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The Two Sexes: Growing up Apart, Coming Together. By Eleanor Maccoby. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Price unknown.
In many respects, Eleanor Maccoby can be considered the godmother of developmental research examining gender differences. Her earlier worksThe Development of Sex Differences and The Psychology of Sex Differences-published in the late 60s and early 70s, significantly shaped research perspectives for several decades. Her new work entitled The Two Sexes: Growing up Apart, Coming Together, is poised to do the same. In this provocative piece, Maccoby explores the causes and consequences of a phenomenon gaining increasing attention: gender segregation. Gender segregation is the tendency for children to associate mostly with same-sex playmates. It is not a new phenomenon, and has been observed for generations and across cultures. It begins to appear in the third year of life, becomes stronger during the preschool years, and likely reaches its peak around ages 8-11. It produces two cultures of childhood, a boy culture and a girl culture, each having its own interests, interaction styles, and language rules. Maccoby's goal is to examine how and why this segregation comes about, and what the potential consequences are for adult male-female interactions as lovers, co-workers, and parents.
Maccoby's book is an intellectual feast that has much to offer both developmental and gender scholars. It makes impressive contributions on at least three fronts. First, the work is beneficial in the perspective it brings to the study of gender differences. With this book Maccoby attempts to move our understanding of gender and gender differences beyond the study of individual personality traits. Her fundamental premise is that because gendered behavior is a function of the social context in which it occurs, the strongest behavioral differences between females and males are of the group-contextual kind. The issue, then, is not that individual males, on average,...