January 30, 2013 • 28 mins
What is the etymology of "tomboy," and how has it evolved from meaning a whiskey-drinking man to a rough-and-tumble girl? Tune in to learn more about pop culture, tomboys, sissies and gender identity in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From House stuff
Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And Caroline. Would you characterize yourself
when you were a child as a tomboy? You know, Kristen,
(00:26):
I don't think. I don't think I would have at
the time, but I think it's because I didn't think
about it. But now that I look back, I absolutely
was one because I played with the boys next door.
We we rough house, and we played with monster truck cars,
and we played out in the yard and in the mud.
And there was one I'll go ahead and tell it.
(00:46):
There was one particular afternoon in the Atlanta, Georgia's sun
that was so hot, and the boys, who I had
grown up with since we were in diapers together, you know,
they took their shirts off and I was like, keep
in mind, I was very little, bowl but I was like,
I'm hot. So I ran into my mommy and I
was like, Mommy, can I take my shirt off too?
And then Sally just let forth this sigh while she
(01:09):
was folding laundry. I was like, alright, but just stay
stay in in the play area. Good for you, Sally. Yeah,
she was like, whatever, I mean, I think the two
boys and I had seen each other naked from the
time we were babies anyway, So whatever. Well, here's a quick,
uh a checklist, a tomboy index, and we can see
(01:31):
if you if you really fit into it. This is
coming from a studied child. Tomboy is um an adult
androgeny by Sean Megan byrne A, Kathleen O'Neil, and Shirley Neederland,
and they developed a twelve item tomboy is um index,
which delighted me to no end because I'm just so
(01:51):
happy when academics do things like make tomboy indexes. So
here we go. Uh. Preferred shorts or jeans to dresses. Yeah, well,
I wasn't even split, but now in life I prefer
pants and jeans. Preferred traditional boys toys over girls toys.
I hadn't even split. Resembled a boy in appearance. I
(02:14):
did rock a while I was a toddler. I had
a bowl cut, for sure. I wish you were a boy.
No prefer traditionally boys activities. Even even Split had girlfriends
that were tom boys. Yeah, participated in traditionally male sports
with boys. I hate competition. And avoid sports at all costs.
(02:34):
By the way, I wish this was a Cosmo quiz.
I feel like Cosmo quiz right now you were? Were
you loud or boisterous all the way? Forever? Did? The
whole life? You couldn't even finish the question. So, yes,
you were preferred playing with boys over girls. Yeah? Yeah,
used traditionally girls toys in traditional boy activities like would
(02:56):
your Barbie have been driving a back for uck? No,
she did have an awesome jeep, though engaged in rough
and tumble play. Yeah, I guess played with many different
peer groups. Sure, Caroline, i'd clear you a tomboy sweet? Uh,
how are you fair? How do I fare? Oh? I was?
(03:18):
I was pretty pretty tomboyish when I was a kid.
I started out My mother initially dressed me in nothing
but dresses because I had hand me downs from two
older sisters, and pretty much as soon as I could
start dressing myself, um, I really preferred to wear like
soccer shorts and T shirts and i umbros. I rocked
(03:40):
some umbroso and those were the hand me downs from
my my brother who was a soccer player. And I
also distinctly remember playing basketball with said soccer playing brother
and being like hold on, hold on, time out. I
got a spit and it ain't like hawking a lugie
(04:01):
and just waiting for his approval, to which he was
like Chris and kod agree. Um. Although you know what
it's it's useful to be able to talk a lugie.
Sometimes you need to do that. Um. And we are
not alone by a long shot in our tomboy is um.
It's it is interesting to to go through these studies
(04:25):
on girls and gender and tomboy is um and not
only look at these, you know, things like the tomboy index,
which you know, the list is not that surprising. These
are kind of traits that we would commonly associate with tomboys. UM.
But also where the term even came from, because it
has quite a rich history. Yeah, I had I had
(04:45):
no idea. I had no idea that the word tom
had so many meanings. But the etymology apparently one of
the slang meetings for Tom's prostitute. Uh multiple connotations male
sexual predators or Tom cat clowns, tom fools and lesbians,
tommy girls. So so tom tom is very versatile and
(05:07):
it's actually been around for a long time. The concept
originated in the sixteenth century, but it initially referred to
rowdy gentlemen courtiers. Yeah. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
tomboy first appeared in fifteen fifty three, applying to bad
boys who were prone to quote unquote whiskey ing, whisky skiing. Well,
(05:33):
the definition shifted in the fifteen seventies to girls and women.
These were bold and immodest women, so not necessarily what
we think of now. The the definition of tomboy that
we think of now came to being in the late
fifteen hundreds, early sixteen hundreds, when it's more of the
you know, the the girl who plays with the boys,
(05:54):
et cetera. Yeah, a rough and tumble, boisterous woman. Um.
And we found a book called The Unwritten History and
Hidden History of Tomboy is um in the United States
by Michelle and Abbott, and she traces this history of
tomboys and makes an interesting connection between the emergence more
(06:14):
modern emergence of tomboys, not just among children, because first
we have the outdoors pal and it's more of this, Uh,
it's only applied to kids, you know, like girls who
kind of like scalp in to kill a mockingbird who
are a little rough around the edges, and they like
playing and they're you know, scrappy little kids. And then
(06:35):
it becomes translated to more of a womanly context. Yeah.
