A part of “The Hidden Hand” that stuck out to me is when the smuggler was invited to stay the night and when he turned out to be Black Donald, Cap clung on to him and said she would sooner die than let him get away. She is always charging into the face of danger for someone so young, and the other characters usually see this as a bad thing. They see her as untameable and want her to act more like a “girl.” Analyzing the way her personality is seen as “boyish” makes me think about nature vs nurture. She did not grow up in an environment that forced her into stereotypical “girl” interests and activities. Instead she fended for herself a lot of the time and found herself more interested in “boy” things, and found it easier to get a job when she was pretending to be a boy. The characters all want her to act more like a girl, until the very end of the reading when Cap outsmarts the burglars hiding under her bed and saves everyone in the house. After that, old Hurricane really appreciates her ability to stay calm in dangerous and scary situations, and her smart thinking, traits that are usually seen as boyish. Without her innate personality, there are many situations in this story that could have ended badly. If they were able to make her conform the way they wanted her to, the story would have been very different. The idea of nature vs nurture in Cap’s personality makes me think about how popular gender reveals have gotten within the last 10 years, and how they weren’t really a thing before that. I see Instagram and TikTok posts about gender reveals all the time and it starts off with conformity at a young age. If it’s a girl then the cake is pink, if it’s a boy then it’s blue. We as a society start off young children with societal expectations on how they should be acting, the same way the characters in the story wanted Cap to act a certain way. Most people innately have both masculine and feminine traits, and I think letting these uniquely and naturally develop within each person should be more normalized.
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