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

Elizabeth Levin is a professor of psychology at Laurentian University.

To what extent are children’s play practices traditional expressions
of gender? To answer this question, researchers asked young Canadian and
Polish children to draw a picture of themselves at play. By examining
the children’s images of gender, they proposed to examine the forces
that maintain gender inequality as a sociological force. The book is
more about gender than play.

The first two chapters describe the research methodology, and gender
differentiation in Canada and Poland. The book relates the patriarchal
features of capitalism and state socialism to the ways children
structure their world by gender. For example, one would expect Canada to
foster interindividual competition; Poland, collectivism.

The next two chapters examine the play themes and the images of self
that emerged from the drawings, exploring factors such as
competition-versus-cooperation and team-versus-interindividual
activities. Although societal differences emerged, they were not as
strong as differences due to gender. The gender differentiation of
Canadian and Polish adults was evident in the children’s drawings. For
example, both Canadian and Polish boys drew themselves as larger and
more prominent that did girls. As Richer notes, the gender
differentiation within the societies is more striking than the societal
differences between them.

The remaining two chapters examine ways of changing children’s
conceptions. Richer argues for intervening in children’s play, and
provides some suggestions.

More than 30 drawings, many of them in color, accompany the text.
Richer describes two drawings by the same child: one at school, formal
and stilted, and one at home, spontaneous and alive. One wonders if all
the children might have produced different drawings in a nonschool
setting. Nevertheless, the text is well written and easy to read. This
book will appeal to the interested lay person, and is suitable for
psychology and especially sociology classrooms.