“Why girls are good”: A constructivist view

Sex Roles, Vol. 11, Nos. 3/4, 1984

"Why Girls Are Good": A Constructivist View

Dora Ullian Henry A. Murray Research Center o f Radcliffe College

A central feature of the literature on sex roles is the presumed link between the development of feminine personality and interpersonal processes. A typical female orientation- one that places people above inanimate objects, feelings above abstract principles, and caretaking above self-interest-remains a dominant theme in recent studies of female psychology.

Research on the moral judgments of women has characterized women by their tendency to care about others in high personal, specific ways (Gilli- gan, 1977). Miller (1976) has described a tendency for women to "partici- pate in the development of others" through such typical female behaviors as nurturance, sharing, empathy, and helping-behaviors that, she argues, have been repressed in men and undervalued in the wider, male-dominant society.

Even observations of women at work corroborate the findings of a distinct female orientation toward interpersonal relationships. Kanter (1976) reports that women, unlike their male counterparts, tend to be concerned with close, immediate relationships, remaining loyal to the local work group, rather than aspiring to promotions that might cause them to leave their social environment.

The primary objective of this study is to examine this pattern of female behavior during the childhood years and to propose a "constructivist" hypothesis that links the development of female personality to conceptual processes governing the thinking of young children. The perspective adopt- ed here suggests that female "goodness"-the cluster of traits that revolves around caretaking, nurturance, sociability, and empathy- i s not simply the results of cultural norms and values internalized directly through socialization. Rather, I will argue that female goodness (as defined in "interpersonal affective" turns) arises in childhood from early forms of thought that shape and often distort sex-role concepts in inevitable and predictable ways. I

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propose that the development of these typical female attributes can be traced to the young child's belief that "anatomy is destiny" (Ullian, 1981), a belief arising from the confusion of such physical traits as size, strength, and childbearing capacity with such psychological attributes as power and nurturance.

Piaget's work on the development of children's thinking has provided psychology with a rich and detailed description of the cognitive structures that shape thought from infancy through adolescence. His analysis of cognitive development demonstrates that children and adults have distinct ways of thinking that correspond to stage-specific ways of organizing the physical universe.

Piaget's original observations on the development of physical concepts were expanded to investigations of the development of social and moral concepts (Kohlberg, 1966; Turiel, 1978; Damon, 1977; Bernstein & Cowan, 1975). Research in each of these areas has revealed a corresponding sequence of stages that represent qualitatively different ways of interpreting social rules and moral values. The findings show that children not only express beliefs about the values of life, the meaning of rules, and the origin of babies that differ from those of adults, but these beliefs are linked to particular cognitive structures that govern thought at different stages of development.

As area of investigation that has received little attention is sex-role development of sex-role concepts (Ullian, 1976) suggesting that preopera- Piagetian concepts such as object constancy and conservation to the domain of sex roles, little research has dealt directly with the structural aspects of sex-role development.

In this study, I will offer interview data from a study of the development of sex-role concepts (Ullian, 1976) suggesting that prepera- tional children have a distinct approach to defining gender, and hence to differentiating the sexes. I propose that females "goodness" is comprised of two major psychological dimensionsAthe desire to be good and the fear of being bad--and that young girls' concepts of themselves as female are firmly rooted in the visible (and often superficial) physical characteristics they use to define gender.

EVIDENCE FOR A N I N T E R P E R S O N A L AFFECTIVE M O D E

A dominant theme in the study of sex differences has been the female's concern with people and their feelings. This orientation has repeatedly been contrasted with the male's characteristic capacity for

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abstract thought and depersonalized judgment. The psychological polarities of agency and communion (Bakan, 1966; Block, 1973), instrumentality and expressiveness (T. Parsons, 1964), and field dependence and independence (Witkin, 1962; Coates, 1974) have been suggested as basic personality dimensions that differentiate the sexes. These polar attributes all describe a female tendency to place a high value on people, feelings, and the maintenance of close, interpersonal relationships.

As early as 1925, Freud's provocative comments about the female personality were predicted on his clinical impression that the woman's superego was "never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origin as we require it to be in men" (19. 257).

