Boys and Girls

"Boys and Girls" stood as a symbol, in my mind, for women's rights, and women's equality in society. This story displayed the hardship and success of descending into adulthood. After reading this story, I think that gender stereotyping and relationships definitely play a role for many children in becoming an adult. Because the narrator was unnamed, I assumed, as playing a role in the story's theme, that the narrator is undignified as an individual because of her sex. Since her brother's name is Laird, which is another name for "Lord", I came to the conclusion that by the virtue of his gender alone, will one day become a master, like his father.

The narrator even states that she would rather work outside helping her father with the foxes, rather than stay inside helping her mother with "dreary and peculiarly depressing" work in the kitchen. It's significant that she calls her mother's housework "endless" and her father's work outside "ritualistically important" (Munro 513). The narrator kind of hypocritically states that her mother "was not to be trusted" (Munro 513). She is now stereotyping her mother as she wished others would not do to her. She goes on to say that "you could not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were not to be known" (Munro 513).

One point that just bestowed me was when the narrator said that she did not expect her father to listen to anything her mother said and did not expect her brother to do the work she does. She is, again, assuming she is great and her brother is not, yet her mother is not important simply for being a woman. This story has quite conflicted views and because of that, I loved it. I found "Boys and Girls" very interesting.