Alice Munro's short story "Boys and Girls" takes place on a farm in the late 1940's. The setting strongly enhances the values, motives and ethics of the story; the gender stereotyping that was so common in this era was an easily found motive for Munro to focus upon. The values associated with the life of the man and the life of the woman were distinct and separate, yet uniquely bonded and dependent on each other.
             The 1940's saw a strong, dividing line between the work and jobs that were primarily male, and those that were to be done only by the women of the period. This was especially the case in farms located in rural Canada. Men did the hard labor outdoors that was required to keep the farm operational. The women were solely responsible for preparing the meals, cleaning the house and tending to the young children not of age to handle duties of their own. Appropriately, Alice Munro chose this situation to represent and portray her theme of divided gender roles.
             The particular farm in the story was a silver fox farm, fittingly, as the foxes were a representative symbol of the women of the time. Women's lifestyles were restricted by the men, as were the foxes; "the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them" (270).
             The narrator of the story is representative of girls and also has no name, suggesting a lack of identity. The foxes were left unnamed until they had survived the first year on the farm, at which point they were added to the breeding stock. Alice Munro suggests that marriage will be the motive behind the narrator finding her true identity.
             The farm is composed of two very distinct worlds; the inside world and the outside. The inside world of the house is where the mother does her "endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing" (272) work. She represents the stereotypical woman and also portrays an image of what the narrator is being molded into throughout the...