The tendency to view the self in relation to others was echoed several years later when Piaget's (1932/1960) reach on children's games led him to observe a discrepancy between the attitudes of boys and girls toward rules and, consequently, between boys' and girls' approaches to the resolution of conflicts. In contrast to the boys' emerging interest in the codification of rules, girls were described as "less explicit about agreement and less concerned about legal elaboration" (p. 32). As a result, when conflict broke out among children, the girls were discovered to be both more tolerant and more easily reconciled to innovation than were the boys.

More recently, Kohlberg's work in the area of moral development has suggested a strong personal orientation in the moral judgments of girls. The tendency of girls to care about specific people in concrete situations is contrasted to the more abstract, impersonal mode of reasoning in the moral judgments of boys (Kohlberg & Kramer, 1968).

While much of this early work has been the object of intense scrutiny and criticism from various sources, it is important to note that subsequent work in the area of sex differences has tended to confirm, rather than to disprove, these original observations. For example, from an observational study of fifth graders' games, Lever (1977) found that girls' play occur in small, intimate groups, most often the dyad. Girls play in private places and usually mimic primary human relationships instead of playing formal games. Lever (1976) concludes the , "girls' games may provide a training ground for the development of delicate socio-emotional skills"; she notes that "their age-mixed play is the type that helps girls develop nurturance skills" (p. 484).

Similarly, Feinberg's analysis (1976) of themes in children's art suggests a striking tendency for girls to perceive events in an interpersonal affective mode. When first-grade children were asked to draw pictures of fighting and helping, males portrayed these events according to organized, impersonal themes, while females consistently focused on the interpersonal

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conflict, "specifically two people in direct confrontat ion. . , the antagonist is not an unknown individual associated with a rule system, but rather a friend or relative" (Feinberg, 1976, p. 67).

Waldrop and Halverson's (1975) analysis of the social behavior of children between 2 and 7 years of age reveals a similar pattern. They found that boys rated as socially competent tended to exhibit extensive peer relationships, while socially competent girls tended to focus on a single primary relationship. Likewise, in a series of open-ended conversations with children between 2 and 5 years of age, Pitcher (1974) reported that girls focused on people more vividly and realistically and identified with the personalities involved; while boys often spoke of material objects and their capacity for movement and manipulation.

In an interesting classroom experiment with girls, Paley (1975) attempted to replace traditional themes of nurturance and caretaking with more aggressive and active play. Removal of the doll corner failed to produce the intended effect; even the daughters of enlightened professional couples committed to principles of equity in child care continued to exhibit stereotypic domestic activity. They merely shifted the locus of their activity from the doll corner to the props provided by classroom animals, blocks, and the sandbox.

Finally, numerous studies have demonstrated that girls are more responsive to babies than boys are, and girls are more likely to be nurturant even when they are not officially responsible for the child (Edwards & Whiting, 1977; Feldman & Nash, 1978). Maccoby (1980) concludes that "there is considerable evidence that girls and women are more interested in infants and more responsive to them than men and boys [a re ] . . . there is also evidence that girls are more nurturant toward younger children who have grown out of babyhood but still need help and care" (p. 219).

These findings suggest that from an early age, females exhibit a distinct way of structuring their experience which may be characterized by an emphasis on people and feelings. This structure is manifest not only in their work and play but also in the conversation of young girls, their fantasies and artistic creations, and even their moral judgments.

However, a second aspect of female "goodness" must be considered. It is manifest in the girl's greater reluctance to engage in competition, aggression, and high-risk situations. Studies indicate that girls choose the dyad over the team, they prefer Cooperative or turn-taking games to competitive ones, and they inhibit their aggression rather than express it directly (McGuire & Thomas, 1975; Lever, 1976; Brodzinsky, Messer, & Tew, 1979). (Some possible antecedents of this typical female pattern will be discussed below.)

The development of these feminine traits--nurturing as well as a reluctance to compete--has typically been traced to the effects of different


socialization patterns on the development of masculine and feminine personality. Research has focused on the differential responsiveness of parent to boys and girls (Lewis & Weinraub, 1974), the effects of sex-typed teacher expectations on classroom behavior (Serbin, Connor, & Ilek, 1979), the prevalence of stereotypic role models presented in the media (Frueh, 1975), as well as on a variety of general social and cultural influences presumed to shape behavior.