She points out in her book the introduction in her
book that there are certain views of tomboys, their icons
of feminist defiance, their symbols of juvenile delinquency, and precursors
of sexual deviance. So there's like a very loaded meaning
(06:58):
behind a tomboy. She writes, the tomboys disrupted the rigid
dichotomy separating good and bad female conduct that critics have
identified as a defining feature of Anglo American girlhood. Yeah,
and then it evolves into this almost positive challenge to
gender roles and speaks a lot to the um, I
(07:22):
guess the power of masculinity, like speaking at that time
where masculinite was obviously more preferred than than femininity, whereas
you know, it's soft, it's weak, and you know we're
very Victorian and fainting couches and all of that. Whereas
men were men, they could do things, they could cut
(07:42):
trees down. And I found it interesting that um that
Abbott quotes Hemingway's Garden of Eden's character Catherine, when she
this character cuts her hair and then says, you see,
that's the surprise. I'm a girl, but I'm not a
boy too, and I can do anything, anything and anything,
And that whole idea of UH embracing more of those
(08:06):
tomboy characteristics were powerful younger girls. Well. Abbott writes that
tomboy is um is an antidote to the idea that
femininity has to equal frailty, like it did with the
fainting couches, couches couches and swooning and wooing and whatnot.
She says that the whole idea of tomboy is um
called for sensible clothing, physical exercise, and a wholesome diet.
(08:29):
And these girls were stronger than the Victorian ideal of
the fainting lady. And then with the turn of the
twentieth century, we have things starting to happen like women voting,
women are smoking, women are drinking, they're driving. There these
major social, political, and economic changes that are happening with
(08:49):
alongside of that the emergence of this new woman. We
can think about the flapper UH women who were not
scared to challenge those fem and in ideals and uh.
And we also have the emergence of of tomboy heroes.
For instance, Amelia Earhart had a biography written about her
called the Kansas Tomboy, and it was once featured as
(09:12):
a prize in Cracker Jacks. And you mentioned Joe March
and Little Women as the pre eminent tomboy in literature,
but there there's a lot of these these tomboy figures
that pop up around the same time. Little Women, for instance,
was written in eighteen sixty eight, and then you have
the Gypsy Britton series which starts out in eighteen sixty six.
(09:34):
It features the tomboy character. What Katie Did comes out
in eighteen seventy two. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm three. I
remember reading the caddy Wood Lawn series in five, and
then we have Little House on the Prairie, which starts
in nineteen thirty two. So in a very short amount
of time, the tomboy has become a central literary figure,
(09:57):
especially for these new narrative that we're targeted specifically to
a female audience, and you start having things like popular
songs and movies that we're all focused around these female tomboys.
Well it's funny, okay. So these things are all over literature.
These things, these these archetypes, these themes are all over literature, movies, culture.
(10:19):
I feel like this is a very common, positive, wonderful
thing to have tomboys. But I still feel like there's
this view of them in some literature that's that's negative. Well, yes,
and that's one thing that Michelle Inhabbitt writes about in
the Unwritten History of Tomboy is Um. She talks about
(10:40):
how a lot of times the there's a transformation that
tends to take place with a tomboy from you know,
she she gets a bath and all of a sudden
she gets the boy kind of like and she's all
that I was just gonna say them, um, And a
lot of times the descriptors are of her being wild
and untamed, and she's chestnut head and has dirt on
(11:03):
the cheeks, and you know, there's always we're never really
completely comfortable with the tomboy remaining the tomboy. The tomboy
has to change. Need I bring up Alie Sheety, Bring
up Ali Sheety, my number club, my number one doppelganger,
bring her up. Go ahead. No, I was just gonna
(11:24):
say it's the same thing in the breakfast club. I
got into this whole I well, I would I would
say debate with my roommate, but he just looked at
me blankly as I railed about why do we need
to give Alie Sheety a makeover and a headband? Well,
we should do an episode on on magical makeovers, because
that's an entire thing in and of itself. Um. And
(11:46):
the interesting thing too about tom boys is that they
generally have a pal with them who remains static for
the most part, and that is the sissy boy. Yeah.
This is also illustrated in a lot of literature. There's
Harper Leaves to Kill a Mockingbird that we brought up,
Scout and Dill Willie Cather's Tommy, the Unsentimental Tommy, and
(12:08):
Jay Carson mccullur's The Member of the Wedding, which featured
Frankie and John. And so it is interesting to read
about this relationship because you know, oh gosh, girl and
boy hanging out together unsupervised, But it was this whole
thing with like gender norms when they were switched. When
it's a tom boy and a sissy boy hanging out
(12:30):
pre puberty. They're just kids. It's all innocent. It doesn't
seem to really raise cultural general suspicion. Um Abbott writes
that this is foreshadowing contemporary queer interpretations of tom boys
as proto lesbians and sissies as proto gay men. Their
friendship does not contain an erotic charge, so like everybody's like, well,
(12:53):
they're different and weird, let them be friends. Yeah, And
it speaks so much to how we perceive of um
gender at that early age, because tomboy, you know, a
girl except taking on masculine characteristics is just a tomboy.
That's no big deal. It's generally not tossed out as
an insult. You might be a little bit uh, you know,
(13:15):
a little bit of an outcast, but there's still plenty
of people just like you now the sissy boy, though
sissy obviously is an insult and um. Julia Grant, a researcher,
also points out that the words cissy comes out of
boy culture in the nineteenth century um and it was
also used as a clinical term for sexual inversion. And
(13:38):
all of this also is coinciding with the time when
massive industrialization raises adults concerns over the loss of real men.
