Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire | Hacker News Reader

Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

daily.jstor.org

72 pointsdiodorus49 comments

The article currently confuses two dolls. The top image matches its caption link[1], but not its caption text. The pictured "Grottarossa" doll, was buried by the via Appia near Rome, with a mummified 2nd-century ~12-year old girl. The caption text's "Illustration of the Ancient Roman doll of Crepereia Tryphaena" refers to a similar doll[2] from another 2nd C. sarcophagus in Rome.

I used the former in a video fragment on remembering scale - like Powers-of-Ten, but with 1000x chunks. "How do we play with things that are too big to play with? Like cars, and people, and trains? We use scale models. Like dolls, and toy ..., but with more zoom." Buildings view (1 mm:m); real world; micro view (1 mm:um - red blood cells are M&Ms); nano view (1 mm:nm - atoms are sand). I should get back to that someday.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_ivory_doll_fro... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crepereia_Tryphaena-2.png

If anyone wants to dive more into the wooden doll world, The Miyagi kokeshi doll - https://kogeijapan.com/locale/en_US/miyagidentokokeshi/ although not as old as this Roman one is interesting. Here is a 3m30s video on who they make them by hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uRxvm6sUs

This article does the difficult job of actually saying nothing interesting but still giving the impression that it holds some great newly discovered insight about Roman doll playing.

It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, not all articles must have "newly discovered insights". For example, I didn't know they had such precisely made and articulated dolls in those times.

I always wonder what kids could play with in other time periods. I guess that woodwork always was pretty excellent, so there could be all sorts of stuff that is lost by now.

There's an interesting note on this in "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond about traditional societies (typically he's talking about pre-contact primitive humans). Many children fashioned their own toys after the real tools/equipment/vehicles used by the adults in their lives.

I always found the quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot

I'm pretty sure kids would do just fine with sticks, mud, pine cones and whatever scrap is lying around. At least mine did before they got engaged in the paychological warfare that is cartoons, toy stores and catalogs.

Even now they seem to stay interested in their paper boats/air planes much longer than the latest paw patrol truck.

For girls in all cultures, playing with some form of doll is a near universal. It's even true of young female chimpanzees.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chi...

My aunt growing up in Korea (just after WWII when it wasn't nearly as rich as today) used carrots that had two legs for her dolls. Kids can make anything work.

My daughter literally put a smiley face on a roll of tissue paper and used it as a stuffed toy, so yeah they can be pretty creative given the chance.

As a kid, the only real toy I had was Lego (and a bike, etc). I had other odds and ends but we didn't buy toys (my family was financially secure, my parents were just cheap/not into material stuff). Being the youngest grandchild of a large extended family, there was a lot of Lego. If I wanted to play "space", I'd build a rocket ship.

I had friends and cousins in a similar situation but because thier families were probably cheque to cheque or worse. They didn't even have Lego. We'd make toys with sticks or stuff we found on garbage day, etc.

As I got older, I had school friends with everything (full collection of Star Wars stuff, etc). They were always bored. "There's nothing to do!" :)

"It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, "

No, it doesn't at all do that.

Not even in one instance.

The article says 'these dolls have certain characteristics' - and then goes on to speculate bout the potential social ramifications of such playtime without any real evidence.

The article fails to hone in on the social nature of playtime at all.

True but I did appreciate the images of the wooden dolls.

Yeah, same here.

Welcome to most of academic publications in the humanities (and recently even in hard-science)

I'm so glad we're not politicizing science . . .

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is every discipline now destroyed by Intersectional nonsense?

"Analyzing the dolls of elite girls shows that playthings reinforced gendered expectations but also allowed for imaginative play."

"Barbie dolls tend to get a bad rap. Critics rebuke them for promoting harmful body standards and other sexist tropes in the minds of young children."

Except for the millions of girls who like playing with them?

"But some scholars note that the dolls also allow for versatile, wide-ranging play, because of their lack of prescriptive narratives. Despite their faults, Barbies can become anything—or anyone—the child wants them to be."

Some Scholars ?

We are now attributing 'Kids Like Toys And Have Imagination' to the narrow testament of scholarship?

"These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. Like modern Barbies, they mirrored the body ideals of Roman times, in this case small breasts and wide hips. Because they resembled adult women, they were likely intended to help young girls contemplate their future as wives and mothers."

So dolls aren't 'toys'?

They are just fascist propaganda?

If they are 'long and thin' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'?

But if they have wider hips and more 'body natural' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'?

