{"id":666,"date":"2010-11-15T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=666"},"modified":"2012-09-11T10:18:29","modified_gmt":"2012-09-11T09:18:29","slug":"an-alphabet-of-femininism-7-g-is-for-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2010\/11\/15\/an-alphabet-of-femininism-7-g-is-for-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"An Alphabet of Feminism #7: G is for Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

G<\/h6>\n

GIRL<\/h2>\n

And alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
\n– Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop<\/strong> (1841)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

‘Twas brillig<\/strong><\/p>\n

Picture the linguistic landscape of the thirteenth century. Full of bastard Latin, Anglo-Norman, smatterings of Anglo-Saxon crudities, and a few words whose origins nobody knows. Sometime around 1290, the word girl <\/em>appeared, used to signify \u2018a child or young person of either sex\u2019, alongside clarifying compounds knave girl <\/em>and gay girl <\/em>(\u2018boy\u2019 and, er, \u2018girl\u2019 respectively). Like some tantalisingly similar words – lad, lass, boy <\/em>– its provenance is unclear, although some cunning linguists would have it derive ultimately (via some torturous and dark history) from the Greek ‘parthenos’ (=’virgin’). But yes, uh huh, you read right: in its earliest incarnation, girl <\/em>was ungendered. In fact, it was not until the 1530s that its more specific application to XX chromosomes surfaced, with girl <\/em>meaning \u2018a female child\u2019 – and even then, it still had its enduring reference to ‘a roebuck in its second year’, with roebuck<\/em> being, naturally, the male equivalent of roe<\/em> (a deer, a female deer).<\/p>\n

Dear, dear<\/h3>\n
\"john<\/a>

John Ruskin aged three and a half, by James Northcote (1882), National Portrait Gallery, London (In storage: clamour for its return!)<\/p><\/div>\n

So the Sylvanian Deer Family would be made up of a roebuck, a roedeer, and, perhaps a (male) girl. Not actually that uncommon: after all, we classify animals via male, female and child (calf, cow, bull; pup, bitch, dog) with a third, genderless young’un alongside their sexually mature parents all the time.<\/p>\n

Here comes an art history aside to girl’<\/em>s ambiguous beginnings: glancing, for example at Queen Victoria with her family<\/a>, a \u00a0young prince of Spain<\/a>, or even an English\u00a0merchant family of the 1740s<\/a>, the gender identities of the under-6s seem, well, fluid at best. I should add that, in the case of the Spanish Royal Family, the eldest prince (Baltasar Carlos<\/a>) leaps straight from painterly petticoats to politically potent riding gear and full armour with apparently no mid-point whatsoever. Another prince, the young Charles II, appears in full armour aged twelve, although in his case there were excellent practical reasons for the switchover (lol revolution). There is also James Northcote’s portrait (right) of John Ruskin, art historian, antiquarian, arguable founder of the National Trust, patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and sometime author – aged three and a half. Manly indeed.<\/p>\n

This could speak of a reluctance to bother gendering the child until that gender could be of socio-political relevance (something infant mortality could only have encouraged), but that is not to say it went un-bemoaned by the children themselves. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke complained bitterly of his mother’s reign of sartorial terror: ‘I had to wear beautiful long dresses, and until I started school I went about like a little girl. I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll<\/a>.’ I am also reminded of the story that hit headlines in Sweden about a couple who refused to gender their two-year-old at all, for fear of falling into gender’s traps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Not yet a woman<\/h3>\n
\"Alice<\/a>

Beggar children are in. Alice Liddell, photographed by Lewis Carroll.<\/p><\/div>\n

But, as we may ask of this Swedish child, what happens to girl <\/em>once its gender has been set? Well, one of its first gender-specific definitions is,\u00a0as of 1668, \u2018a maid of all work\u2019;\u00a0sweetheart<\/em> or mistress<\/em> makes its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century (as in the popular song \u2018The Girl I Left Behind Me’); and it appears in compound reference to prostitution \u2013 a kind girl, girl about town<\/em>. These are all potentially belittling terms for female-orientated stations in life, which can nonetheless retain a flattering appeal \u00ad\u2013 think Patsy Stone<\/a> and her insistence on being referred to as ‘mademoiselle’; or, more psychotically, think Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n

So, actually, as girl <\/em>grows up, it sexes up: indeed, once gendered firmly female, its sexual identity becomes more complicated, and this is something that seems to go alongside a developing idea of what early youth actually is<\/em>. It is only really with the Victorians that the \u2018cult of childhood\u2019 really came into being, upheld by luminaries such as J. M. Barrie, Ruskin himself, Charles Dickens and, of course, Lewis Carroll.<\/p>\n

This is where whispers start snaking around history, and it feels fitting that the term\u00a0paedophilia erotica <\/em>did not come into diagnostic existence until 1886, for this was arguably the first time childhood was regarded with fetishism (as later underlines the actions of ‘poet and pervert’ Humbert Humbert, in Nabokov’s now-notorious Lolita<\/em>).\u00a0Girls<\/em> suddenly become not simply small genderless adults, but (feminine) symbols of what adulthood is seen to lack: innocence, purity and beauty, as in Dickens’\u00a0The Old Curiosity Shop<\/em>, whose\u00a0Little Nell loves to say her prayers. Dickens’ adult females fare little better, of course, and the Victorian infantalisation of women proves girl <\/em>in grown-up action, and a topic for another day.<\/p>\n

This, then, is the context for Carroll’s photography, but it is important to note that, whatever their evidence for something darker, their subject matter was by no means original: Carroll’s contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, produced many similar images<\/a> (worksafety check: mild nudity) that played on girlish simplicity for typically Victorian effect.<\/p>\n

[She was] the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed.<\/p>\n

He wondered if she was a real live person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops.<\/p>\n

– Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1862-3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A strange journey, then: a word that commences genderless and ends sexualised and technically belittling (‘the checkout girl’), but without much perceptible backlash from the female population. Are we not all Patsy Stones?<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Image:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

NEXT WEEK: H is for Hysteria<\/strong><\/p>\n