Gender Roles and Female Solidarity Theme Analysis

The protagonist of “Raymond’s Run”—a precocious young girl nicknamed Squeaky—hopes that she’ll win the 50-yard dash at the local May Day races. Her main competition is a girl named Gretchen—a feud that reflects Squeaky’s broader estrangement from women and femininity. Leading up to the race, she narrates her discomfort with the traditionally feminine role that her community expects her to play: instead of wearing a frilly dress and dancing around the May Pole, Squeaky is a serious runner who is unapologetically competitive. She also brawls with anyone who mocks her disabled brother, and she is hostile to other girls her age. As she runs the race, though, Squeaky has an epiphany: while she still insists on being herself (even if that means bucking social norms), she realizes that she actually likes and respects Gretchen. In the story’s climactic moment—a shared smile between Squeaky and Gretchen—Squeaky realizes that part of being true to herself means extending kindness to other women. For Bambara, then, division between women is just another social norm that should be defied so that women can thrive.

Squeaky’s refusal to “act like a girl” is rooted in her strong sense of self; to her, playing a traditionally feminine role would be a betrayal of who she is. Squeaky learned this in nursery school when she dressed up as a strawberry for a pageant. While this pleased her parents, she says the pageant was “nonsense” and that she was a “perfect fool” for participating. “I am not a strawberry,” she insists, “I do not dance on my toes. I run. That is what I am all about.” Squeaky’s memory of the strawberry costume connects to her refusal to wear a dress to the May Day celebration. Even though this is a norm in her community that her mother begs her to follow, Squeaky insists that wearing the dress and participating in the May Day dance would mean “trying to act like a fairy or a flower or whatever you’re supposed to be when you should be trying to be yourself.” To Squeaky, then, insisting that girls follow feminine norms is equivalent to training them not to be themselves, and she wants no part in this. Importantly, though, this does not mean rejecting all feminine norms; she never rejects the label “girl,” for example, and she embraces being her disabled brother’s caretaker, a role that is traditionally gendered female. Instead, Squeaky prefers to think critically about the expectations others place on her and decide for herself whether following a norm would be true to who she is.

However, the story emphasizes one norm that Squeaky uncritically follows: that women should relate to one another through competition and animosity rather than learning to be friends or allies. When Squeaky reflects that “girls never really smile at each other because they don’t know how to […] and there’s probably no one to teach us how, cause grown-up girls don’t know either,” she acknowledges that unkindness between women is a social norm passed between generations. Squeaky emulates this norm: she constantly insults other girls, calling them out for their freckles or weight, and the girls around her are aggressive and insulting in return. Squeaky’s former friend Mary Louise, for example, now talks about Squeaky “like a dog.” Underlying this outright hostility is a pervasive sense of competition among girls. Many of the school activities that Squeaky mentions—such as the spelling bee, music class, or the May Day Races—are inherently competitive, and the there is an obvious struggle among Squeaky’s female peers to be the best. Her classmate Cynthia Procter, for instance, is so competitive that she pretends that her skills come without effort, insinuating that she has aced tests without studying, or that she can play the piano without practice. Even though Squeaky’s competitive posture is different (she prides herself on her hard work and practices running constantly in public), she shares Cynthia’s competitive spirit, bragging about her “big rep as the baddest thing around” and her “roomful of ribbons and medals and awards.” It’s clear, then, that Squeaky and the other girls in the neighborhood feel the need to best rather than support one another.

However, Squeaky’s non-competitive and caring relationships with men—particularly with her intellectually disabled brother Raymond—become a model for rethinking her attitude toward women. Squeaky’s only positive relationships in the story are with men: she enjoys racing her father (even though he always wins), and she shows a tenderness toward her intellectually disabled brother Raymond that she never shows other women, caring for and defending him despite the social difficulty it brings. It’s Raymond who finally makes Squeaky begin to question the value of her competitive spirit. As Squeaky waits to find out whether she or Gretchen won the May Day race, she realizes that she would find more meaning in teaching Raymond to run than in winning races herself. This is a shift in her attitude: she no longer wants to prove herself superior to other women but instead wants to help Raymond (who has nothing “to call his own”) find success. In this moment of epiphany, Squeaky looks from Raymond to Gretchen and realizes that her kindness toward Raymond could extend to Gretchen. For the first time, Squeaky sees Gretchen as an ally rather than a rival; maybe Gretchen would even help her coach Raymond, she thinks, showing that they could perhaps work together rather than trying to tear each other down. When Gretchen and Squeaky then share a “real” smile (even though girls “don’t practice smiling every day” because they’re “too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest”), Bambara implies that Squeaky has learned a new way of relating to women. In practicing kindness as Squeaky once practiced competing, she defies the silly norm that women should be hostile and competitive toward one another.