Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Friday, June 10, 2011

Report by Ann Fabian

I commented on the session “Tomboys and the Heritage of Gender Nonconformity in the United States, 1850s-1960.” Anne Scott McLeod chaired the session. Renee Sentilles (Case Western) read a paper on “Tomboys, Girl Sports and Western Pulp Fiction, 1860s-1900”; Kristen Proehl (William and Mary) read hers on “Sympathetic Alliances: Tomboys, ’Sissy Boys,’ and Queer Friendship in Literature of the American South, 1940s-1960”; and Allison Miller (Rutgers) spoke about her work on “American Tomboys in the Age of Penis Envy: Bodies, Gender Affinity, and Childhood, 1920s-1930.”

Although their sources differed, each paper levied a small assault on the fortified lines of gender difference. Renee and Kristen asked us to think about the cultural work of fictional characters; Allison to think about the materials, ideas, experiences, and memories that went into cobbled together, carefully and creatively invented, gendered selves.

Renee gave a brief overview of those dime novel characters a wonderful undergraduate of mine called “The Trans-Mississippi Transvestites.” In the larger project, Renee contrasts these characters with domestic tomboys, but here she concentrated on the Girls of the Dime Novel West. Renee suggests that readers found cross-dressing women as “heroic figures of resistance” to rigid strictures of gender norms.

Kristen turned to Carson McCullers’ novella, Member of the Wedding and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to explore “sympathetic alliances” between tomboys and sissy boys. I appreciated the way her paper turned away from the literature that has taught us only to be suspicious of the powers of sympathy and sentiment to explore the ways sentimental alliance might contribute to social criticism, might challenge heteronormativity through “gender-bending” child figures. “Queer friendships” of tomboys and sissy boys, Kristen suggests, “resist and parody hetero-normative institutions and rituals, challenge binary understandings of gender and sexuality, and destabilize categories of romantic and platonic love.”

In Allison’s paper, instead of writers in control of characters, we found traces of people cobbling gendered selves together out of various things they had read or heard or overheard, understood or misunderstood, believed or invented. She turned to psychologist Agnes Landis’s files to capture children’s gifts of invention—a trace of those moments when we all once were artists of gender. With remarkable sympathy, Allison reminded us of moments where the lines between self and other blurred, “where one sex can included two and two can become one,” in other words, where difference didn’t matter. She led us toward a world that challenged tyrannies of difference.

Those challenges have never been easy. But if I read Allison’s paper correctly perhaps we should pause to thank Dottie and Esther for voicing their convictions that “sex existed along a spectrum” and add their names to the roster of tomboys who have challenged the tyranny of difference and left us (on some of the better days, at least) with a chance to invent our genders.