There Are No Girl Pirate Captains Boys, Girls and the "Boy Crisis" in Preschool

This paper employs data from from a multi-year, ethnographic study of children in a diverse public preschool to destabilize some of the claims of the "boy crisis" literature (Hoff-Somers, 2000). Focusing on fine-grained analyses of events in the study context, the authors illustrate the complexity of everyday interactions between female teachers and the male and female preschoolers in their classes, as well as between the male and female preschoolers themselves. These analyses suggest that a preschool environment where all teachers are female is as patriarchally and hegemonically saturated as any other context, as both boys and girls (and teachers) are subject to, and invariably take up, powerful cultural scripts reflected in children's and other media in the larger cultural milieu. Further, we emphasize that preschool- arguably among the most "feminized" school environments-is more complex than "boy crisis" proponents present.