Like when we were talking about in our summer camp podcast,
the reason why summer camps wilderness camps uh began in
the first place was to send boys out away from
their pampered city lives to make sure that they could
(13:59):
still do things like chopping all those trees, right, And
hence you now have the the sissy boy that everyone's
concerned about because it's not okay for for boys to
accept the more feminine traits. But one literary theme that
comes up is the tomboy character working to masculine masculine
eye there it is her sissy boy friend, but it
(14:21):
doesn't work the other way around. So like you know
this the sissy boys hanging out with a tomboy and
it rubs off on him and he's like, Oh, I'm
gonna be a big strong man and marry a lady
and we're all gonna be happy and everything. But it's
I guess that's the maybe equivalent of the tomboy getting
a bath and suddenly going to the prom. Yeah, yeah,
because we wouldn't expect in these kind of rich generals,
(14:43):
we wouldn't it would not be acceptable for a boy
to pass along softness too. You know, a tougher girl,
right unless she suddenly became interested in him in a
likeli kind of way. Un when she started crushing on
him and then she takes a bath and then they
go to the bronx. Wait, wait, and then she takes
(15:05):
a bath, puts on a headband and then they go
that's where they from. But what about tom boys and
sissy girls. Well, yeah, it's definitely not just for boys.
And this was researchers Carrie Robinson and Kristin Davies. They
said that the term sissy amplifies some characteristics that are
perceived to be feminine and negative in both boys and girls.
(15:27):
So for boys, as we talked about, it suggests homosexuality weakness.
For girls, however, it's associated with the type of undesirable femininity.
So you don't want to be called a sissy girl
anymore than a boy wants to be called a sissy boy.
And it's interesting they wrote about how the sissy girls
desires and interests are in the relationship with the other
(15:50):
girls and the women, so they are more interested in
pursuing those friendships with the tom boy because of adventure
or bringing them out of their shell more or so
then maybe crushing on Freddie Prince Jr. Now, these more
negative views toward tomboy is um and that you know,
(16:12):
the attendant sissy boy or sissy girl have loosened in
more recent times since it became, you know, part of
our pop culture and part of just kind of an
expected phase that a child might go through. UM. And
Betsy Livonian Morgan at the University of Wisconsin in was
(16:34):
curious to see how there might be a generational shift
in women's embrace of the term tomboy and whether or
not they engaged in tomboy like activities when they were kids.
And so she talked to young female college students, their mothers,
and their grandmothers to do a generational comparison among tomboy
(17:00):
attributes and behaviors. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting
that the senior women were less likely to report having
been a tomboy than the younger two generations. So as
common as that whole theme was in literature, movies, culture
in general, etcetera, Um, they still were maybe applying prejudices
(17:20):
to the term. And thought it was still that whole
you know, that whole stereotype of the dirty girl or woman. UM.
But Morgan found out that tomboy is um does in
fact appear to be a normal part of most women's
child's childhoods. Sixty percent of the people that she surveyed
over the three generations reported being tomboys during their childhood,
(17:42):
and the average age that they reported starting to be
a tomboy was five point eight years old, and the
average age reported for ceasing the behavior growing up becoming
a lady taking that bath and putting that head band
on was twelve point six. Uh. Yeah, And and of
course that's age that puberty tends to kick in. And
(18:02):
I find that kind of said that we that we
pack up you know, our talka trucks and put away
our overalls and such. Once we start it's it's at
the age when we start paying more attention to other
people's perceptions of us. Obviously, uh, you know, sexual attractions
(18:23):
start to kick in, and we we become more more
self aware of what we are presenting to Yeah, I
mean nobody, I mean think of us. Now. We might
not care what we appeared to be to other people.
But when you're a thirteen year old and you're hitting puberty,
and you're nervous and you're awkward and oh god, I
(18:43):
just want people to like me, and I just want
that person over there to to like me and have
a crush on me. You do you pay attention more
to like? Okay, well, what what do I have to
do to not be weird? You gotta fit in, oh man.
But there are so many upsides to tomboy is um
um And again, like like you mentioned it. In every
(19:04):
study that we found, a majority of the people that
they talked to at some point said, yeah, I went
through some kind of tomboyish face. And even though this
is a little dated, according to in nineteen seventy study,
girls who performed tomboyish behavior has had a larger repertoire
of activities and less gender bound preferences for the future,
understandably because I'm challenging those scripts from a young age,
(19:27):
so it seems normal to just do whatever. And according
to one studies, similarly, self described tomboys tend to embrace
boys and girls activities rather than they don't reject one
or the other. They tend to blend it together and um.
More contemporary studies have looked a little bit deeper into
(19:50):
the gender dynamics of tomboyism, whether it is related to
um adult homosexuality or androgeny down the road and and
how all of that plays. And it makes sense that
we are taking a deeper look at the these early
childhood formative self labeling like you know, playing, you know,
(20:14):
doing tomboyish types of things, and how it relates to
our gender identity down the road. Um, because we are
now more accepting of the fact that, uh, that we
we don't live in just like a binary system of
you know, masculine feminine, male female blah blah blah, there
is room for for much more fluidity and scholars have
(20:38):
understandably looked into how the how tomboy might play into that.
