ABSTRACT
Encountering the unpublished papers of Joseph Noshpitz, who conducted these studies in the early 1980s, we are struck that both this chapter and the next offer a rich description of the self-presentation of women self-identifying as tomboys. Joe Noshpitz was far ahead of his times in having been one of the first people to systematically study tomboys using a structured interview. His work was contemporaneous with the first published systematic studies of tomboys by Katherine Williams (Williams, Green, & Goodman, 1979). Those included in Noshpitz’s study were adults aged 20 to 40 who simply said that they had gone through a tomboy phase growing up. Most were professionals or support staff, such as secretaries and administrators; that is, they were working women. The interviews bear the imprint of the 1980s rise of feminism, and the new awareness of the complexity of femininity.
