differenceblog, posts by tag: daughters - LiveJournal

The Daily Mail (UK, 2007) reports on research (publication pending) by Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham (UK) that indicates that women are attracted to men who resemble their fathers, mediated by their relationship with their father. Girls who like their fathers are more likely to be attracted to men who resemble them. Boothroyd was also a contributor on Cornwell (2006), which suggested that rate of sexual development played a role in the assortative mating choices.

The idea that people are attracted to mates who are like their parents is hardly a new one, going back at least to Sigmund Freud. However, most modern research has focused on the ways that people are attracted to mates that behave like their parents, rather than physically resemble them. For example, Olivetti et al (2002) found that men whose mothers had worked or were educated were more likely to marry educated, working women themselves.

[edit, 11:18am: See also Perrett et al (2002), who found that children born to older parents were less impressed by youth in rating attractiveness in potential mates.]

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Obviously I have been using the wrong keywords, because despite all of the times I've heard people say that men marry their mothers or women marry their fathers (metaphorically speaking), finding any research that addresses this issue from a non-Freudian perspective is proving nearly impossible, and there's only so much castration theory I can read before breakfast. This is another case where I'm putting it out to you folks. If you're aware of any other sources discussing physical resemblance between parents and mates, I'd love to see them.

Julie Henry reports in the Telegraph (UK) that by age four, "when left to their own devices, boys play pirates and girls play house." The article focuses largely on a research published in European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (not indexed online, apparently), by Sue Rogers. The Telegraph article quotes the study as warning against attempting to alter children's play patterns: "Adult intervention to move children on from gender stereotypical play might be counterproductive and inhibit the development of play."

However, it is likely that socialization into gender roles occurs prior to age four, and the Telegraph, to its credit, acknowledges this. Idle et al (1993) found that while parents rated toys for acceptability along generally gendered guidelines, when presented with a variety, parents spent the least amount of time with "feminine" toys, and children responded with equal enthusiasm regardless of the toy presented. Hagan and Kuebli (2006) found that fathers monitors 3-4 year old daughters more closely than they did sons of the same age, whereas mothers monitored children of both sexes similarly. There was a relationship between perception of the child's risk-taking behavior and maternal monitoring.

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I had both trucks and dolls when I was a kid. While I don't remember what influences I had that inspired my play, I'm often a little disturbed by the themes that came up in it. For example, I remember vividly the day when the dump truck driver stopped at the truck stop and the waitress, played by Barbie, decided to abandon her dull life and take off with him on a life of romantic adventure. The height difference (Barbie was 11 inches tall, whereas Tonka characters were only about 4 inches tall) was a source of frequent arguments, but it was Barbie's constant nagging that eventually split up my toys. I must have been 6 or 7 at the time.

Ellwood and Jenks (2002, pdf) claim that increases in men's incomes correlates to a rise in marriage rates, but the effects of women's advances were unclear:

"In cross-sectional studies of areas and individuals, women with more economic opportunities are less likely to be married and in some cases more likely to divorce. But hazard models that follow the same woman over time seldom find this pattern. These divergent findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that improvements in women's economic opportunities discourage marriage, although they may lead women to postpone marriage." (page 18)

Lichter, LeClere, and McLaughlin (1991) suggest that marriage rates may have more to do with availability of desirable males locally than with specific economic factors (although the way in which they separate these seemingly entertwined factors is unclear). Lundberg and Rose (2003, pdf) point out that the presence of a son (as opposed to a daughter) is not only correlated with increased marital stability, but seems to shorten the time before women marry.

These data suggest that the choice to marry remains largely in the hands of women. However, the Lundberg and Rose paper seems to suggest that the welfare of a male child seems to trump the other factors when the woman makes her choice. How much of this pattern can be tied to the desire to provide male role models for sons (as opposed to daughters)? Also, at what point do men become part of the marriage decision?

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When I arrived (as a 16 year old girl) at college, I was shocked to see how many of the girls in my dorm were engaged. Even though many of these engagements were broken by Thanksgiving (and I believe I did not know anyone who was still engaged by the end of the first year), I began to feel incredibly invalidated as a woman that no one had ever proposed to me. This feeling of inadequacy built up for years as college relationships began to generate engagements, and then after college, marriages. Even into the beginning of my life as a man, I still held onto this irrational idea that if I had been a successful woman, someone would have proposed to me at least once.

So, I suppose that it is not surprising that when I heard that the Massachusetts Supreme Court was possibly going to allow same-sex marriage, I semi-jokingly proposed to my partner. His look of genuine terror made me apologize at length and explain that I was kidding. But if I had really been entirely kidding, I don't think I would have felt the weight of my long-held neurosis lift the way that it did.