For instance, there in two thousand eleven, there is a
study publish in the Journal of Lesbian Studies called tomboy
as Protective identity, and they wanted to look at three
different components of how tomboy is a gendered social identity
(20:58):
that can offer temporary detections to women and girls in
terms of, for instance, excusing masculine typed behavior and girls
and women because it is much more acceptable for girls
too to be a little more rough and tumble. Um.
It can also provide protection for lesbian girls and women
who prefer not to divulge their sexual orientation, and this
(21:20):
is also pretty compelling. The tomboy identity can gain women
limited privileges to spaces for which masculinity is an unspoken requirement,
and that was something that came up in another study
we found that was interviewing women who were pretty intense
tomboys when they were kids, and that came up a
(21:40):
lot in terms of saying, no, like calling myself a tomboy.
Being a tomboy gave me more access to It broadened
my world, allow me to do things I normally wouldn't
be able to do. Yeah. Well, um, Robinson and Davies
talked to a lot of women about, you know, their
(22:00):
past and what it was like being a tomboy, and
I did think it was interesting, Uh, just the different
kind of perceptions that people could have of tomboys and
how it could bring such shame to a child if
that was outside of what their parents considered to be normal.
For instance, Um, one woman was saying that as a child,
(22:22):
she you know, goes into the toy store and wants
to buy this toy gun, and her mom was totally
okay with it, was like, yeah, whatever you want it,
that's fine. But it was the shopkeeper who said, well,
that's not a girl's toy, and so she had this
That was the first time she had been shamed about
wanting a different type of toy than was normal for girls,
and so she just felt like she had that feeling
(22:43):
attached to tomboy is um from then on out. Yeah,
And even though these days in we are becoming more
aware and more accepting of children who might from a
very early age begin to identify self identify as transgender
and not feel okay in the body that they were
(23:05):
born in and want to, uh, you know, cross those
lines in those kinds of ways. But I think, especially
because we're talking about children, we still have a difficult time.
There's still something about tomboyish behavior that you know, still
challenges those old scripts that stick around, and people almost
(23:27):
get mad at the parents sometimes for like making or
letting your child do something. And I mean not to
get all TMZ up in here, but like Shiloh Jolie Pitt,
for instance, cute cute kid prefers to wear more masculine
clothes and a masculine haircut, and I mean, people freak
out like what do you This is why kids are
(23:47):
weird nowadays, Like what are you doing to that child? Well,
and it's like the the the J Crew image in
the magazine of the kid having the boy having his
nails painted pink by his mom? How would you do that?
And that that is the thing I think that all
of these studies, in the research on tom Boys, I've
(24:08):
only demonstrated that a it is perfectly normal and healthy
to allow kids. I mean this has been a very
like girl focused conversation obviously since we're talking about tom Boys,
but it is very healthy to to allow kids to
explore and to break those those barriers. I mean, I
have excellent memories of being a kid playing outside and
(24:29):
climbing trees and playing in the sandbox with boys and everything,
playing with my monster trucks. My mom even bought me
like a like a sports coop one of those yellow
plastic cars. I had the handles that you turned it with. Yeah,
I wasn't brave enough to ride it down our steep driveway.
That's good probably, but I would drive it around sure. Yeah. No,
(24:50):
it's it's great too to give children the option to
just be themselves. Yeah, and just one last etymological fact.
Before tomboy became the accepted term for these rough and
tumble girls, tom boys were called Hoyden's, the term for
boisterous girls. So well that fell out of fashion, didn't it,
Considering I've never heard of it, Yeah, I think hoyden
(25:13):
does not have quite the ring to it, even though
things do a little strange when you think about tom
being slang for prostitute, evolved, evolved, indeed, now I just
think of freckles and overalls. So tom boys out there,
write us your letters, please, running hear all of your stories.
Mom's stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
(25:35):
send them, or you can also message this on Facebook.
And now we've got a couple of listener letters to
share with you. Yeah, I have one from Brook. This
is about sweaty Jim creepers Kristen. She says, I managed
to Jim for about four years just outside of Louisville, Kentucky,
(25:56):
and encountered a wide variety of awkward interactions between gym members,
including lots of pickup attempts, adulterous sex affairs in the
tanning beds, and jealous spouses storming in to catch their
significant others quote unquote training with the mistress. The gym
is a and this isn't all caps scandalous, scandalous place.
(26:17):
I found that the only time I'm comfortable working out
in a gym anymore is in the middle of the
night when there is basically nobody around. Jeez, Brooke, that
sounds like a scary Jim. Indeed, Well, I've got one
here from Nari, and it's not about Jim's. It is
actually about our pro Laps podcast. But listen up, folks,
it's good news. She says. I'm twenty seven and I've
(26:39):
never been pregnant, So when I felt a lot of
pressure and put some pain in the girly parts, it
was definitely a little weird. This was just several weeks
after I listened to the pro Laps podcast, so I
thought I might be imagining things like a total hypochondriac
just because But because of you two, I knew how
to do this self examination. Because I'm familiar with my anatomy.
I realized that my serve BIXID dropped at least half
(27:01):
an inch, and I went straight to my guyn of collegist,
who was really glad. I caught it at such an
early stage. The Kegle exercises, which I also know the
details about because of your podcasts have put everything back
to where it should be. So long as I keep
doing them, I am so grateful to you. See enough
people were so grossed out about the prolaps podcast. But
(27:21):
you know what, the more you know, do do do do?
