"Boys and Girls" and Gender Roles

Gender roles have been around for so long that it is sometimes easy to overlook them. It's true, boys and girls are notably different from each other, and not just in the biological sense. The short story "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro explores the stereotypical gender roles, and how limiting and emotionally upsetting society's standards can be for a young woman. The protagonist, who remains nameless throughout the story, is an ambitious and lively girl living on a fox farm. In the beginning of the story she is unfamiliar with the pressure of being a woman, and considers herself no different than her younger brother, Laird. As her tale progresses we see her repeatedly in situations where a boy is viewed as more valuable than a girl. She begins to comprehend what it means to be a female,  "It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment." The narrator learns that working beside her father on the farm is only tentative, until her brother becomes old enough to take her place. Her "rightful" place, it seemed, is in the house with her mother: cooking, cleaning and sewing. She hates it inside the house and the kitchen, she would much rather be outdoors helping her father with the foxes. To the narrator "work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in [her] father's service, was ritualistically important.” This is the opposite of what society believes a girl her age, or any age, should think. The narrator becomes conflicted between what she feels and what is expected of a young woman. By the end of the story, she accepts that she is different from a boy and she recognizes differences in herself. In her bedtime stories she does not dream of being the hero anymore, but of being rescued by a boy. The narrator accepts the role society had decided for her from birth, the role her family has pressed onto her; she accepts that "She is only a girl."