It begins long before we're born; in the days when parents-to-be begin to speculate about whether the child they're expecting will be a girl or a boy. Pink or blue? Baseball mitt or baby doll? Barbie or G.I. Joe?

While America has been the scene of dramatic changes in the lives of women during the twentieth century, the fact remains that it is often the boy child who is considered the prize; the luckier birth; the being charged with the duty of carrying on the family name.

Despite tremendous strides in the struggle for equality between men and women, cultural assumptions about the proper roles of male and female endure.

"Snakes and snails and puppy dogs' tails — that's what little boys are made of," goes an old nursery rhyme. And the girl? "Sugar and spice and everything nice — that's what little girls are made of."

Trouble arises when flesh and blood human beings try to live up to that one dimensional ideal. "I was supposed to be the princess; the good girl," said New Jersey artist Sylvia Mann. "I was supposed to do it right."

What her family didn't know was that at the age of nine, Mann had been repeatedly sexually abused by a male teacher.

It was not the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to fairy-tale princesses.

Though she transferred to a new school the following year, the damage came with her. "I never felt good enough," she recalled.

In high school, Mann said, "I became really quiet and let the guys overwhelm me in every way, shape or form," she said. "I always set myself up as a victim."

She kept silent about the sexual abuse until she was 19. When she finally told her parents, they didn't believe her. She began to doubt her memories, too — until she attended a high-school reunion where she talked with two other girls who had been similarly abused by the same teacher.

"All women experience oppression," says therapist Jacqueline Hudak, MEd., of Family Therapy Associates, Red Bank, New Jersey. "There is no culture that is not a patriarchy. Women get oppressed, or have less access to privilege than men do.

The evidence of that oppression is so deeply implanted in the culture that women are often unconscious of the extent of it," Hudak says. In one of her women's therapy groups, Hudak shows video clips of films as seemingly innocuous as "The Little Mermaid," that illustrate some of the potentially destructive cultural messages given to women.

"In the Little Mermaid, it's the fact that she has to give up her voice," says Hudak. "It's giving up yourself for a relationship. Everyone in the group connected with that. It's just unbelievable what happens to women when they see this stuff. I think it can be invaluable."

Teacher and counselor Joyce Block of Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, remembers fondly her girlhood years as her father's "little sidekick."

He had wanted a boy, Block recalled. Thwarted by nature, he simply made his daughter his honorary son. "He called me Butch Maguire," she said. "When I was little, I would drive with him in his tow truck. I went hunting with him. I liked everything but the kill."

About to take aim at a rabbit one day, her father put the gun down when Block ordered him not to shoot the bunny.

Emotionally supported by two loving parents, Block's world took a tumble when she was sent to the far more conventional environment of school for the first time.

"I was scared. I was frightened," she recalled. "Every day, as soon as my parents left me there, I'd go back home a different way so they wouldn't catch me." Her parents told her that if she didn't want to go to school, she would have to leave home. Her parents packed her suitcase and watched as she went out the door. Much later, she would discover that the suitcase was full of wire hangers.

"I remember walking to the corner and it was a real busy street and I didn't want to cross it. I knew I had no choice. I walked back home. I remember saying to myself, 'I'll go to school, but they'll never get me. They'll never get me.'"

It was to be the defining moment of Block's life; a moment that ultimately led to her decision to become a teacher.

Years later, she wrote a poem about that moment.

Block vowed not to become a homemaker like her mother, but to express her creativity and be out in the world like her father.

She organized a mother/daughter dinner at school, choosing the event as the forum at which to appear all in black, climb a ladder and read her "gut-wrenching poetry" out loud.

"That was my 'coming out,'" Block said. "My mother thought it was great."

More often, rather than being the star of the show, girls are thrust into supporting roles as caretakers.

And because women become accustomed to that role very early on, Block notes, they may have trouble setting boundaries as adults and risk losing themselves in the process of caretaking others. "Women know how to go into another person's frame of reference, but they don't know how to step out," she says. The problem women have to solve is "How do you stay connected to yourself and move back and forth across the boundaries?"

The situation could be as simple as not being able to end a telephone conversation with a talkative friend or as complex as attempting to maintain a sense of self when in a relationship with an overbearing man.

Women in such circumstances need to keep in mind that they have a choice, Block notes.

But the caretaking habit is often ingrained at mother's knee. "I was the second oldest in a large family and my mother was constantly stressing that my sister and I had to be responsible for the others," said Marie Cleary, a professional writer who grew up in an upscale neighborhood in Connecticut. "I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I always had to take care of my brothers and sisters. I was taught that that was essential to a woman's character; that that's what a woman's role was: To take care of others."

Now in her mid-forties, Marie was about 11 when she began to be troubled by differences in the way boys and girls were treated.

In school, the teacher had distributed a weekly newsletter for boys and a weekly newsletter for girls to the class. The newsletters were very different

"Theirs was all about how to set goals and achieve them," Marie recalled. "It had goalposts on the cover. Ours was about how to act, and what your manners were. I resented it then and I never stopped. I didn't realize how much it affected me not to have learned to set goals until I was well into my working life. I had never been taught the importance of a long-range plan.

Girls were taught to just accept our situation, whatever it might be."

In high school, Marie began to play the game familiar to many girls: Let the boy think he's smarter than you. "I began to feel very oppressed," she said.

The idea of passive acceptance can set the stage for later victimization in the form of "learned helplessness": the inability to act in our best interests.