The more you know that you know, and the more
you know, that's great. I'm glad we could help. Yeah,
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(27:42):
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how stuff works dot com s
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From House stuff
Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And Caroline. Would you characterize yourself
when you were a child as a tomboy? You know, Kristen,
(00:26):
I don't think. I don't think I would have at
the time, but I think it's because I didn't think
about it. But now that I look back, I absolutely
was one because I played with the boys next door.
We we rough house, and we played with monster truck cars,
and we played out in the yard and in the mud.
And there was one I'll go ahead and tell it.
(00:46):
There was one particular afternoon in the Atlanta, Georgia's sun
that was so hot, and the boys, who I had
grown up with since we were in diapers together, you know,
they took their shirts off and I was like, keep
in mind, I was very little, bowl but I was like,
I'm hot. So I ran into my mommy and I
was like, Mommy, can I take my shirt off too?
And then Sally just let forth this sigh while she
(01:09):
was folding laundry. I was like, alright, but just stay
stay in in the play area. Good for you, Sally. Yeah,
she was like, whatever, I mean, I think the two
boys and I had seen each other naked from the
time we were babies anyway, So whatever. Well, here's a quick,
uh a checklist, a tomboy index, and we can see
(01:31):
if you if you really fit into it. This is
coming from a studied child. Tomboy is um an adult
androgeny by Sean Megan byrne A, Kathleen O'Neil, and Shirley Neederland,
and they developed a twelve item tomboy is um index,
which delighted me to no end because I'm just so
(01:51):
happy when academics do things like make tomboy indexes. So
here we go. Uh. Preferred shorts or jeans to dresses. Yeah, well,
I wasn't even split, but now in life I prefer
pants and jeans. Preferred traditional boys toys over girls toys.
I hadn't even split. Resembled a boy in appearance. I
(02:14):
did rock a while I was a toddler. I had
a bowl cut, for sure. I wish you were a boy.
No prefer traditionally boys activities. Even even Split had girlfriends
that were tom boys. Yeah, participated in traditionally male sports
with boys. I hate competition. And avoid sports at all costs.
(02:34):
By the way, I wish this was a Cosmo quiz.
I feel like Cosmo quiz right now you were? Were
you loud or boisterous all the way? Forever? Did? The
whole life? You couldn't even finish the question. So, yes,
you were preferred playing with boys over girls. Yeah? Yeah,
used traditionally girls toys in traditional boy activities like would
(02:56):
your Barbie have been driving a back for uck? No,
she did have an awesome jeep, though engaged in rough
and tumble play. Yeah, I guess played with many different
peer groups. Sure, Caroline, i'd clear you a tomboy sweet? Uh,
how are you fair? How do I fare? Oh? I was?
(03:18):
I was pretty pretty tomboyish when I was a kid.
I started out My mother initially dressed me in nothing
but dresses because I had hand me downs from two
older sisters, and pretty much as soon as I could
start dressing myself, um, I really preferred to wear like
soccer shorts and T shirts and i umbros. I rocked
(03:40):
some umbroso and those were the hand me downs from
my my brother who was a soccer player. And I
also distinctly remember playing basketball with said soccer playing brother
and being like hold on, hold on, time out. I
got a spit and it ain't like hawking a lugie
(04:01):
and just waiting for his approval, to which he was
like Chris and kod agree. Um. Although you know what
it's it's useful to be able to talk a lugie.
Sometimes you need to do that. Um. And we are
not alone by a long shot in our tomboy is um.
It's it is interesting to to go through these studies
(04:25):
on girls and gender and tomboy is um and not
only look at these, you know, things like the tomboy index,
which you know, the list is not that surprising. These
are kind of traits that we would commonly associate with tomboys. UM.
But also where the term even came from, because it
has quite a rich history. Yeah, I had I had
(04:45):
no idea. I had no idea that the word tom
had so many meanings. But the etymology apparently one of
the slang meetings for Tom's prostitute. Uh multiple connotations male
sexual predators or Tom cat clowns, tom fools and lesbians,
tommy girls. So so tom tom is very versatile and
(05:07):
it's actually been around for a long time. The concept
originated in the sixteenth century, but it initially referred to
rowdy gentlemen courtiers. Yeah. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
tomboy first appeared in fifteen fifty three, applying to bad
boys who were prone to quote unquote whiskey ing, whisky skiing. Well,
(05:33):
the definition shifted in the fifteen seventies to girls and women.
These were bold and immodest women, so not necessarily what
we think of now. The the definition of tomboy that
we think of now came to being in the late
fifteen hundreds, early sixteen hundreds, when it's more of the
you know, the the girl who plays with the boys,
(05:54):
et cetera. Yeah, a rough and tumble, boisterous woman. Um.
And we found a book called The Unwritten History and
Hidden History of Tomboy is um in the United States
by Michelle and Abbott, and she traces this history of
tomboys and makes an interesting connection between the emergence more
(06:14):
modern emergence of tomboys, not just among children, because first
we have the outdoors pal and it's more of this, Uh,
it's only applied to kids, you know, like girls who
kind of like scalp in to kill a mockingbird who
are a little rough around the edges, and they like
playing and they're you know, scrappy little kids. And then
(06:35):
it becomes translated to more of a womanly context. Yeah.