Nevertheless, several controlled studies have demonstrated that children between 4 and 7 years of age exhibit a heightened level of sex-role stereotypy despite differences in social class (Guttentag & Bray, 1974), parental ideology (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974), and role modeling (Hoffman, 1974) opportunities: An extensive review of the literature led Maccoby and Jacklin (1974) to conclude the "our survey of data has revealed a remarkable degree of uniformity in the socialization of the two sexes, o . [in any case] existing evidence has not revealed any consistent process of 'shaping' boys and girls toward a number of behaviors that are normally part of our sex stereotypes" (p. 348).

Writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, Chodorow (1976) traced the development of these differences in the male and female personality to the sociological fact that women mother. According to Chodorow, the intense emotional relationship that develops between mother and son forces the young boys to repress early Oedipal feelings. Thus, the male personality "comes to be founded more on the repression of affect and the denial of relational needs and a sense of connection than feminine personality" (p. 46). Chodorow contends that since the young girls represses neither her pre-Oedipal and Oedipal attachment to her mother, nor her Oedipal attachment to her father, "she grows up with more ongoing preoccupation with internalized object relationships and with externalized relationships as well" (p. 461).

A COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

In 1966, Kohlberg introduced a quite different approach to the study of sex-role stereotypes. The primary assumption underlying his view is that basic attitudes about sex roles are not patterned directly by either biological drives or social expectations, but "by the child's cognitive organization of his social world along sex-role dimensions" (Kohlberg, 1966, p. 83).

According to this model, sex-role development begins approximately between 3 and 5 years of age with a simple cognitive judgment about gender. After this initial labeling of oneself as boy or girl, the child engages in and values the activities, objects, and attributes that are seen as representative of his or her own gender. For boys the adoption of such

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masculine attributes as strength and dominance is motivated directly by the desire for power and competence. However, noting the tendency for girls to adopt a less prestigious role, as measured by competence and power, Kohlberg (1966) was forced to conclude that there is sufficient value in such attributes as "niceness" and "attractiveness" to prevent the female from renouncing her femininity totally: "In the case of girls, feminine roles provide ample, if somewhat less, scope for power and competence mot ivat ion. . , in that the pursuit of attractiveness, goodness, and social approval is ultimately based on the same needs for successful achievement as are the more obvious masculine competence values" (p. 122).

In other words, Kohlberg argued that girls do not acquire feminine traits directly from the need to exercise power, as boys do, but indirectly, from their ability to derive a semblance of prestige through interpersonal, nurturing, and sexual skills. Why these particular attributes--the interpersonal, nurturing, and the sexual- should so consistently be accepted by women as a substitute for power and competence is an issue that Kohlberg does not address.

A CONSTRUCTIVIST MODEL OF FEMALE DEVELOPMENT

The alternative model of development that I will propose postulates a direct link between the young girl's concern for people and feelings and specific processes of cognitive development.

According to this view, the development of female attributes is rooted not merely in social expectations but also in the concepts children generate about the nature of men and women. Using concrete cues that distinguish adult men and women (such as size, childbearing capacity, and body hair), I will show that young girls generate a corresponding set of shared attributes that define their gender and shape their behavior. Viewed from this perspective, such attributes as nurturnance and interpersonal sensitivity are the inevitable result of cognitive judgments generated by young girls as they actively seek to interpret the psychological significance of biological gender.

From the constructivist point of view, not only biological or social influences shape the direction of male and female development, but also the child's interpretation of masculinity and femininity, coupled with his or her need to behave in gender-specific ways. Obviously, social and cultural influences reinforce these conceptual distinctions and often perpetuate early manifestations of gender into adult sex differences. However, the central feature of my position is that particular age-related distinctions, especially those organized around power and nurturance, originate in the primitive cognitive constructions that children use to differentiate the sexes.


Piaget (1932/1960) has described the preoperational aspects of children's thought--the ways in which aspects of external reality remain undifferentiated and causal relations are formed through subjective connections rather than through laws independent of the self:

Syncretism is the spontaneous tendency on the part of children to take things in by means of a comprehensive act of perception instead of by the detection of details, to find immediately and without analysis analogies between words or objects that have nothing to do with each other, to bring heterogeneous phenomena into relation with each other, to find a reason for every chance event; in a word, it is the tendency to connect everything with everything else . . . . (p. 4)

These cognitive process, derived from the child's egocentrism, consist of a confusion of relationships of a causal and physical nature with those of psychological origin. (p. 168).