According to a study of 1,100 adults between the ages of 25 and 75 by psychologists Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, and Carla Grayson, PhD, both of the University of Michigan, and Judith Larson, PhD, of Atherton, California, women's lower social power contributes to chronic strain and rumination (chronically and passively thinking about feelings).

"Failing to do what one can to overcome stressful situations such as an unfulfilling marriage or an inequitable distribution of labor at home perpetuates these situations," the authors noted.

That sense of powerlessness drains people of the motivation, persistence and problem-solving skills necessary to improve their lives.

The psychologists concluded that women need to develop problem-solving skills to take the place of unproductive rumination.

In her book, Meeting At The Crossroads, (Harvard University Press, 1992), Harvard University Professor Carol Gilligan detailed the results of her five-year study of pre-adolescent and teenage girls. She found that as girls enter adolescence, they begin to "go underground," submerging their own powerful personalities under a cultural mask of traditional femininity.

For many girls, the advent of adolescence brings with it the loss of a sense of control.

Several women interviewed for this article reported incidents where boys curious about the changing bodies of their former female buddies delighted in snapping their bra straps.

When girls complained, they were told, "He's doing that because he likes you."

Sandra Malone, a special events planner who grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, remembers feeling threatened and confused at the age of 12 when boys in passing cars began whistling and catcalling as she walked down the sidewalk. "It was a real turning point," she said. "I was still a little kid. That was my first consciousness that I was changing, feeling threatened walking down the street."

For many girls, the onset of menstruation can be a rocky introduction to womanhood.

"When I was growing up, it was called the curse," said Thea Killian, a Sarasota, Florida, children's entertainer. "It somehow related back to Eve, like giving birth in pain for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and being sent out of Eden.

"I now believe that when a girl gets her menstrual period the first time, we should celebrate and give her a party. Some ritual should be done to mark her new status."

The life-changing of menstruation event was often acknowledged by parents in only the most rudimentary fashion. "I got this real strong message that it was an unclean state," said Marie. "My mother avoided talking about anything sexual."

According to a study published by the American Psychological Association in 1998, between the ages of 11 and 15, girls' rates of depression rise dramatically while the rate for boys increases only slightly.

In their study of 615 San Francisco Bay area adolescents in grades six, eight and ten, psychologists Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, and Joan S. Girgus, PhD, found that by age 18, females have twice the rate of depression of males.

The study also noted that while there were no gender differences in worries about school, relationships with parents or what to do when they are older, girls at all three grade levels worried more about "appearance, friends, personal problems, romantic relationships, problems with family, what kind of person they are, being liked by other kids and being safe."

"Girls raised with an emphasis on care taking and approval-seeking tend to become adults at risk of being abused," says Beverly Hills psychologist Lucy Papillon, author of the book, When Hope Can Kill.

And because of an upbringing focused on the needs of others, women may suffer from "learned helplessness," which makes them unable to extract themselves from abusive or neglectful relationships.

Dr. Papillon began exploring the phenomenon when she found herself in that same situation. "I could not figure out for myself why I was behaving the way I was with this inappropriate relationship," she said. "I couldn't get a handle on it." Once she delved deeply into the reasons behind her behavior, she was able to extract herself from a bad situation. "Until then you're just sort of walking around in the dark," she said. "You're kind of immobilized and you don't know why."

The "whys" are hidden in the patterns we develop growing up, Papillon says now. It can evidence itself in what Papillon calls "benign neglect," when a child is given no special attention in a family. "It's as if you're a piece of the furniture," Papillon says. "You're just not paid attention to. Your needs are not met."

Benign neglect sets the stage for what Papillon calls "soul mugging," those incidents that damage our self-esteem, leaving deep wounds.

"It might be when you showed (your parents) a wonderful piece of art and they just laughed," she said.

She calls such an experience soul-mugging because the pain inflicted is completely unexpected. "It's something that you don't prepare yourself for because you don't think anything is going to happen," she says. "You're unprotected. As a little girl, you're very unprotected and you have no sense of why this caretaker is acting that way."

Experiences of benign neglect in childhood set women up psychologically to find a marriage partner who will treat them the same way. "Someone unavailable, someone mean ... you define yourself as being unlovable," Pappillon says. "You pick someone who repeats those messages to you either subtly or directly. That's what you define yourself as being."

The effort to gain attention and love can lead to extraordinary struggle and stress. "I was so darn hungry for approval that I over-achieved, wearing myself out, and nothing worked," Papillon said.

Many women report having little encouragement or support when it came to establishing career goals. "You're socialized into finding a man," says Papillon.

"We were like leaves floating down stream," said Sandra Malone, who enrolled in college as an adult, earning a bachelor's degree in English. For most women now in their thirties and older, destiny was fulfilled at the altar.

"After I got married and had a baby," Sandra recalled, "my parents just totally backed off," she recalled. "I'd accomplished what I was supposed to do."

Thanks in great part to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the little girl experience is no longer what it once was.

While the playing ground is not yet equal, it's a lot more level than it ever used to be. Fair Haven, New Jersey, newspaper columnist and girls' softball coach George Severini says he sees his daughter and her friends going at the game with the same gutsiness and commitment to team play that boys have long displayed.

"Here's the new century line-up as I see it:" Severini says.

"Women will take the field in the modern era with a lifetime mindset of being players, not cheerleaders. The attitude and spirit they are acquiring today will help them score in business and politics. I predict there will be many more women batters and many less battered women." 

Eileen Moon is a freelance writer
from Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.

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