She points out in her book the introduction in her
book that there are certain views of tomboys, their icons
of feminist defiance, their symbols of juvenile delinquency, and precursors
of sexual deviance. So there's like a very loaded meaning
(06:58):
behind a tomboy. She writes, the tomboys disrupted the rigid
dichotomy separating good and bad female conduct that critics have
identified as a defining feature of Anglo American girlhood. Yeah,
and then it evolves into this almost positive challenge to
gender roles and speaks a lot to the um, I
(07:22):
guess the power of masculinity, like speaking at that time
where masculinite was obviously more preferred than than femininity, whereas
you know, it's soft, it's weak, and you know we're
very Victorian and fainting couches and all of that. Whereas
men were men, they could do things, they could cut
(07:42):
trees down. And I found it interesting that um that
Abbott quotes Hemingway's Garden of Eden's character Catherine, when she
this character cuts her hair and then says, you see,
that's the surprise. I'm a girl, but I'm not a
boy too, and I can do anything, anything and anything,
And that whole idea of UH embracing more of those
(08:06):
tomboy characteristics were powerful younger girls. Well. Abbott writes that
tomboy is um is an antidote to the idea that
femininity has to equal frailty, like it did with the
fainting couches, couches couches and swooning and wooing and whatnot.
She says that the whole idea of tomboy is um
called for sensible clothing, physical exercise, and a wholesome diet.
(08:29):
And these girls were stronger than the Victorian ideal of
the fainting lady. And then with the turn of the
twentieth century, we have things starting to happen like women voting,
women are smoking, women are drinking, they're driving. There these
major social, political, and economic changes that are happening with
(08:49):
alongside of that the emergence of this new woman. We
can think about the flapper UH women who were not
scared to challenge those fem and in ideals and uh.
And we also have the emergence of of tomboy heroes.
For instance, Amelia Earhart had a biography written about her
called the Kansas Tomboy, and it was once featured as
(09:12):
a prize in Cracker Jacks. And you mentioned Joe March
and Little Women as the pre eminent tomboy in literature,
but there there's a lot of these these tomboy figures
that pop up around the same time. Little Women, for instance,
was written in eighteen sixty eight, and then you have
the Gypsy Britton series which starts out in eighteen sixty six.
(09:34):
It features the tomboy character. What Katie Did comes out
in eighteen seventy two. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm three. I
remember reading the caddy Wood Lawn series in five, and
then we have Little House on the Prairie, which starts
in nineteen thirty two. So in a very short amount
of time, the tomboy has become a central literary figure,
(09:57):
especially for these new narrative that we're targeted specifically to
a female audience, and you start having things like popular
songs and movies that we're all focused around these female tomboys.
Well it's funny, okay. So these things are all over literature.
These things, these these archetypes, these themes are all over literature, movies, culture.
(10:19):
I feel like this is a very common, positive, wonderful
thing to have tomboys. But I still feel like there's
this view of them in some literature that's that's negative. Well, yes,
and that's one thing that Michelle Inhabbitt writes about in
the Unwritten History of Tomboy is Um. She talks about
(10:40):
how a lot of times the there's a transformation that
tends to take place with a tomboy from you know,
she she gets a bath and all of a sudden
she gets the boy kind of like and she's all
that I was just gonna say them, um, And a
lot of times the descriptors are of her being wild
and untamed, and she's chestnut head and has dirt on
(11:03):
the cheeks, and you know, there's always we're never really
completely comfortable with the tomboy remaining the tomboy. The tomboy
has to change. Need I bring up Alie Sheety, Bring
up Ali Sheety, my number club, my number one doppelganger,
bring her up. Go ahead. No, I was just gonna
(11:24):
say it's the same thing in the breakfast club. I
got into this whole I well, I would I would
say debate with my roommate, but he just looked at
me blankly as I railed about why do we need
to give Alie Sheety a makeover and a headband? Well,
we should do an episode on on magical makeovers, because
that's an entire thing in and of itself. Um. And
(11:46):
the interesting thing too about tom boys is that they
generally have a pal with them who remains static for
the most part, and that is the sissy boy. Yeah.
This is also illustrated in a lot of literature. There's
Harper Leaves to Kill a Mockingbird that we brought up,
Scout and Dill Willie Cather's Tommy, the Unsentimental Tommy, and
(12:08):
Jay Carson mccullur's The Member of the Wedding, which featured
Frankie and John. And so it is interesting to read
about this relationship because you know, oh gosh, girl and
boy hanging out together unsupervised, But it was this whole
thing with like gender norms when they were switched. When
it's a tom boy and a sissy boy hanging out
(12:30):
pre puberty. They're just kids. It's all innocent. It doesn't
seem to really raise cultural general suspicion. Um Abbott writes
that this is foreshadowing contemporary queer interpretations of tom boys
as proto lesbians and sissies as proto gay men. Their
friendship does not contain an erotic charge, so like everybody's like, well,
(12:53):
they're different and weird, let them be friends. Yeah, And
it speaks so much to how we perceive of um
gender at that early age, because tomboy, you know, a
girl except taking on masculine characteristics is just a tomboy.
That's no big deal. It's generally not tossed out as
an insult. You might be a little bit uh, you know,
(13:15):
a little bit of an outcast, but there's still plenty
of people just like you now the sissy boy, though
sissy obviously is an insult and um. Julia Grant, a researcher,
also points out that the words cissy comes out of
boy culture in the nineteenth century um and it was
also used as a clinical term for sexual inversion. And
(13:38):
all of this also is coinciding with the time when
massive industrialization raises adults concerns over the loss of real men.
