ABSTRACT
The continued reproduction of unambiguously differentiated gender roles by children, evident from kindergarten play, through the gender separation of middle school into the highly genderized life of high school students, presents a puzzle to all those concerned with gender socialization. Despite major changes in power relationships between the genders in contemporary society and the influence of these on adult lives, children continue to reproduce behaviors evocative of earlier social arrangements. Recent work in elementary school shows that children insist on a clearcut separation of gender roles in elementary school life and tease their peers who want to crossboundaries (Thorne, 1993). Such boundary drawing becomes even stronger in high school with its ritual divisions between boys and girls, who often belong to separate, named groups, and where such group divisions have persisted through several generational cohorts of students (Eckert, 1988). Psychologists and sociologists who long ago rejected a simplistic biological determinism as the explanation for gender differentiated roles find these phenomena particularly challenging.
