The course of the little girl’s gender development is, according to Freud, more circuitous. He says that she starts with a homosexual relationship, for her first love is a female. The second obstacle athwart her development is her discovery that there are people—males— with a superior sexual apparatus, and so in earliest childhood the girl is envious at not being a male and blames her mother for this deprivation. In fact, some girls believe they were not simply deprived but that they had this possession at an earlier time and were then robbed of it. If she is to become feminine, therefore, the girl must give up her hopes of ever being a male (or her fantasy that she once was one) and, resigned to this defeat, embark on a new path, femininity. To the extent she can do so she will transfer her love from the first, homosexual object to her father. In good part this process can succeed only if the girl gives up her fixation on her clitoris, which she sees only as a little penis. This becomes possible if she turns to her father in the hope that he can give her the ideal replacement for a penis, namely, a baby. If she can fantasy that this is so, she eventually becomes vaginally responsive, but that this is an uncertain process is demonstrated by the large number of women who depend on clitoral orgasm. Mature female sexuality, part of which is femininity, is therefore marked, says Freud, by the capacity for vaginal orgasm, and those women who cannot manage this are by definition unfeminine, appearances, interests, or fantasy life to the contrary.
The oedipus situation is therefore the crux of gender development. In the boy, masculinity results only if he successfully surmounts the dangers of imagined castration by his father, while in the girl the development of femininity precedes the oedipal conflict and is essential for it to occur; only when the girl becomes feminine does she give up her attachment to her mother and attempt to reach her father. This is then thwarted by her mother, who once again becomes villainous (the first time was in depriving the girl of her penis). Therefore the little girl, like the little boy, will, if successful, defer her complete heterosexuality until she is older and able to focus it on a different man from her father. Thus, masculinity in boys requires successful resolution of the oedipal situation, and femininity in girls requires only the arrival at the start of the oedipal conflict.
Because Freud saw this process as more conflict-laden and devious in girls, he felt he had an explanation for his conviction that adult female sexuality is less certain, less gratifying, and more mysterious than that of males. A curious addition to his theory was his belief that the development of little boys and little girls is about the same until the onset of the full-blown development of the oedipal situation at around five or six years, and that therefore no significant, true femininity is present in little girls younger than this. “Both sexes seem to pass through the early phases of libidinal development in the same manner. ... With their entering into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreement. We are obliged now to recognize that the little girl is a little man" (33, pp. 117118).
Some workers (for example, Malinowski [97]) have claimed that the oedipus complex is imaginary because its form is different in some societies, as in those where the genetic father’s place as the psychological father is taken by one of the mother’s kin. But so far, there are no descriptions of cultures in which the growing child does not look upward toward a large and powerful male who serves as a model for masculinity in boys and a model heterosexual object for girls, or toward a female who mothers. What varies from family to family and culture to culture is how much conflict there is in the complex, but not whether families are made up of mothers, fathers, and children each with attributes of power and sex more or less as Freud noted in Vienna.
Where at present is this theory of the development of masculinity and femininity? A new factor has been thrown into the discussion by studies on the earliest stages of gender development, which contradict Freud in several places. It has been found that certain boys, because of an oddity in child-rearing practices, are markedly feminine from their earliest days on. They have spent excessive time in intense, blissful intimacy with their mothers, and the mothers who are more likely be this close to their sons are drawn to marry distant and passive men. In general, the purer the form this constellation takes in a family, the earlier and the more ingrained and irreversible is the femininity that develops in the boy (142). On the other hand, boys who have close relationships with their fathers are found not to have mothers like this, and these boys are masculine (4).
A girl who has a distant, unloving mother but whose father is close to her develops masculinity if her father encourages her to have the same interests he does (141). A girl whose mother enjoys having a daughter and is not ashamed that her daughter has a female body and whose father encourages his daughter’s femininity will grow up feminine (80).
Whether the communications between each parent and the infant mold the child’s behavior by imprinting, classical or operant conditioning, identification, or combinations of all these is still to be thrashed out. What is demonstrated in study after study, however, is that attitudes passing between parent and infant are powerfully instrumental in creating masculinity and femininity in both sexes. This reduces the conflict (castration anxiety) aspect of gender development; in contrast to Freud’s theory, in this description conflict-free development also plays a prominent part.
A greater disagreement with classical analytic theory arises here. While it is obvious enough that the boy’s first love object is a female (his mother), in his earliest stages of life a great physical and emotional intimacy (merging) between him and his mother’s body and psyche introduces the risk of a sense of oneness with a female. And so, one of the boy's first tasks on the way to masculinity is to separate himself from his mother (chap. 8); that process can be subverted by a too intimate mother. The same intimacy does not thus endanger the little girl, for such closeness with her mother only encourages her femininity.
New data are appearing in regard to the differential handling of male and female infants by their mothers (13); in the usual case (which is more likely to produce femininity in girls and masculinity in boys), girls have more contact, physical and visual, with their mothers during the early months than boys (48). Mothers generally feel easier being intimate with their infant girls than with their boys. So, the boy does not have the straightforward heterosexual development Freud alleged. Instead, he has a major impediment on the way to heterosexuality: he must rid himself of whatever femininity he may develop in the mother-infant symbiosis. Only then, at a later stage, can he see his mother as the separate and desirable object of the classical oedipal situation (26).
And so, rather than girls being little boys, these data would predict that little girls are shaped in the direction of femininity right from the start. And that is what simple observation reveals: girls in general just are not masculine in early childhood. Clear-cut femininity is routinely seen by a year or so of age; there is no evidence that this is a facade or an imitation of femininity. Thus I cannot agree with Freud’s statement: “As we all know, it is not until puberty that the sharp distinction is established between the masculine and feminine character” (24, p. 219). We shall look into these issues further (chap. 8).
The Primacy of the Penis
Freud accepted as a given the belief that the superior sex is male. He felt this was a fact established throughout mammalia by males’ physical superiority in strength: life-or-death struggles select out males as superior because stronger. This fact, with the penis as its most compelling symbolic representation, was then reflected in mythology, folk tales, institutions of society, artistic productions, religious worship, dreams—everywhere.