Tomboys were a trend 100 years ago, but mostly to bring up the birth rate for white babies
Fear of diminishing broodstock got the gals going outdoors
“A girl should be a tomboy during the tomboy age and the more of a tomboy she is, the better,” wrote Joseph Lee, the father of the playground movement, in 1915. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist activist best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” echoed this idea. “The most normal girl is the ‘tom-boy’ — whose numbers increase among us in these wiser days, — a healthy young creature, who is human through and through.”
The turn of the 20th century was a progressive era, and Americans were not merely coming around to the idea of tomboys — child rearing experts, cultural critics, and writers were in fact championing the benefits of tomboy-ism. But while the loosening of gender strictures seemed to signal the dawn of a more egalitarian age, society’s evolving acceptance of tomboys didn’t merely spring from concern for the wellbeing of women in their own right.
“The angel in the house,” the ideal upper middle class mother, was mild and subservient, rarely outdoors, and tightly bound in a corset. The languorous look of the consumption patient was considered attractive, but this aesthetic of frailty was literally killing them. Where the wealthy Anglo-Saxon American woman was at risk, so was the white race, since a dead white woman cannot bear children. With increasing numbers of Japanese, Chinese, Eastern and Southern European immigrants pouring over the borders, upper middle-class anxiety was high. As Ohio State University historian Michelle Ann Abate writes, “In this way, tomboyism was more than simply a new childrearing practice or gender expression for the nation’s adolescent girls; it was a eugenic practice or, at least, a means to help ensure white racial supremacy.”
Gilman’s advocacy for tomboy-ism and female physical fitness was part and parcel of her nativism. She was alarmed by the increasing number of “degenerate” immigrants coming to “pollute” the American citizenry. A proponent of female physical fitness after being raised by an invalid mother, she practiced rigorous exercise routines: running, weightlifting, rope climbing, vaulting, and jumping. At the height of her career, she was advocating for female economic independence, female physical fitness, women’s participation in the public sphere, and stricter immigration laws. Her 1923 essay “Is America too Hospitable?” voiced anxieties about races mixing. “If you put into a melting pot promiscuous shovelfuls of anything that comes handy you do not get anything out of it of value,” she argued.
The tomboy, or “the outdoors pal,” soon became a staple of popular culture. Already beloved from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, tomboy characters sprang up everywhere: from the works of Henry James to Willa Cather’s Tommy, the Unsentimental (1896). The tomboy became a regular star of the screen as well, in films such as Miss Tomboy and Freckles (1914), The Tomboy (1921), and Some Tomboy (1924). By WWII, the tomboy novel was fully its own genre.
In 1916, Good Housekeeping ran an article, “Your Girl at Play,” singing the praises of outdoor exercise for girls; “free and untrammeled, resplendent in her healthful vigor with a wise outlet for every girlish impulse — that should be your girl at play; play that prepares her little by little to burst from girlhood into womanhood, like a beauteous nymph from the sea.” The author, a woman, begins the article with an idyllic scene. She is walking on a beach with a doctor when they came across a group of teenage girls gathering sticks and pebbles, playing by the seashore. The doctor says solemnly, “I am thinking not what a story or what a picture they’ll make, but what mothers they will make … And to think of the physiques built by climbing rocks, carrying wood, making an oven, all this in the glorious air. Gracious, what men they are going to bear in ten years more!” The author agrees, “Your girl’s work tomorrow — which we all hope may be motherhood — depends in no small measure upon her play today.”
But many advocates of tomboyism and female physical fitness worried that unleashing girls’ tomboy tendencies might actually undermine the original child-rearing intent. If girls were allowed to remain tomboys for too long, they might not be interested in walking down the aisle or carrying babies, and would maybe even become lesbians. These fears were realized in Gilman’s own life. She was known to have three heated relationships with women, though only one was physical, and, a reluctant mother, she shocked the public when she sent her daughter to live with her ex-husband. In her utopian novel Herland, the women choose not to become mothers. The solution to these fears was that girls should be tomboys for a period, but then they should stop. Lee defined “the tomboy age,” as between eight and 13. “It is not a perpetual tomboy we are trying to produce,” he wrote. Even Gilman in her advocacy of tomboyism, added that girls should be “not feminine till it is time to be.”
Many of the novels and films that appear during this period are nearly schizophrenic in their messaging about gender norms exactly for this reason. The heroines who originally subvert convention suddenly embrace them, their stories “conclud[ing] with the all-too-familiar trope of wedding bells and baby cries,” as Abate writes. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the tomboy heroine from Little House on the Prairie marries Almanzo. Jo from Little Women marries Professor Bhaer. In the 1942 film Woman of the Year, Tess, a pants-wearing career woman played by Katharine Hepburn renounces it all when her husband becomes dissatisfied with her hectic lifestyle. The movie ends with Tess in the kitchen, trying and mostly failing to make her husband breakfast. (The feminine intuition has clearly been suppressed perilously long, as the coffee boils over and something gelatinous threatens to explode on the stove.) “I’m going to give up my job. I’m going to be your wife,” she says desperately. The movie ends with Tess refusing an appointment to launch a battleship and her husband chasing away her personal assistant, after which they embrace and presumably live happily ever after.
On some level, this fear of the woman who does not outgrow her tomboyism still exists, with Jessi Klein noting in her 2016 memoir You’ll Grow Out of It, “nobody likes a tom man.” It calls to mind the slew of celebrities like Paris Hilton or Keira Knightley who claim to have been tomboys as they glide down the red carpet in stilettos and designer dresses. But as any tomboy past or present will tell you, while tomboy approval was manufactured, they have always existed regardless of whether society nurtured or constrained them. Those who feel “free and untrammeled, resplendent in her healthful vigor,” once liberated, may not listen when you tell them to stop, even if the white race is endangered.