In a study of children's spontaneous analyses of the self, Broughton (1978) found that children conceived the "self" to be a part of the body that could be described in terms of material dimensions such as size, shape, or color. Children at this level distinguish themselves from others on the basis of their physical appearances and other material attributes. Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) proposed four general developmental levels of self- understanding and noted that in the years between 4 and 7, self-understanding is physicalistic in the sense that it is chiefly descriptive of surface features.

In a study of the development of sex-role concepts (Kohlberg & Ullian, 1974; Ullian, 1976), I argued that the characteristics used by preoperational children to differentiate the sexes tend to be concrete attributes that can be easily recognized and understood at the young child's level of cognitive functioning. Children between the ages of 5 and 7 distinguished masculinity and femininity not only in relation to adult size but also along such physical dimensions as strength, depth of voice, body and facial hair, and the capacity to bear children. In a series of open-ended interviews, both boys and girls 5- to 7-years-old described men as bigger, stronger, and hairier than women, with deeper voices; the same children described women as smaller, weaker, with gentle voices and smooth skin, and able to bear children. On the basis of these cues, children at this age also stated that men had bigger brains, stronger bones, thicker skin, and louder voices. Correspondingly, women were assumed to get hurt more easily and to cry more often, because "their skin is thinner" or "their head is not as hard."

When a 6-year-old girl was asked to decide who was smarter, men or women, she replied: "A lady doesn't know so much about working in an insurance agency. (How come?)- Because a father can get more money; the father can do more things than the lady, because a lady has delicate skin and

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a man has tougher skin." When another child was asked who should care for children, she replied: "The Mother. The mother 's skin is softer than daddy's skin. And daddies have hair all over their arms and stuff."

The direct correspondence between the physical characteristics and psychological attributes of adult men and women is used to generate similar distinctions between young boys and girls. For example, when Katie, a 6-year-old girl, was asked to explain some of the differences between boys and girls, she responded in the following way:

The boy usually gets some harder projects than her, because I think boys can work stronger than girls. (Why is that?) Well, boys work on houses and sometimes they paint and sometimes they help build or get a job like doing the lawn. (How come girls don't do that?) Well, girls are afraid that they will get hurt and boys aren't. I think boys are just a little stronger than girls. (Why?) Girls usually cry harder than boys. (Why is that?) Because they get hurt.

Rose, another girl, observed:

Boys are scarier. They sort of scare girls because they think they are so great. (What makes them think that?) They think they are strong and better than girls. (Are girls more delicate?) Yes. Because she has lighter bones. The man can do anything. He could lift a weight and he won't break any bones or anything. If a woman did 100 pounds, she could break some bones, but the man couldn't.

Unable to distinguish psychological attributes from physical cues, the children inferred that women were "nicer ," "sof te r , " cried more easily, and were more capable of caring for children. The author concluded that because o f their way of organizing gender-related information, children in this age group are led to equate physical and psychological attributes. As a result, young children believe that males are powerful, dominating, scary, and tough, while women are nice, gentle, and delicate.

The preoperational child, bound by concrete perceptible appearances, also relies on concrete visible cues to sustain his or her notion of gender constancy. Even as late as 7 years of age, deviation from conventional stan- dards of dress, appearance, toys, and activities is viewed as a violation of the laws of physical reality as well as a threat to gender identity (Emmerich et al., 1977; Marcus & Overton, 1978). Since gender is exper- ienced as potentially changeable or reversible, the 5-to-8-year-old child adopts stereotypic behavior in order to establish a stable and irreversible identity.

Let us now consider the relationship of these cognitive developmental processes to the development of feminine personality. The 5-to-6-year-old girl, as is evident on all of the dimensions she uses to define her gender, is similar to the adult female. The young girl is small and relatively powerless; she has a high-pitched voice and relatively little hair on her face and body. Perhaps most important to her, she believes that she is a


mother and is capable of bearing children. Bernstein and Cowan's research (1975) on children's concepts of the origin of babies demonstrated that preoperational girls believe they have some form of baby in them. While explanations of birth range from the "stork" to more accurate descriptions of conception, the young girls believed that they were already or would inevitably be mothers.

