistent with industrial societies where, as I indicated earlier, girls are expected to help their mothers in domestic chores from which males are typically exempted. Lever's (1976) observational study of fifth-grade

42

Expressions of Gender: Play Practices

American children confirmed the hypothesis that boys are considerably more likely to play out of doors. The media, particularly children's books, reinforce this tendency by depicting boys as curious, outgoing, adventuresome and exploratory, relegating girls to supporting roles or leaving them behind altogether (Pyke 1975; Lipman-Blumen and Tickamyer 1975). The cross-societal consistency of these findings, then, led us to the expectation that boys would be more likely in both Canada and Poland to depict outdoor settings, while girls would tend to depict indoor settings. W e also expected that girls would more likely includ depictions of home and family members in their drawings, even whe

the scene was an outdoor one. Finally, a third expectation (based on the above considerations, the material in Chapter Two, and my own research on children's play [Richer 1984]), was that both boys and girls would tend to produce sex-homogeneous

pictures—i.e.,

boys would draw only boys in their pictures and girls would draw only girls. If indeed the world of children is reflective of wider patterns of gender differentiation, gender homogeneity should be the rule rather than the exception in the drawings.

The Play Practices Depicted We begin with a discussion of the various kinds of play practices portrayed by the children. Table 3.1 is an exhaustive list of all the play practices portrayed by the 362 children who participated in the study. In all, 68 different activities were drawn, an average of roughly one activity per five children. That is, if all the activities were equally preferred, we would expect approximately five children to select each activity. Some activities, though, are more popular than others, and Table 3.1 shows a strong clustering of children in certain categories, with very few in others. The rank order columns indicate the five most commonly depicted activities and are therefore a good place to start. Taking

43

Table 3.1:

en

Play Practices Depicted

OTTAWA Boys

Girls Rank Order

%

f

8. 0 5. 0

(5) (3)

4

10. 0 (6) 11. 0 (7) 16. 0 (10)

3

a

WARSAW

%

f

1.0 7.0

(1) (5)

1.0 3.0

(1)

Boys Rank Order

%

f

4.0

(4)

Total

Girls Rank Order

%

f

Rank Order

%

f

Rank Order

Pi ***. -
>

If

I. Competitive: Inter-group

4X

Baseball Basketball "Gra w Zbijanego" (German Ball) Football Hockey Soccer Othet (Field Hockey; Pairs Skating; Doubles Tennis; Cricket; Kickball; War Game; Volleyball; Sailing

2 1

(2)

4

-

31.0 (34)

5

7.0

(8)

3

(7)

4

1

6.0 1.0

(1)

2.0 (6) 6.0 (20) 2.0 (8) 2.0 (6) 2.0 (7) 13.0 (47)

3

I" *-». 1

§ Si

3. 0

(2)

7.0

(5)

3.0

(3)

3.0 -

(2)

2.0 7.0 4.0 1.0 -

(2) (8)

1.0

1

3.0 (11)

(1)

II. Competitive: Inter-Individual Badminton Bike Racing Car Racing Gymnastics Running

!

(4) (1)

3 5

9.0 (11) 1.0 (1) 4.0 (5) 3.0 (4)

1

4.0 (15) 3.0 (9) 1.0 (4) 2.0 (6) 1.0 (4)

5

Skating Skiing Swimming Tennis Wrestling/Judo Other (Motorbike Racing; Ping-Pong; Horse Jumping; Rowing)

5 .0 8 .0

(3) (5)

4

4.0

3.0 (3) 1.0 (1) 15.0 (16) 1.0 (1)

(3)

-

-

5.0

(6)

7.0 2.0

(8) (2)

2

2.0 3.0 2.0 -

(3)

1.0 (3) 1.0 (3) 1.0 (5) 7.0 (25) 2.0 (6)

(4) (3)

1.0

(1)

2.0

2.0 3.0 -

(3) (4)

2.0 (7) 5.0 (17) 1.0 (3)

5.0

(6)

2.0

2

(7)

III. Non-Competitive

4^

Ballet Biking (recreational) Computer/Video Game "Gra w Gume" (Elastic Game) Gymnastics (recreational) Horse-back Riding Hula Hoops Pets (playing with) Playing Catch Playing in Park Sailing (ice or water) Skating Skiing (recreational) Skipping Suntanning Swimming (recreational)

7 .0 2 .0

6.0 1.0 -

(4) (1)

2 .0 2 .0 2 .0 2 .0 8 .0

(4)

5

(1)

-

(1) (1) (1)

3.0 1.0 -

(2) (1)

10.0

(7)

3.0

(2) 18.0 (12) 3.0 (2)

(1)

(5)

-

4

3.0

(2)

3

I

1.0 1.0 -

(1) (1)

3-0

(3)

1.0 1.0 _ 1.0

(1) (1)

(1)

3

2.0 (3) 2.0 (2) 2.0 (3) 2.0 (2) 3.0 (4) 2.0 (3) 9.0 (11) 4.0 (5) 5.0 (6) 2.0 (2) 6.0

(7)

1

4

4

(6)

2.0 (6) 1.0 (5) 1.0 (3) 1.0 (3) 1.0 (4) 2.0 (8) 2.0 (6) 3.0 (12) 3.0 (9) 5.0 (18) 1.0 (4) 4.0 (15)

|

5

Boys

Table 3 • I (continued) % Walking Water-skiing Other (Kite-flying; Cooking; Tea party; Roller-skating; Fishing; Piano Playing; Looking through Telescope; Baton Twirling; Skateboarding; TV; Wall Tennis; Beach Play; Windsurfing; Discodancing; Sledding; Golf; Museum-going; Rowing; Motorcycling; Surfboarding; Aerobics; Weightlifting)

4is ON

N ( = 100%)* #

f

t Rank Order

Girls %

f

13.0

(9)

-

Boys Rank Order 2

%

f

WARSAW Rank Order

-

2.0

(2)

% 1.0 1.0

to

Girls f