ABSTRACT
Although the umbrella term “child” was originally gendered female in early modern England, recent scholars such as Jennifer Higginbotham have observed that as “girl” and “boy” became the default terms for female and male children, the term “child” itself became increasingly gender-neutral, signaling the beginning of a shift away from cultural perceptions of childhood as a feminine stage into two separate worlds of boyhood and girlhood.1 Indeed, Higginbotham points out that when Philippe Ariès declares that “boys were the first specialized children,”2 he “misses the point that the special demarcation of boys did not mean that girls were excluded from the idea of childhood,” especially given that the transformation of the vocabulary of childhood over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “reflected a growing sense of the need for language to mark more clearly the biological sex of female children.”3 Moreover, Will Fisher makes the instructive observation that “masculinity was not only constructed in contrast to femininity, but also in contrast to boyhood; as a result, we can say that men and boys were quite literally two distinct genders.”4
