Children's Gender Indexing in Language: From the Separate Worlds Hypothesis to Considerations of Culture, Context, and Power

In the early 1980s, an influential theory that guided much of the recent work on children’s communicative competence, the separate worlds hypothesis (SWH; Maltz & Borker, 1982) gained prominence. The hypothesis states that as a result of separated peer play in childhood, with girls playing predominantly with other girls and boys playing predominantly with other boys, the genders evolve quite different goals for social interactions and communicative styles. Although a great deal of research with White middle-class children supported the SWH, several critiques were leveled against it by feminist researchers (Bing & Bergvall, 1996; Cameron, 1996; Freed, 1996). These critiques claimed that the theory overdichotomized and universalized gender differences, paying little attention to contextual variation in gender display and neglecting considerations of power in children’s and adults’ use of gender-linked forms. The first section of this introduction articulates the origin of the SWH and the research that supported it. The second section spells out the feminist critiques. Because the feminist critiques were theoretical and