Guilty of preferring a son?

“I never had a play mate growing up among boys,” she said.And the society would laugh with her and feel that it is okay for her to say if only she had given birth to a girl than a boy. But what of if she grew up in all female house, say about five daughters and […]

“I never had a play mate growing up among boys,” she said.
And the society would laugh with her and feel that it is okay for her to say if only she had given birth to a girl than a boy.
 But what of if she grew up in all female house, say about five daughters and she gives birth to a daughter, then she laments that she would have preferred a son, the same society would have condemned her for not wanting a girl.
I know of three women that have five sons each, and they have voiced their preference for daughters after the first few boys and nobody chided them, unlike if they were having daughters and say they would have liked to have sons.
Anyway, two of them eventually have a daughter each and were immensely happy.
Years ago an uncle to a friend got married and he wanted to have five daughters only. Naturally people laughed and let it pass at the man’s self- deprecation of wanting daughters.
The whole point is to muse on why it is okay to openly admit preferring having daughter to a son, but ‘socially correct’ not say you prefer a son.
Does it make people hypocrites  or what?
Sometimes ago, I read  a list of things as being discrimination against women according to  one organisation, and among them is the preference for male child.
I don’t know  who in this case is to blame if women themselves prefer male children.  This of course may be due to societal pressure in some places.
However, I think it is exaggerated to say that people prefer male children. Though if  a  person  has more of  one gender, it is natural to want to also have the other gender.
Now with opportunities, girls also go to school and also take care of their parents as the boys. Besides, if everybody gives birth to boys, who are going to be the wives and mothers, even if only to perpetuate the male gender?
In places where women are denied inheritance, they pray fervently to have male children, because in the event of the father’s death the wife and the daughters would be thrown out of the husband’s house and what he left would be shared among his brothers (sisters are probably excluded).
The wife would have to raise her children alone, often with difficulty.
In one such case, one woman told me she was a victim, because she was a female, her father’s inheritance was denied her, as their custom demanded. And now she was at the forefront of fighting that custom.
But then people still feel a male child carries the family name, and therefore becomes the eventual head of the family, whereas a female child gets married and goes into another family.
This coupled with inheritance where a female child gets half of what a male child gets has made some women with more male children in a polygamous family to feel superior to the wives with more female children.
In some cases where a woman has only female children and the husband decides to take another wife, the new wife may be happy , sure that she would have male children, not knowing she may have  a child or not.
Such new wives are often instigated by relatives as potential mothers of Hassan and Hussein (male twins).
But when they give birth to daughters they become subdued.
The only case I know where a woman is unhappy for giving birth to a female child was where one woman in a polygamous marriage was openly unhappy when she gave birth to her third daughter, also her third child. Her mother rebuked her.
Yet, I wonder, if she had boys and expressed disappointment in having a third boy instead of a girl, would her mother have rebuked her?