My father asked me if he had ever told me I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. He never did. But the messages we pass on to our children aren’t always conscious. What follows is not meant to be a critique of my parents, simply a notation of how we foster different attitudes for our daughters than we do our sons.
Our family started collections for my brother and I. His: model airplanes and baseball caps. Mine: perfume bottles and dolls. We both went shooting with our father. I was never given my own gun; my brother was.