Thus, on the basis of the physical or external features that distinguish her sex, the young girl believes she is like the woman she is ultimately to become. (This is in sharp contrast to the young boy, who differs from the adult male in all the criteria he uses to define his gender. Because he is small, relatively powerless, has a high-pitched voice, and relatively little facial and body hair, the boy is lacking or deficient in all the characteristics relevant to his own model of adult masculinity. The psychological consequences of this developmental discrepancy have been described in detail elsewhere; see Ullian, 1981.)

WHY GIRLS ARE GOOD

On the basis of these findings, our first hypothesis proposes that the young girl's belief in her eventual motherhood and her belief that she possesses other female bodily characteristics leads her to develop the interests, skills, and values that correspond to this aspect of her emerging identity. In other words, since girls believe they resemble adult women- tha t they have a natural capacity to bear children and to care for them, and that they are by nature soft-spoken, gentle, delicate, and nice--they will spontaneously develop an inclination toward people and caring for others.

With regard to female nurturance and interpersonal sensitivity, let us focus on one salient female attribute and summarize the sequence of development in the following way: The girl perceives a set of attributes that distinguish adult women (e.g., childbearing capacity); she assumes that she possesses a set of traits identical to those of adult women (e.g., she believes that she, too, has a baby); she proceeds to behave in ways that are consistent with these attributes (e.g., taking care of babies, in doll play perhaps); simultaneously, as a result of these behaviors, she adopts beliefs and attitudes that are consistent with her self-perception (e.g., she prefers doll play to blocks, and she values nurturing).

In addition to her presumed childbearing capacity, other female traits that the young girl observes, such as a soft voice and smooth skin, will also lead her to stress the nurturing and "gentle" features of the female gender.

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Kay's analysis of masculine and feminine attributes illustrates this point:

A lady is nicer than a man, because, a man sometimes sound angry, but he really isn't angry. I can tell a lady is nice because she has a nice kind of voice. Women are nicer than men, because, when my father talks, he sounds like he is always mad. But when my mother talks, she sounds like she is kind. I can tell when she is kind, she goes "hi Jane" (high pitched). (Your daddy does not?) No, he goes "hi Jane" (low voice), or hi, Butch, because my nickname is Butch."

Undoubtedly, the child's sex-role identity at this age is still a shifting and fragmentary concept. However, a feature of identity as salient as the capacity to bear children may represent a stable organizer of the child's identity and a significant determinant of her behavior. The preoccupation of girls with babies, dolls, various household items, friendships, and feelings bears testimony to the invariably of this female pattern.

If the sequence described above is accurate, one might consider the development of feminine attributes between 4 and 7 years as part of the process of gender acquisition, with distinct content and specific developmental consequences. One might view the young girl's sex-role identity as one that emerges in relation to ano ther - -a self that develops in concentric fashion around a dependent being whose growth and welfare she ultimately determines. Connected to a life she believes exists within her, and responsible for its protection and its eventual delivery, would she not be expected early on to develop such feminine characteristics as helping, caretaking, responsibility, and attachment? The development of a personal identity in perpetual union with another being would account, moreover, for the persistent themes of attachment and separation that permeate women's experiences in real or imagined situations (Gilligan, 1982).

This position differs f rom Chodorow's (1976) explanation of female personality in an important respect. Rather than posit a lack o f differentiation between young girls and their mothers, the argument presented here links female"connectedness" to the young girl's tendency to view herself as the mother of a real or imagined child. Her assumption that she is connected, either metaphorically or physically, to another person is more likely to cause her "preoccupat ion with internalized object relations" than is the paradoxical claim made by Chodorow that a less exclusive attachment between a young girl and her mother and father should lead to a richer and more complex emotional life.

The constructivist position also differs from Kohlberg's (1966) model of sex-role development. It proposes a parallel model of development whereby the development of sex-typed attributes for both males and females results from the child's spontaneous tendency to behave in gender-related ways. According to this position, such female attributes as


nurturance, sensitivity to others, and helpfulness do not arise from a displaced need for power and competence, as Kohlberg suggests; nor do they compensate for a desire for typical "male" traits. Rather, these traits correspond to the young girl's stage-specific interpretation of femininity and to her subsequent effort to give psychological expression to her perceived gender attributes. This approach implies less conflict about gender and greater value placed upon a female role by girls, and it is consistent with much of the evidence suggesting strong same-sex preferences by girls as well as boys (Silvern, 1977).

