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Academic

Sweet, Elizabeth Valerie. 2014. “Dolls.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. Ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press.

This peer-reviewed annotated bibliography provides an overview of the academic research on dolls, along with a roadmap through the central themes, debates, and resources in doll studies.

Diane Felmlee, Elizabeth Sweet and H. Colleen Sinclair. 2012. “Gender Rules: Same- and Cross-Gender Friendships Norms.” Sex Roles 66:518-529.

We examined the relationships between gender and attitudes towards same- and cross-gender friendship norms for a sample of 269 West Coast, U.S., college students. Participants evaluated violations of friendship norms described in vignettes in which the friend’s gender was experimentally manipulated. Women differentiated more between types of violations in their evaluations than did men. There also were several significant gender differences in approval of norm violations. As expected, women tended to have relatively high expectations of their friendships in situations involving trust and intimacy, likely resulting from the high value they placed on affiliation and emotional closeness. Women were more disapproving than men of a friend who canceled plans or failed to come to their defense publicly. Men and women judged a woman who betrayed a secret more harshly than a man. Generally, expectations for cross-gender, versus same-gender, friends were more similar than different; there were no significant cross-gender interactions, with one exception. Men were particularly less approving of a male, as compared to a female, friend who kissed them in a greeting. Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of respondents (81.6%) reported that men and women can be friends. A minority of women were cautious in their responses, with women (18.5%) more apt to reply “maybe,” than men (9.9%). Overall, these findings provided evidence that gender, rather than cross-gender, norms primarily influenced friendship evaluations, and demonstrated that even a subtle manipulation of gender can trigger gender stereotypes. They suggested, too, that women may hold their friends to stricter “rules” than men

Press
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New York Times 
Sunday Review

Guys and Dolls no More?

December 23, 2012

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The Atlantic

Toys Are More Divided by Gender Now Than They Were 50 Years Ago

December 9, 2014

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New York Times 
Room for Debate

How Did Toys Get Stereotyped by Sex?

December 22, 2014

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