trust girls and to praise them for being good, whereas the boys were all treated as discipline problems. Ruth Hartley ["Sex-Role Pressures and the Socialization of the Male Child". in Joseph H. Pleck and Jack Sawyer, Eds., Men and Masculinity NJ: Prentice-Hall 1974, pp. 7-13] writes,

. . . the demeanor of the women with whom he is forced to associate is often such that the boy feels that women just don't like boys. We found many indications of this belief in our subjects' responses to a hypothetical adoption story that they were asked to complete. Almost invariably mothers were assumed to prefer girls to boys. The reasons given for this were drawn from the boys' own experiences with their mothers: "She says boys are rough." "A girl wouldn't be so wild - she would not run so much and play rough . . . a girl is more kind."
(p. 9)


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