Obviously, the preoperational concepts generated by girls between 4 and 7 years are not identical to those of older girls or adult women. With increasing age, girls become aware that motherhood is a matter of choice and that other, less stereotypic characteristics may coexist with those necessary for child care. This position suggests, however, that the way a girl thinks about her femininity in childhood may establish a pattern of skills, interests, and values with important consequences for the future development of the female personality.

This theoretical position does not ignore the role of environmental influences in shaping or reinforcing feminine stereotypes. Obviously, the organization of social roles according to sex-typed criteria provides an important source of data from which children's beliefs and values are shaped. However, the constructivist view suggests that the prelogical nature of children's thought leads them to assimilate all of the possible differences between the sexes according to tangible, physical cues and to assume that these cues, in turn, define gender. Thus, the model presented her suggests that the sex-role concepts generated by children are not externally imposed and arbitrary; rather, they represent beliefs that the child creates by confusing physical categories with psychological constructs.

THE FEAR OF BEING BAD

Another feature of the female tendency to be "good" must be considered. A consistent pattern of nonaggression, noncombativeness, and noncompetitiveness among females has been reported repeatedly in the literature. Girls tend to be more fearful in new situations, they fight less than boys and exhibit more anxiety in competitive situations (Sutton-Smith, 1965; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Cramer & Hogan, 1975).

The constructivist position suggests that this aspect of female personality may also be rooted in the set of beliefs generated by children as they seek to clarify the differences between males and females. As noted, the young girl believes that, like women, she is small, relatively powerless,

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fragile, and physically vulnerable. In contrast to males of her own age, she insists that she "gets hurt more easily," she "cannot yell as loud to get her own way," and she "cries more often" (Ullian, 1976). When Jane, a 5-year-old girl, is asked who is better at sports, she replies:

Oh, the boy. He is harder and tougher and he knows how to play baseball: girls try to learn, like I am now. (Will you get as good as a boy?) No because boys are tougher than girls. They were born that way. (What do you mean?) See, a girl is more delicate. Maybe because a lady has more thin skin than a man, a man has hard skin. (Is boys ' skin different than yours?) Yes. Because it 's brown and it has all this black stuff, hair, and I don ' t have so much.

Even the definition of "nice" behavior is directly linked to the presence or absence of physical aggression, as the following comment about playground behavior by another 5-year-old girl illustrates:

"Some boys aren't very nice. If you tell them not to start jumping on you, they keep doing it. They think they are so great. I don't really think much of boys. Some of them think they are so great. I don't like them. Girls are nicer and men are sort of mean."

As a result of the young boys' "roughness" and their capacity to frighten the girls, "niceness" is defined as a female attribute that is expressed through an absence of aggression as well as through the corresponding attributes of modesty, pacifism, and submission. These findings--combined with those from studies in which males were consistently viewed as darker, dirtier, more dangerous, and more dominant than females (Kagan, 1961; Best, Cloud, & Robertson, 1977; Rothbaum, 1977)--suggest that the young girl's view of herself as physically vulnerable may represent another aspect of her identity that influences the course of later behavior and attributes.

On the basis of her belief that she lacks "toughness" and physical strength corresponds to power and dominance, the girl is more likely to adopt a set of values that minimizes the probability of aggressive competition and confrontation. This sequence of development may be summarized in the following way: The girl perceives a set of attributes that distinguishes adult men (e.g., strength, power, and size); she perceives a set of attributes that distinguishes adult women (e.g., timidity and fragility); she assumes that she possesses a set of physical traits comparable to adult women (e.g., she is small, fragile, and easily hurt); she proceeds to behave in ways that correspond to these attributes (e.g., avoiding danger, strenuous physical activity," and competition); and she adopts a self-concept that corresponds to her imagined physical attributes.

