In the following essay, Goldman looks at the theme of societal forces that shape children into adults, especially the different things expected of boys and girls, found in Munro's "Boys and Girls." She also looks at the very different worlds—outside and inside, the male sphere and the female sphere—described by Munro in the story.

"My father was a fox farmer." So begins Alice Munro's short story "Boys and Girls," a narrative which highlights the almost invisible societal forces which shape children, in this case, the narrator and her brother Laird, into gendered adults. There is no doubt that males and females are biologically distinct at birth. Yet the behaviours and roles ascribed to each sex on the basis of this biological distinction are not natural. In this study, then, when I speak of gender, I refer not to sex, but to this set...