Word: pogrebin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...less Mom, they say, would result in greater equality, not only for parents but also for the next generation. This is fine in theory, but the actual how-to-do-it has remained a puzzle. Now the first real guide to nonsexist child raising has appeared: Letty Cottin Pogrebin's innovative and exhaustive Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80's (McGraw-Hill; $15.95). Even the eminent Dr. Benjamin Spock, who invented modern parenting, describes the book as "essential" for rearing liberated children...
...Pogrebin, a feminist writer and a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the parental example of an egalitarian marriage is a step toward doing away with sex stereotypes, which "bang people together with a cultural sledgehammer." What is an egalitarian marriage? One in which, for starters, both spouses can correctly answer the following questions...
...Free reassures both kinds of parents, the old-fashioned ones who worry that a son who plays with dolls will be a sissy, and the new-fashioned ones who worry that a son who doesn't play with dolls will never be a caring, involved father. Nonsexist, writes Pogrebin, is not the same as unisex or sexless. It is a way of freeing individualism, of "opening all possibilities to children so they are not predestined by gender...
...sexuality be affected by whether or not Father does the dishes or Mother drives a truck? "Unwittingly, the feuding experts and conflicting experiments testify to the truth: we will never have a Sears catalogue of sex differences because human beings are too diverse for labels and measurements," writes Pogrebin. "For every trait studied, the differences within each sex are greater than the average differences between the two sexes...
...then, to help each child become not as "masculine" or as "feminine" as possible, but to "become the fullest possible person"? Some of Pogrebin's practical suggestions...