On the basis of her self-concept of fragility and her corresponding notion that boys are "bossy," rough, loud, and aggressive, she is inclined to avoid situations requiring strenth or aggression, fearing for her own safety


and the safety of others. Unlike her male counterpart who believes he must be "tough" and powerful (like the adult male) and who learns to manage his aggression through sports, games, and aggressive play, her view of herself as fragile is inconsistent with expressions of power and dominance. Thus, the safety of the doll corner and avoidance of aggression or conflict are preferable to the slaying of dragons and the conquest of danger. Studies of the play and fantasy life of young girls repeatedly reveal this distinction (Cramer & Hogan, 1975; Paley, 1975; Brodzinsky et al., 1979).

Contemporary psychologists have theorized that girls and adult women avoid aggressive or competitive situations because they fear the consequences of social isolation (Horner, 1972). The fact that successful or highly competitive women confront social rejection is undeniable (Bernard, 1964). However, if female psychology is shaped at all by the beliefs and experiences of childhood, then the avoidance of power, competition, and aggression may grow out of the belief in female vulnerability that is established in childhood and reinforced through experience.

The factor of "hurting others" as well as fear of being hurt is a recurrent theme that emerges in studies of girls and women in relationship to others. Responsibility for the welfare of others has been described as a distinctly female concern in the moral judgments of girls and women (Gilligan, 1979). However, analysis of data on girls and women reveals a striking preoccupation with their potential for hurting others, often at the expense of their own emotional or financial well-being (Gilligan, 1982). A similar theme regarding their potential for "hurting others" emerges from interviews with young girls and women in relation to work, family, and interpersonal relationships (Miller, 1976; Ullian, 1982).

I propose that this tendency may arise from a distorted view that the young girl spontaneously constructs about the extent and limits of her own physical power. The lack of experience young girls have in feeling they are strong and powerful (and thereby learning to manage their aggression in a realistic fashion) may contribute to the difficulties they later experience around the exercise of power and the pursuit of individual goals. This fragile or fearful self, in contrast to the maternal or caretaking self, is manifest in her withdrawal from danger and competition, as well as in her greater anxiety about failure, her lower level of aspirations, and her greater tendency to avoid risk (Stein & Bailey, 1973; J. Parsons, Ruble, Hodges, & Small, 1976).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

If we consider the notion of a distinct mode of female functioning--an interpersonal affective orientation manifested in the play

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and games of childhood as well as in the work and relationships of adulthood--we can identify two separate yet inseparable forces that contribute to this female pattern. These forces originate in the sex-role concepts of preoperational children who use (and confuse) external cues to define their gender.

One major source of "goodness" is tied to the young girl's sense of connection with another life and her subsequent concern with caretaking and responsibility for the welfare of others. Her tendency to view herself primarily in relation to other people has been clearly demonstrated in studies with children and noted in recent studies of adult development.

However, while the female tendencies toward docility, nonaggression, and avoidance of competition resemble the pattern of interpersonal sensitivity and nurturance described above (and are often confused with it), they may derive from a different source. According to the position taken here, these tendencies arise from the young girl's belief that she is physically vulnerable and from her related anxieties and inhibitions.

If we ask, therefore, why girls remain in the doll corner instead of roughhousing with blocks, or why they worry about losing friends instead of winning the game, we must consider at least two psychological forces: the need to be good--a need that arises from a definition of the self as mother-caretaker, with its corresponding themes of protection, help, nurturance and empathy--and the fear of being bad--arising from a self viewed as fragile and defenseless, fearful of aggression, and concerned with potential harm to self and others.

Similarly, if we seek to make sense of the conflicts in women's lives--the nature of their relationships and their moral judgments (GiUigan, 1979), their need to seek fulfillment through others (Miller, 1976), the subordination of personal needs in order to protect a more vulnerable male ego (Ullian, 1981), and the fear of success in competitive situations (Homer, 1972), we must first examine the psychological consequences of a self-concept built upon a childhood notion of weakness or vulnerability. Phenomena such as these cannot be explained merely as neurotic symptoms nor as superior moral constructions. Rather, each of these expressions of female personality must be viewed as a complex interplay between the need to care for others and the fear of aggression--between the desire to be good and the fear of being bad.

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Block, J. Conceptions of sex-role: Some cross-cultural and longitudinal perspectives. American Psychologist, 1973, 28, 512-526.

Brodzinsky, D., Messer, S., & Tew, J. Sex differences in children's expression and con- trol of fantasy and overt aggression. Child Development, 1979, 50, 372-379.

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