Like when we were talking about in our summer camp podcast,
the reason why summer camps wilderness camps uh began in
the first place was to send boys out away from
their pampered city lives to make sure that they could
(13:59):
still do things like chopping all those trees, right, And
hence you now have the the sissy boy that everyone's
concerned about because it's not okay for for boys to
accept the more feminine traits. But one literary theme that
comes up is the tomboy character working to masculine masculine
eye there it is her sissy boy friend, but it
(14:21):
doesn't work the other way around. So like you know
this the sissy boys hanging out with a tomboy and
it rubs off on him and he's like, Oh, I'm
gonna be a big strong man and marry a lady
and we're all gonna be happy and everything. But it's
I guess that's the maybe equivalent of the tomboy getting
a bath and suddenly going to the prom. Yeah, yeah,
because we wouldn't expect in these kind of rich generals,
(14:43):
we wouldn't it would not be acceptable for a boy
to pass along softness too. You know, a tougher girl,
right unless she suddenly became interested in him in a
likeli kind of way. Un when she started crushing on
him and then she takes a bath and then they
go to the bronx. Wait, wait, and then she takes
(15:05):
a bath, puts on a headband and then they go
that's where they from. But what about tom boys and
sissy girls. Well, yeah, it's definitely not just for boys.
And this was researchers Carrie Robinson and Kristin Davies. They
said that the term sissy amplifies some characteristics that are
perceived to be feminine and negative in both boys and girls.
(15:27):
So for boys, as we talked about, it suggests homosexuality weakness.
For girls, however, it's associated with the type of undesirable femininity.
So you don't want to be called a sissy girl
anymore than a boy wants to be called a sissy boy.
And it's interesting they wrote about how the sissy girls
desires and interests are in the relationship with the other
(15:50):
girls and the women, so they are more interested in
pursuing those friendships with the tom boy because of adventure
or bringing them out of their shell more or so
then maybe crushing on Freddie Prince Jr. Now, these more
negative views toward tomboy is um and that you know,
(16:12):
the attendant sissy boy or sissy girl have loosened in
more recent times since it became, you know, part of
our pop culture and part of just kind of an
expected phase that a child might go through. UM. And
Betsy Livonian Morgan at the University of Wisconsin in was
(16:34):
curious to see how there might be a generational shift
in women's embrace of the term tomboy and whether or
not they engaged in tomboy like activities when they were kids.
And so she talked to young female college students, their mothers,
and their grandmothers to do a generational comparison among tomboy
(17:00):
attributes and behaviors. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting
that the senior women were less likely to report having
been a tomboy than the younger two generations. So as
common as that whole theme was in literature, movies, culture
in general, etcetera, Um, they still were maybe applying prejudices
(17:20):
to the term. And thought it was still that whole
you know, that whole stereotype of the dirty girl or woman. UM.
But Morgan found out that tomboy is um does in
fact appear to be a normal part of most women's
child's childhoods. Sixty percent of the people that she surveyed
over the three generations reported being tomboys during their childhood,
(17:42):
and the average age that they reported starting to be
a tomboy was five point eight years old, and the
average age reported for ceasing the behavior growing up becoming
a lady taking that bath and putting that head band
on was twelve point six. Uh. Yeah, And and of
course that's age that puberty tends to kick in. And
(18:02):
I find that kind of said that we that we
pack up you know, our talka trucks and put away
our overalls and such. Once we start it's it's at
the age when we start paying more attention to other
people's perceptions of us. Obviously, uh, you know, sexual attractions
(18:23):
start to kick in, and we we become more more
self aware of what we are presenting to Yeah, I
mean nobody, I mean think of us. Now. We might
not care what we appeared to be to other people.
But when you're a thirteen year old and you're hitting puberty,
and you're nervous and you're awkward and oh god, I
(18:43):
just want people to like me, and I just want
that person over there to to like me and have
a crush on me. You do you pay attention more
to like? Okay, well, what what do I have to
do to not be weird? You gotta fit in, oh man.
But there are so many upsides to tomboy is um
um And again, like like you mentioned it. In every
(19:04):
study that we found, a majority of the people that
they talked to at some point said, yeah, I went
through some kind of tomboyish face. And even though this
is a little dated, according to in nineteen seventy study,
girls who performed tomboyish behavior has had a larger repertoire
of activities and less gender bound preferences for the future,
understandably because I'm challenging those scripts from a young age,
(19:27):
so it seems normal to just do whatever. And according
to one studies, similarly, self described tomboys tend to embrace
boys and girls activities rather than they don't reject one
or the other. They tend to blend it together and um.
More contemporary studies have looked a little bit deeper into
(19:50):
the gender dynamics of tomboyism, whether it is related to
um adult homosexuality or androgeny down the road and and
how all of that plays. And it makes sense that
we are taking a deeper look at the these early
childhood formative self labeling like you know, playing, you know,
(20:14):
doing tomboyish types of things, and how it relates to
our gender identity down the road. Um, because we are
now more accepting of the fact that, uh, that we
we don't live in just like a binary system of
you know, masculine feminine, male female blah blah blah, there
is room for for much more fluidity and scholars have
(20:38):
understandably looked into how the how tomboy might play into that.
For instance, there in two thousand eleven, there is a
study publish in the Journal of Lesbian Studies called tomboy
as Protective identity, and they wanted to look at three
different components of how tomboy is a gendered social identity
(20:58):
that can offer temporary detections to women and girls in
terms of, for instance, excusing masculine typed behavior and girls
and women because it is much more acceptable for girls
too to be a little more rough and tumble. Um.
