Tomboy

It is a compound of tom and boy, and both halves already had senses of their own. Tom, the familiar shortening of Thomas, was in use by the late fourteenth century as a name for a common man, often with some contempt attached, the same way Jack was. Boy had meant servant, commoner and knave before it settled on a male child. A near neighbour, tomrig, meant a rude, wild girl.

How the meaning of tomboy reversed

The dates in the sources do not quite line up, and the three accounts are given separately. Etymonline gives the 1550s for the obsolete sense of a rude, boisterous boy, the 1570s for a strumpet or immodest woman, and the 1590s for a wild, romping girl. Wiktionary dates the first attestation to Ralph Roister Doister, published in 1567 and written around 1552, where it describes a boisterous girl, but adds that the dictionary reads that citation as generally taken to mean a boisterous boy, and that a use in The Old Law, published in 1656 and thought to have been written around 1599, certainly means a boy. It puts the immodest-woman sense at 1579 and the modern one no later than 1592.

What the three accounts agree on is the shape of the change. The word began as a term for a male child, moved to an adult woman whose conduct was disapproved of, and only then landed on a girl. The insult stayed constant while the target moved, which is a common enough path and rarely so cleanly documented. The current meaning has been stable for four centuries, which is longer than most of the vocabulary this catalogue holds.

Why American tomboyism was encouraged

The word survived; the attitude to what it named did not. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideal of femininity known as the Cult of True Womanhood equated it with emotional fragility, physical vulnerability, hesitation and domestic submissiveness, and strenuous activity had no place in it. The Long Depression from 1873 to 1899 made that ideal impractical. Young women entered the workforce to support their families, physical work required a physical constitution, and expectations shifted from decorative to healthy.

The American Civil War had already pushed in the same direction. Women who had not been permitted their own bank accounts found themselves handling the household finances, and girls and women who had relied on the men of the house for security found themselves responsible for it, so mothers began attending to their daughters' physical condition and to their own.

By the turn of the century the argument was being made openly. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, in 1898, praised the health benefits of tomboyhood and held that girls should be not feminine till it is time to be. The playground advocate Joseph Lee wrote in 1915 that a tomboy phase was necessary to the physical development of girls between eight and thirteen. Parents permitted and in some cases promoted a tomboy upbringing, and first-wave feminism gave the whole thing a vocabulary.

What the word came to mean about sexuality

Through the twentieth century a second reading attached itself. Freudian psychology and the backlash against gay and lesbian movements produced anxieties about what tomboyism led to, and Hollywood supplied the image, stereotyping the adult tomboy as a predatory Butch figure.

Some of the association came from the other direction. Lynne Yamaguchi and Karen Barber, editing Tomboys! Tales of Dyke Derring-Do, argue that tomboyhood is much more than a phase for many lesbians and remains part of the foundation of who they are as adults, and many of their contributors linked the two labels because both placed them outside cultural and gender boundaries. Dianne Elise reported in a 1995 essay that more lesbians recorded having been tomboys than straight women did.

The sources are equally clear about what that does not license. Behaviour typical of boys displayed by girls is not an indicator of anybody's sexual orientation, some tomboys turn out to be lesbians and most do not, and the Wikipedia article treats any general association between the two as both outdated and disrespectful. The same article states plainly that childhood tomboy behaviour does not influence or indicate a girl's eventual orientation or her lifelong gender presentation.

Why the word is heard less often now

Tomboy describes a departure from a norm, and the norm moved. Skirts and dresses have declined in the Western world since the 1960s, to the point where not wearing them is no longer read as a male trait; women's sporting events grew in popularity, helped by the American law known as Title IX; and it became ordinary for girls to play physical games with peers of either sex and to wear comfortable clothing. An increasing number of girls could technically be called tomboys and are simply not called anything, which has drained most of the force out of the word as a pejorative.

Not all of it, and not everywhere. Jack Halberstam argues that defiance of gender roles is tolerated in young girls but that adolescent girls showing masculine traits are often repressed or punished, and Barbara Creed reads the tomboy's image as undermining the boundaries that separate the sexes and therefore as a threatening figure, one that unsettles assumptions about what a family looks like. In China the equivalent, 假小子, literally pseudo-boy, is largely derogatory and can carry the implication that the girl could not get a boyfriend. Where the English word travelled it kept its own shape: Wiktionary records it borrowed into Cebuano, Central Bikol, Indonesian, Malay, Spanish and Tagalog.

The sociologist Barrie Thorne noticed the opposite movement in adults. Some women take pride in describing their childhood selves as tomboys, and Thorne reads the claim as saying that they were and are independent and active, that they held their own with boys and men, and that they resisted and go on resisting gender stereotypes. The word is one of the few in this catalogue more often used in the past tense about oneself than in the present.

What fiction does with a tomboy

The tomboy is a stock figure, and the stock plot is a makeover. She is set against a girlier and more conventionally feminine character, and at some point learns to be feminine, usually with that character's help and usually in pursuit of a man; Doris Day's role in Calamity Jane in 1953 is the standing example. Figures who do not make that turn tend to be left in a permanent childhood instead, eternally ambiguous, since the stage of life in which tomboyism is allowed is short and few characters are permitted to age out of it while keeping it.

Two other patterns recur. Tomboyism in fiction often accompanies a disrupted family, a death or a household reassembled by choice rather than descent, which lets a story question what a family has to look like and who is allowed to be one. And the tomboy is a fixture of patriotic war stories, where a girl wants to serve, is usually discovered after an injury, and is presented as a hero other female characters should look up to, though she generally sheds the more extreme parts of the role once the war ends.

What the record on tomboy leaves out

The most-read page on the subject is thin, and says so. The English Wikipedia article is rated Start-class, was nominated for deletion in November 2022 with the result a speedy keep, and drew an editorial complaint in the same month that much of it read like an essay composed of original research with a distinct lack of sources. Its history section was rewritten shortly after by an editor working mainly from Michelle Ann Abate's Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History and from the review literature on Renée M. Sentilles's American Tomboys, 1850 to 1915, and that editor noted openly that the resulting history is almost entirely American.

One thread on the talk page belongs here because the article does not carry it. The same editor reported that Abate and a BBC article both discuss a connection between white supremacy and the emergence of the American tomboy, and asked whether it belonged on the page. It has not been added. A separate exchange about whether an image of Hatshepsut belonged there ended with the point that a pharaoh is not an adolescent, which is a reminder that the word is about girls specifically and does not stretch backwards over every woman in masculine dress.

The psychobehavioural material is the weakest part. It reports that psychologists speculate about innate curiosity, family dynamics and imposed gender roles, and cites a study from 2002 suggesting some girls may be born tomboys because of higher maternal testosterone in pregnancy, without naming the authors of either. Against that, the word is demonstrably alive: Merriam-Webster's collected usage examples run from 2018 to 2026, across Vogue, Essence, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour and USA Today, and one of them, from The Conversation in 2026, makes the observation that there is no benign male version of the word at all. Gender nonconformity covers the wider behaviour with none of that history attached.