The doll makers were regrouped by the 'Domninus Cultural Senate of Men' led by 'Claudius Mansplainus' to make sure they made evil dolls for conformity?

Or is it perhaps 'many girls like dressing up and being pretty and Barbie is a doll some girls like' ... and 'ancient girls also liked playing with dolls, representatives of older women who they aspired to be'?

And that despite 2000 years of advancing knowledge, we still have not figured out how to see basic truths through a wall of ideological noise?

Did they miss the most important point and how 'Ancient Dolls related to Trump's disgusting Tweets'?

This was painful to read and the scholarship was lost.

What is 'remarkable' about the toy is that it seems to reflect almost perfectly the aspirations of people in similar situations today.

The 'dolls' really aren't that far off Barbie, and probably represent in young ladies most of the same social artifacts and aspirations.

It's how you get noticed these days. It's hard for me to read past it as well, but I assume we'll continue to make slow progress understanding the past, even with these self-imposed handicaps.

It is, what it is worst it has become a sort of neo cultural imperialism , where white monolingual Anglos tell for example to Latinos that their gendered languages are wrong and must be changed.

> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society.

It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Children play pretend, and they dress their dolls like their mothers and other people they admire. It's not an insidious plot, it's a culture and youthful admiration.

If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them, you've gone off the rails.

Yeah, I was surprised they made that leap to the dolls carrying messages about their expected roles in society. As a little girl, my doll was more an outlet to be able to imitate my mother. She’d give me a cuddle, clothe me, put me down for a nap, and I did all that with my doll. I also had a play telephone that I’d pretend to use while watching my parents speak on the telephone. My expected role in society isn’t a telephone operator.

Right? And the message they carry is that adulthood is possible. The entire point of dolls for both boys and girls is to play at being adults, which they do spontaneously cross culturally anyway. These toys facilitate fantasies of empowerment and maturity, and as such are an important part of how we develop into adult humans. They're not top down imposed cultural conditioning.

Spot on. I have two girls. Neither were "encouraged" to play with dolls, nor was it any sort of "gender role re-enforcement".

Girls like dolls because it's roll play on many levels (relationships, role) as well as a way to nurture something, as is likely built into the female DNA and brain.

If you think dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity, you're sick in the head and we could never hang out together.

You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless.

And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.

I get that the female DNA comment might sound ignorant, but I was going down a rabbit hole about why girls play with dolls and came across the article below. It says that there might be some biological factors why girls gravitate towards things like dolls. Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. Obviously, it’s not 100% guaranteed what your kid is going to like based on DNA, but I thought it was an interesting article anyways.

https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playi...

> Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys.

If we try to generalize findings of primatologists onto humans, namely what Franz de Waal writes about chimpanzee, than I'd rather say that boys prefer toys that model objects, while girls prefer toys that model subjects. Chimpanzee males seek power and control, they play political games forming coalitions, breaking from them out, they are friendly when it seems beneficial for them and hostile when needed. Chimpanzee females seek stable relationships, their relationships last longer, easily they could last for life. I mean, if we think of chimpanzee as of humans, then how we model the mind of a male? He sees his neighbors as objects which should be manipulated for his benefit. While females see others as subjects: it helps to respect their needs and to be respected back, it allows understand each other needs, and to form a long-term relationship based on a cooperation.

See how it nicely fits together? It is not a some kind of a science theory, it is just my own unfounded speculations. What I want to say, that it one of the reasons because I doubt that all the difference between boys and girls preferences could be explained by a nurture. Some of it must be a nature thing.

You know that "female DNA" is a fact right? XX vs XY anyone? Do you really believe that human beings are 100% blank slates, biology has no effect whatsoever?

So is it the extra X or the absence of the Y that you're suggesting is the reason for a preference for dolls?

Not only this diference per se, but the XX XY difference is a simple way to show that there is, in fact, a thing called "female DNA". The preference for dolls by girls is just evolutionary behavior, females are the ones that bare the responsibility for raising the offspring, in 99.9% of animal species, so it is just logical that the female cubs of humans and chimpanzees would "practice" raising babies. If you can't see this self evident truth, only ideology can explain it.

That doesn't really make "female DNA" a thing, because XX vs. XY does not tell us enough to know for sure if someone is male or female in the sense that the words are normally used. There are natural XY females who have a mutation in the SRY gene, XX males who randomly got a functional SRY on one of their X chromosomes, and other XY people whose bodies can't process testosterone and thus are female in almost every respect except lacking a uterus and having underdeveloped testes where ovaries would be. Most of what we think of as "female biological traits" seem to come down to that one gene and how the body (any body) reacts to hormones, rather than an overall difference in DNA.