It can also provide protection for lesbian girls and women
who prefer not to divulge their sexual orientation, and this
(21:20):
is also pretty compelling. The tomboy identity can gain women
limited privileges to spaces for which masculinity is an unspoken requirement,
and that was something that came up in another study
we found that was interviewing women who were pretty intense
tomboys when they were kids, and that came up a
(21:40):
lot in terms of saying, no, like calling myself a tomboy.
Being a tomboy gave me more access to It broadened
my world, allow me to do things I normally wouldn't
be able to do. Yeah. Well, um, Robinson and Davies
talked to a lot of women about, you know, their
(22:00):
past and what it was like being a tomboy, and
I did think it was interesting, Uh, just the different
kind of perceptions that people could have of tomboys and
how it could bring such shame to a child if
that was outside of what their parents considered to be normal.
For instance, Um, one woman was saying that as a child,
(22:22):
she you know, goes into the toy store and wants
to buy this toy gun, and her mom was totally
okay with it, was like, yeah, whatever you want it,
that's fine. But it was the shopkeeper who said, well,
that's not a girl's toy, and so she had this
That was the first time she had been shamed about
wanting a different type of toy than was normal for girls,
and so she just felt like she had that feeling
(22:43):
attached to tomboy is um from then on out. Yeah,
And even though these days in we are becoming more
aware and more accepting of children who might from a
very early age begin to identify self identify as transgender
and not feel okay in the body that they were
(23:05):
born in and want to, uh, you know, cross those
lines in those kinds of ways. But I think, especially
because we're talking about children, we still have a difficult time.
There's still something about tomboyish behavior that you know, still
challenges those old scripts that stick around, and people almost
(23:27):
get mad at the parents sometimes for like making or
letting your child do something. And I mean not to
get all TMZ up in here, but like Shiloh Jolie Pitt,
for instance, cute cute kid prefers to wear more masculine
clothes and a masculine haircut, and I mean, people freak
out like what do you This is why kids are
(23:47):
weird nowadays, Like what are you doing to that child? Well,
and it's like the the the J Crew image in
the magazine of the kid having the boy having his
nails painted pink by his mom? How would you do that?
And that that is the thing I think that all
of these studies, in the research on tom Boys, I've
(24:08):
only demonstrated that a it is perfectly normal and healthy
to allow kids. I mean this has been a very
like girl focused conversation obviously since we're talking about tom Boys,
but it is very healthy to to allow kids to
explore and to break those those barriers. I mean, I
have excellent memories of being a kid playing outside and
(24:29):
climbing trees and playing in the sandbox with boys and everything,
playing with my monster trucks. My mom even bought me
like a like a sports coop one of those yellow
plastic cars. I had the handles that you turned it with. Yeah,
I wasn't brave enough to ride it down our steep driveway.
That's good probably, but I would drive it around sure. Yeah. No,
(24:50):
it's it's great too to give children the option to
just be themselves. Yeah, and just one last etymological fact.
Before tomboy became the accepted term for these rough and
tumble girls, tom boys were called Hoyden's, the term for
boisterous girls. So well that fell out of fashion, didn't it,
Considering I've never heard of it, Yeah, I think hoyden
(25:13):
does not have quite the ring to it, even though
things do a little strange when you think about tom
being slang for prostitute, evolved, evolved, indeed, now I just
think of freckles and overalls. So tom boys out there,
write us your letters, please, running hear all of your stories.
Mom's stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
(25:35):
send them, or you can also message this on Facebook.
And now we've got a couple of listener letters to
share with you. Yeah, I have one from Brook. This
is about sweaty Jim creepers Kristen. She says, I managed
to Jim for about four years just outside of Louisville, Kentucky,
(25:56):
and encountered a wide variety of awkward interactions between gym members,
including lots of pickup attempts, adulterous sex affairs in the
tanning beds, and jealous spouses storming in to catch their
significant others quote unquote training with the mistress. The gym
is a and this isn't all caps scandalous, scandalous place.
(26:17):
I found that the only time I'm comfortable working out
in a gym anymore is in the middle of the
night when there is basically nobody around. Jeez, Brooke, that
sounds like a scary Jim. Indeed, Well, I've got one
here from Nari, and it's not about Jim's. It is
actually about our pro Laps podcast. But listen up, folks,
it's good news. She says. I'm twenty seven and I've
(26:39):
never been pregnant, So when I felt a lot of
pressure and put some pain in the girly parts, it
was definitely a little weird. This was just several weeks
after I listened to the pro Laps podcast, so I
thought I might be imagining things like a total hypochondriac
just because But because of you two, I knew how
to do this self examination. Because I'm familiar with my anatomy.
I realized that my serve BIXID dropped at least half
(27:01):
an inch, and I went straight to my guyn of collegist,
who was really glad. I caught it at such an
early stage. The Kegle exercises, which I also know the
details about because of your podcasts have put everything back
to where it should be. So long as I keep
doing them, I am so grateful to you. See enough
people were so grossed out about the prolaps podcast. But
(27:21):
you know what, the more you know, do do do do?
The more you know that you know, and the more
you know, that's great. I'm glad we could help. Yeah,
that made me very happy to hear. And if you
have any good news to share with us, you know
our address. It's mom Stuff at Discovery dot com. You
can also find us on Facebook. Like us while you're
at it, follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast.
(27:42):
You can also follow us on Tumbler at stuff Mo'm
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