she can escape her social expectations as a girl is by rejecting feminine qualities or any qualities seen as weak. So much so, she feels proud and “red in the face with pleasure,” when her father introduces her to a feed salesman as “my new hired hand.”

“Could of fooled me, said the salesman. "I thought it was only a girl."

In these lines, we can see her joy that she is better than a mere girl. However, a couple of things cast dark shadows over this joy. One is the growing expectations from her to start behaving like a girl as she grows older.

My grandmother came to stay with us for a few weeks and I heard other things. "Girls don't slam doors like that." "Girls keep their knees together when they sit down." And worse still, when I asked some questions, "That's none of girls’ business." I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.

Her mother’s solemn talk with her father about keeping the narrator more in the house to help with the housework chills her some more.

The second impediment is the narrator’s self-awareness about some of her own qualities that are more sensitive and may be deemed “weak” in a male-dominated culture. Watching the old horse Mack get killed is an act of particular bravado for her, yet it produces a empathetic reaction. She feels disturbed by the violence. Her dreams too are changing, from her as a wild adventurer to her as someone seeking the adventure of romance. Yet, she cannot acknowledge these changes fully because in her mind they are girlish therefore flimsy and silly.

In this context, the grown mare Flora represents a new way to grow up female for the narrator, and in my opinion, that is one of the reasons saving Flora gains particular symbolic power for her. As a female animal who is beyond socially constructed gender, Flora is simply herself. Contrast the way the narrator describes Flora with the earlier description of Mack.

She was running free in the barnyard, from one end to the other. We climbed on the fence. It was exciting to see her running, whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in a Western movie, an unbroken ranch horse, though she was just an old driver, an old sorrel mare. My father and Henry ran after her and tried to grab the dangling halter. They tried to work her into a corner, and they had almost succeeded when she made a run between them, wild-eyed, and disappeared round the corner of the barn. We heard the rails clatter down as she got over the fence, and Henry yelled. "She's into the field now!"

And here’s the lead-up to Mack’s death.

My father came in sight carrying the gun. Henry was leading Mack by the halter. He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled cigarettes for my father and himself. While this was going on Mack nosed around in the old, dead grass along the fence. Then my father opened the gate and they took Mack through. Henry led Mack away from the path to a patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear. Mack again began to searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not found.

Flora is lively, spirited, and “threatening like a horse in a Western movie,” while Mack seems dull and resigned to his fate. For the narrator, Flora represents adult femaleness in the full scope of its vivacity and power. It is at this point the narrator realizes the possibility of being a strong female without rejecting her feminine qualities. That realization stays her hand, keeps her from locking the gate to the field, almost as if pre-destined.

At the end of the story, she has had the epiphany, or transforming realization, that being a girl is a rigged game in the world she lives in. She cannot win by acting like a boy or by substituting for her younger brother, Laird, who is growing stronger every day. However, in another world, there may be a different way to exist: embrace her feminine qualities fully, without feeling them as an albatross around her neck. After Laird lets out that she deliberately let Flora escape, a silence falls at the dining table as the narrator cries silently. Everyone stares her, till the father speaks:

"Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humor the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said. I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.

Absolved and dismissed: the narrator is dismissed of importance in a male world, but she also absolves herself of the burden of proving she is better than a girl. She’s not better or worse, she is simply a girl, like Flora, and that’s enough.

The narrator has always felt remarkably free out there in the open air. The overriding importance she attaches to freedom can be seen in her defiance of established convention regarding gender roles. The girl instinctively bridles against her mother and grandmother's attempts to mold her into a fine, respectable lady. She'd much rather be out and about in the open air, helping out her father and brother on the farm.

But the girl's attitude suddenly changes when the realizes that the old nag Flora's about to be shot. It seems somehow unfair to the young girl that she's able to achieve some measure of freedom on the farm, but not the horse. Despite her experience she may not understand completely how a farm actually works, but she does have an instinctive grasp of freedom and what it entails. That being so, the girl opens the gate to allow Flora to escape. Ironically, this fateful decision looks set to precipitate a return to traditional gender roles for the narrator. The relative freedom she's enjoyed up until this moment is about to end.

The narrator in the story is the girl who helped her father as a “farm hand” and sister to Laird. She started off enjoying outdoor farm activities like feeding the silver foxes, which her father kept for their fur. This outdoorsy nature of the narrator brought conflict between her and her mother. Her mother needed her for house chores but she preferred working with her father. The mother hoped that her daughter would get in touch with her feminine side when she grows older. On one occasion, she witnessed the shooting of one of the horses by her father to provide food for the foxes. After this event she changed her perception of her father.

Flora was the mare that the girl allowed to escape. On that day, Flora was to be slaughtered but the mare managed to breakaway. The father asked her daughter to close the gate that Flora was heading for, but instead the daughter opened the gate wider, disobeying her father’s instructions. Flora managed to escape from the farm but she was later found, slaughtered and fed to the foxes.

The girl and the mare both yearned for their freedom and worked towards it. The two were also similar in their lively nature. The narrator saw herself in the mare that was trying to escape from the slaughter, just like she was trying to escape from social expectations. This motivated the girl to let Flora escape as it signified her own attempts to escape the social expectations.

The narrator and the horse named Flora share a few traits but are more different than they are similar. Both are female, and both seem high-spirited. The narrator is young during the period of the story, while Flora is old. The narrator is human; Flora is a horse. This distinction is particularly significant because the human character has agency, but Flora is a domesticated animal who can make almost no life choices for herself.

It is the recognition of this difference between them that prompts the girl to open the gate wide. Because she knows that the mare's fate is sealed, she seems giddy with the power to enable Flora to have one last glorious run before she dies and to defy her father with a big, obvious gesture.

In Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls," the narrator, a girl approaching puberty who lives on a fox farm with her family, and Flora, the horse whom she helps escape to help her avoid being shot, share a couple similarities, which may be why the narrator feels so compelled to let Flora go.

One similarity is that neither Flora nor the narrator is in control of their own destiny. The narrator is suddenly realizing that, now that she's older, more traditionally girl-like behavior is soon to be expected of her (previously she had been what is often called a "tomboy"); Flora is about to be shot because she has been deemed too old to be of use on the farm.

Another similarity they share is their defiant spirit. Flora is described as having an air of "gallantry and abandon" and is often so rambunctious that her caretakers can't enter her stall, lest they get kicked. Similarly, the narrator defies the sweet and tidy behavior expected of her by her mother and grandmother, preferring to help with the rough and dirty work on the farm.