This is not to say that there aren't biological aspects to gender, just that if such a thing does exist, it doesn't seem to be as simple as "female DNA" or "XX vs. XY."

There's are days during the year when the sun doesn't set at all around the arctic circle. No one would argue with the statemet "the sun sets at night".

More directly, there being extremely rare exceptions to a general rule doesn't make the rule false. There's a reason the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" exists.

I mostly agree, but I don't think that's responsive to what I said. My point was that, to the best of my understanding, the idea of "female DNA" just doesn't seem like a good way of conceptualizing biological sex, to the point where it doesn't seem useful to me for explaining anything.

The actual changes needed to flip an embryo from male to female are fairly tiny. On the other hand, the number of genes related to sex characteristics is large, but they're mostly shared between both sexes and not uniformly expressed in members of a given sex (hence why transgender HRT administered before puberty results in development largely indistinguishable from a natural puberty). So proposing "female DNA" as a cause for some observation seems unenlightening to me.

You seem to be reading in a bit here. Observing how societal traditions and roles are passed on and reinforced is a far cry from "thinking dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity."

Yeah, how dare anyone study the past and the present in order to consider the best path for the future. Real science is about accepting things at face value and never asking hard questions.

I agree with you that this article is a tiresome attempt to spot-weld an archaeological subject interesting in itself to the gender-and-power fad. However, with regard to this:

> If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them

many toys sold in North America over the last several decades have been closely tied to media franchises, and there has been plenty of criticism of those media franchises for accepting strings-attached help from the US military to bolster its image, e.g. the Transformers movies [0].

[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/

Yes, that's a very fair point. I do think hijacking childrens' toys and entertainment as a means of social engineering is an avenue of influence. I suppose what I mean to say is that the default case is not that, and to act as if it is is perverse.

A weak simile: the fact that a relationship can be abusive does not mean that all relationships are.

> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines.

Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date. Feminist analysis as applied to archaeology has a pretty solid history : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology

The thing about archaeology is the objects of its study are things made by people who happened to be living in a society (ok sometimes they study actual human remains, but I have to point out that those too were made with untrained labor). If you want to use the things to understand the people--and if you don't, why are you doing archaeology in the first place?--it's important to use what we know about people and societies in general to guide your analysis.

What are some important facts about people and societies? Well, people are generally bilateral bipedal, have a mineralized internal skeleton, like to wear clothes and get out of the rain, and so on.

In particular, people tend to be weakly sexually dimorphic (with substantial overlap and exceptions), and societies tend to divide among that line with varying intensities (again with overlap and exceptions). So if we want to study the people of the past, one of the things we need to understand is how that division tends to manifest and be maintained, and one way to do that is to understand how it manifests and is maintained in observable, i.e. modern, societies.

And once you start looking at things from a "how" perspective it's not too hard to start noticing that one mechanism is giving children toys that encourage play in ways that reinforce the ways in which they will be expected to act in the side of that subdivision they were assigned at birth.

(This isn't necessarily a comfortable thought! All of us on this forum were young children at one point in our lives, and with probably some rare exceptions would have been soaking in this boy-side or girl-side split the whole way through. I know I certainly was!)

Anyway, this is getting kind of long. To sum up, understanding how people on both sides of that division lived and how their society maintained that division is necessary to understanding their society as a whole, and if 'acknowledging that women are people and an honest examination of how they are treated by society' isn't feminism, I don't know what is.

Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars.

I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these:

> “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”

I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).

Fabrications are unnecessary to make his point.

'Math is Racist' is an accepted idea in parts of government and programs are designed around the fact that 'getting the correct answer' can be an artifact of White Supremacy.

Here is a hefty dose of Newspeak [1]

And Oregon teachers material on : "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" [2]

The first sentence:

"White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms"

"• The focus is on getting the “right” answer."

(Notice the word 'right' in quotation marks!)

"Students are required to “show their work.”"

"These common practices that perpetuate white supremacy culture create and sustain institutional and systemic barriers to equity for Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students. In order to dismantle these barriers, we must identify what it means to be an antiracist math educator."

In Critical Race Theory - quite literally Math and 'getting the correct answer' (or even a focus on that) is 'White Supremacy' and if you don't get that, you're racist and must be pushed out of the system so that teachers who begin their instruction from the basis of 'anti racism' can 'teach'.

Of course, there's no evidence of this offered, but that's irrelevant.

