Just found this terrific editorial of sorts in a 1959 issue of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (terrific at least for the purposes of my manuscript). One of the commonalities among the sitcoms I’m looking at from the 1950s is that they permit a sort of gender fluidity for girls (and really just for girls) until puberty. At that point, daughters are expected to transform into miniature versions of their mothers. Kitty- the youngest child on Father Knows Best is a great example of this phenomenon. The writer of this piece makes a modern sounding call for more toy choices for young girls, yet can not conceive of gender nonconformity past a very young age. The contradiction between his call for girls not be “second class citizens” and his assertion that girls past toddlerhood will only want to play with domestic toys is fascinating.
Here’s most of the piece – December 1 1959 Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Sydney Harris
“Hundreds of aggressive and ingenious toys are available for boys to break, but what does one get for a little girl who is still too young for cutouts and sewing baskets and such?” Only Dolls “As a result, of course, she [his daughter Barbara] quickly appropriates many of his toys and the Harris menage is frequently in a bitter state of civil war. Yet, one cannot really buy guns and cement=mixers and rocket ships for a girl. When Barbie is older, she will mimic her mother, and become heavily involved in toy washing machines and stoves and all the other domestic gadgets that will confirm her femininity. But right now, she mostly plays with Mike’s broken or battered castoff toys.” ” There is no doubt in my mind that women grow up with some sense of inferiority because of this. Most of the splendid toys are made for boys…. Yet, women have the same aggressive tendencies as men do; the same hostilities, the same need to discharge surplus energy, the same frustrations and the same resentments against the looming adult world. If these tendencies are not permitted to be released in childhood, I suspect that the girls grow up feeling that they are second class citizens. Much of the gossip and backbiting we attribute to the woman, I am convinced, is the result of this feeling. She uses her tongue as a weapon to compensate for the weakness of muscle. Give a gun to shoot, or a cement mixer to bat around, it is possible that the little girl may grow up feeling more like a person and less like an inferior edition of her swaggering brother.”
Fragments of History 