Bobbie & Carroll & Terry & Alex
The Half-life of Robin and Kim
By
now firemen, policemen, and mailmen sound like cultural
relics from the 1950s next to the no-nonsense firefighters, police
officers, and mail carriers who people our streets today.
The once universal he has given way to he or she and
the androgynous they. But what about first names, which rank
among the most important markers of gender? Have androgynous names
multiplied along with equal rights? Lowell professor of sociology
Stanley Lieberson heard this question so often that he set out to
analyze the names of almost 11 million babies born in Illinois between
1916 and 1989--plus additional data from 1995--with graduate students
Susan Dumais, A.M. '98, and Shyon Baumann, A.M. '98. (Their study,
recently published in the American Journal of Sociology, confines
itself to white births because of the enormous increase in newly invented
names among black children from the 1960s onward.)
"I
expected it to be a simple answer, that more and more children were
being given androgynous names--end of story," says Lieberson, author
of A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (Yale
University Press), which appears this fall. Instead, the use of androgynous
names like "Dale," "Jackie," "Merle," and "Robin" remains rare, and
has barely increased in 80 years. Only 1 to 2 percent, approximately,
of all the children studied had unquestionably androgynous names (those
whose populations included at least a third from either gender).
The
authors note that "for the average girl (or boy) less than 3 percent
of the children with her (his) name are of opposite sex"--reflecting
the fact that, over time, name androgyny tends not to persist. A given
moniker usually resolves itself into a predominantly male or female
choice. A name like "Robin," for example, might become popular for
both sexes, then drop out of favor for one sex--usually boys--and
so lose its androgynous character. To explain these findings, Lieberson
turned in a surprising direction, to a model that Thomas Schelling,
Ph.D. '51, Littauer professor of political economy emeritus, used
to describe the process of racial segregation in housing. "The great
insight provided by the Schelling model is to show how easily a racially
mixed area can lose its equilibrium and become a highly segregated
black area," write Lieberson and his coauthors. He adds, "The language
in residential segregation is that a 'tipping point' is reached, generally
from white to black--enough blacks move in, and the rest of the whites
just sort of get out." Lieberson compares androgynous names to "neighborhoods"
that are "occupied" by girls and boys. If the population skews far
enough toward one gender, the other sex stops moving in.
This
process is not symmetrical: parents are more likely to choose androgynous
names for daughters. The 1995 Illinois data showed that for college-educated
parents, 8 percent of the daughters--but only 3 percent of sons--received
one of 45 common androgynous names. "To some degree the androgyny
is appealing," says Lieberson. "But this can also give it a negative
value for their sons and a positive value for their daughters." The
researchers explain this asymmetry using the well-known sociological
concept of status contamination: "The advantaged have a greater
incentive to avoid having their status confused with the disadvantaged,"
they write. If boys (like whites) are relatively advantaged compared
with girls (or blacks), these privileged groups will systematically
"leave the neighborhood" when customary markers of status disappear--as
they do when names lose their sexual specificity.
Consider
"Kim," a name that was popular for both sexes in the 1950s. In Illinois,
male Kims increased steadily in the early '50s, until 153 boys and
90 girls received the name in 1953. The following year, movie star
Kim Novak became a top box-office attraction. That year saw the start
of a drastic upsurge in girls named "Kim": by 1957 there were 453
female Kims--but only 76 boys. "Isn't that a mind-blower?" interjects
Lieberson, who is particularly fond of this graph. "You know it's
not chance, because just the year of her debut, phew!" and
his thumb shoots up. "For males," he adds, "use of the name did go
up slightly for a year, continuing the earlier trend, but then it
really dropped off."
The
appearance of someone like Kim Novak in the cultural consciousness
"accelerates and maybe alters the trend," Lieberson explains. The
Novak phenomenon "really killed the name 'Kim' for boys," he says,
adding with a laugh, "You don't want to name your son after a screen
goddess."