This is a government document, not a random quote from the internet.

[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracis...

[2] https://equitablemath.org/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govde...

Part of feminism is the agreement that "the experience of girls and women" is a topic worth studying in the first place.

This is a misrepresentation.

1) Critical Race Theory as a mainstay of scholarship is relatively new it it's broad intervention into all disciplines.

2) The 'big misrepresentaion' in your thesis is that you're alluding to some of the material value in the CRT lens (a kernel of truth) to posit it as the lens through which we should be understanding everything (the article used only CRT language to describe the dolls - nothing else).

3) By your own assertion, we're having to make some very broad assumptions about culture in order to draw conclusions, but in reality there isn't enough information to draw upon.

The assertion made in the article that 'Dolls are used to reinforce genders stereotypes' is a secondary artifact of the dolls, and frankly it's an insult to scholarship because it has little to do with the dolls directly.

Dolls were toys, used for a variety of reasons, the fact that those activities possibly reinforced gender roles is a secondary artifact. To represent that as 'the first truth' of the dolls is the giant CRT lie.

A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. What we could infer from these dolls from antiquity is possibly how little has changed.

The dolls, more than anything are probably just a reflection of society as a whole - like everything.

By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty'

The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity'

Yes - there are elements of validity in CRT, but as soon as you start with that hammer, everything crumbles into nonsense.

The article, as it stands, is rubbish, it has no intellectual value other than to give us a few nice photos to glean our own understanding.

I don't have any idea why you're bringing "Critical Race Theory" into this? I didn't think there was any analysis of race in the article, only gender?

Critical Race Theory is not some kind of boogeyman that encompasses everything you don't like.

> A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful.

I don't know what you consider "reinforcing gender stereotypes" means, but to me that's fitting the bill pretty solidly! The mother (presumably) acts in the way that her society expects of a woman, and in playing with the doll to mimic her mother the child is more deeply internalizing those ways.

> By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty'

OK, yeah, I'll bite: Da Vinci was comissioned by Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa del Giocondo. The thing about painting for patrons is you're supposed to make them look good. If you try to make Lisa dG look good, you're going to be relying on "gender stereotypes of feminine beauty".

> The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity'

David (in the "vs Goliath" version) is a young fit man armed with a sling. Furthermore, that David was often a symbol of Florence, and if Michelangelo (a Florentine) hadn't made him so youthful, fit, and masculine there might have been trouble.

If you look at other depictions of David from that time, they're all stereotypically youthful, fit, and masculine (and sometimes horned up as in Donatello's second take). Michelangelo (and contemporaries) had similar ideas of what a young, fit, masculine person should look like and that's what they sculpted.

The commenter brought up Critical Race Theory (or at least 'Critial Theory') I was responding to that.

You're making my point for me:

Every portrayal of society reinforces the norms in that society.

So it's not 'scholarship' (or even relevant) to point it out the possibilities.

In fact, to avoid talking about the more material issues, and to go right into indirect fuzzy issues of feminism is 'anti scholarship'.

Not only that - it's probably false - as I pointed out, 'bad feminists' lament Barbies and more anatomically correct dolls at the same time, literally for opposite reasons.

It's speculative ideological rubbish. If a 'gender theory' researcher actually wants to do some research and put some sound logic together, that's find, but otherwise it's just politics.

My qualm with this is thinking is that it supposes the gender role binary is created then reinforced, rather than emergent and reinforced. The key difference being the conclusion: is the gender role binary reinforced by oppressing individuals or is it reinforced by indulging individuals?

My opinion and probably the most popular side across all cultures and all time: human gender role binaries are emergent behavior, and we indulge that emergent behavior. If humanity restarted from day 0, on day 1 girls would be playing with dolls far more frequently than boys, and boys would be playing with trucks far more than girls. On day 2, parents would buy their girl a new doll she wants and buy their boy a new truck he wants. The gendered behavior emerged without social construction of any kind, but because parents love their kids they indulge that behavior, thus reinforcing it.

In your view, if humans began at day 0, what would happen on day 1? Would boys and girls play with trucks and dolls evenly? Is it only on day 2 that parents start reinforcing gendered behavior?

Now obviously there’s a discontinuity here because there was never a day 0 for humans, but the fact that practically every culture across space and time no matter how separated, including all the way back to chimps, shows girls playing with dolls and boys playing with objects suggests that this isn’t some societal cram down, it’s an emergent phenomenon from biology, or group behavior (one sex is larger, one is smaller) that causes this to appear almost always.

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