Sherry Rose was at the Lancaster Toys "R" Us one evening last week, pushing a shopping cart that contained an orange toy digger, a small red car, a pink baby-doll carrier and a Fisher-Price medical kit with a bright pink doctor's bag.
Rose said she would have preferred a medical kit with a gender-neutral color scheme, but she couldn't find one. She said she also has searched — in vain — for a bicycle with training wheels that wasn't explicitly designed for either a boy or a girl.
The Hellam Township mother said she would like to be able to buy toys —particularly big-ticket items such as bikes — that her daughter, who's nearly 3, and her son, who's 18 months old, could share.
Pointing to a pink-and-purple confection that on closer inspection was revealed to be a toy cash register, Rose asked, "Does it have to have princesses on it?"
The question, clearly, was rhetorical.
There are girl toys and there are boy toys, and only rarely do the twain meet. For every Dirt Devil Junior play vacuum that features both girls and boys on its packaging, there are scores more toys pitched to either the sugar-and-spice crowd or the frogs-and-snails set.
In the "Free to Be ... You and Me" 1970s, as feminists were pushing against traditional male-female roles, there was some clamor for gender-neutral toys. But over time, gender-neutral toys came more and more to be confined to small, independent toy shops and educational stores.
In more recent years, merchandise meant for girls has been marketed using the language of the girl-power movement, said Fabienne Darling-Wolf, an assistant professor at Temple University who teaches courses on gender and media.
Now, however, gender roles are as firmly entrenched as ever in the toy aisles of major retailers, say Darling-Wolf and other academics. And parents who shop for toys agree.
Suzanne Reed, a Hempfield Township mother of two, said she wants her little ones to grow up with a "balanced perspective." So she searched high and low for a baby doll for her son when he was 2. "For the life of me, I couldn't find one," she said.
Reed said it would be nice if the aisles stocked with domestic role-playing toys, such as kitchen utensils and play foods and doll strollers, were a more gender-neutral zone.
"It's not very subtle," said David Sadker, a renowned researcher on gender bias in education, and a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. "You'd have to be in deep denial to walk into a toy store and not see what's going on."
Sadker believes that Americans are struggling with the advances made by girls and women in recent years.
Some adults are genuinely worried about how boys are faring these days, he said, but some conservatives see progress as a "zero-sum game," and believe that the gains made by females have come at the expense of males.
Promoting toys along gender-specific lines is one way of reinforcing traditional roles for boys and girls, he said, noting, "Toys are the messages we choose to teach or not to teach."
Alison Kibler, an assistant professor of American and women's studies at Franklin & Marshall College, had her students read a book about Barbie for a course on women and popular culture.
Barbie has been the doyenne of the girl toy aisles for decades, and G.I. Joe has been around since the 1960s. So Kibler is keenly aware — both as an academic and as a mom — that the marketing of toys pitched either to boys or girls isn't new.
But, Kibler said, there seems to be an intensification of the trend.
Last summer, "The Dangerous Book for Boys," which exalted traditional boyhood activities, rocketed to the top of best-seller lists. It was followed by the publication of "The Daring Book for Girls," a less heralded celebration of girlhood fun.
An even more dramatic example of the boy-versus-girl marketing trend can be found in Hasbro's new slogan for Tonka toy trucks: "Built for Boyhood!"
The slogan is a nod to the perception that boys are interested in construction, Kibler noted. And it seems directed at parents who don't want their sons to be, in any way, "infected with girlhood," she said.
A commercial for a Tonka Scoot 'n Scoop shows a toddler boy riding around his house on the plastic vehicle, zooming under a dining table, hurtling through a stack of pillows, chasing the family dog, and wreaking gleeful havoc. The Scoot 'n Scoop is "built around what he does naturally," according to the ad.
"Let's face it," says the voice-over. "Boys are built different. And Tonka's got the blueprint."
Another Hasbro brand, Playskool, sells the Rose Petal Cottage, a pastel playhouse, which, according to its Web site, is "made just for her, with beautiful appliances and accessories that she can arrange however she likes."
A commercial for the cottage shows a little girl placidly doing pretend housework in the house where "dreams have room to grow."
As the little girl puts laundry into a toy washing machine, a girl's voice sings, "I love when my laundry gets so clean! Taking care of my home is a dream, dream, dream!"
A columnist for the online magazine Salon observed wryly, "I'd like to write to Hasbro's ad team and point out that it's 2007."
Psychologist Mary Polce-Lynch, author of the book, "Boy Talk: How You Can Help Your Son Express His Emotions," said it would be difficult to prove that children's behavior is affected by the toys with which they play.
But different toys make different cognitive demands on children, she said, noting that blocks and construction toys help to develop visual and spatial skills, while dolls and domestic role-playing toys help to develop nurturing, more passive and more verbal skills.
There are girls who play with trucks and boys who play with dollhouses. "We shouldn't underestimate the extent to which boys and girls ignore or resist the manufacturers' message," Kibler noted.
Girls, especially little ones, have some latitude to play with toys intended for boys. "But if boys are drawn to girls' stuff, they're punished for it right away," said Polce-Lynch, noting, "A tomboy is still OK. But to be a wuss or a sissy is not OK."
The language, said Sadker, doesn't even have a direct male equivalent for tomboy.
"We can understand why a female would want to be like a man," Sadker said, noting that male characteristics are honored, while female characteristics "are lovely, but secondary."
And "girl stuff isn't as powerful," and isn't held to be as interesting as boy stuff, said Polce-Lynch.
Shelley Matt of Lititz said her two sons wouldn't be caught with a pink Nintendo. Her 5-year-old son didn't even want to carry a Strawberry Shortcake gift into a girl's birthday party recently. "He was embarrassed carrying a girl's gift," Matt said.
Polce-Lynch understands why some parents are reluctant to let their sons play with girl toys — they don't want their boys to be social outcasts, she said. Fathers, especially, "know what it's like to be punished for stepping outside that gender-role script," she noted.
Still, there is a cost to insisting that girls play with girl toys and boys play with boy toys, Polce-Lynch believes. "We shape future choices, we communicate to our children what's acceptable and what's not acceptable," she maintained.
In an ideal world, she said, children would play with the toys to which they are drawn.
"Toys should match children's interests and skills," she said. "That would just be a wonderful guide for parents. It validates who these little people are, rather than who we're trying to make them be."
Darling-Wolf said it remains a matter of debate whether there are biological differences in the way boys and girls play. Because adults put children into either pink or blue worlds from birth, they have experienced years of gender stereotyping by the time they reach kindergarten, she said.
A mother of two daughters, Darling-Wolf said she didn't know the sex of her kids when she was pregnant, and "it just drove people crazy because they didn't know what gifts to get ... and the moment we had girls, all of the gifts were pink."
Grownups, she said, still "perceive men and women having different roles in society, and we want to prepare them for that."
But when we don't allow children to explore all of their possibilities in play, "it really limits their imaginations, and their options," Darling-Wolf said, adding, "I do think ultimately it has an impact on how they grow up."
Suzanne Cassidy is a staff writer for the Sunday News. Her e-mail address is scassidy@lnpnews.com.
