I once had a cultural studies prof gripe, “Why is the first question someone asks you about your new baby, ‘Is it a boy or a girl’? Why don’t they ask if the baby is healthy or how the mother is doing? Why is gender so important that it trumps everything else?”. And he’s right- why is the gender so damn important? It’s a baby- it is going to do baby-like things without any regard for it’s gender. But everyone is dying to find out the sex of their baby, and those that find out the sex before the baby is born will already start to prescribe what the baby wears, plays with and rooms in relation to this unimportant factor. Parents are terrified to have someone approach them to declare, “Oh, what an adorable little boy!” when they are pushing their stroller out and about, and will go so far as to piece their infant’s flesh to …
… ensure people get their gender right.
So we dress our boys in blue and our girls in pink to ensure that there is never any confusion that our bundles of joy belong to a specific category which won’t really matter to the child until they are of school age. But why pink, and why blue?
Smithsonian Magazine released an interesting article on the history of the colour of babies’ clothing, which points out that originally babies were dressed in gender neutral clothing (which may not have been gender neutral by today’s standards- check out this photo of FDR looking adorably feminine as a baby). Babies started wearing pastels in the mid-19th century, but colours weren’t separated into gendered categories. Different magazines and newspapers would make claims on the modern fashion for babies, and some originally suggested that pink was more appropriate for boys because it was a stronger colour. While it seems natural to us that pink is feminine, it is interesting to think that less than 100 years ago, the complete opposite was true.
It wasn’t until the 40s that the two colours were divded by the standards that we hold today. And it was largely manufacturers who made this decision. They simply started peddling pink as a girls’ colour, and blue as a boys’ colour, and parents picked it up. Of course the manufacturer stands to gain more sales by creating niche markets for different genders, and from about the 80s on the infant goods market has been regimented in the pink vs. blue concept (this was partially due to the introduction of prenatal testing which allowed parents to know their child’s sex before it was born. Sex was suddenly a factor in pre-birth purchasing decisions). The idea has now been pushed until it has reached a point in our culture where we can’t really understanding meaning outside of this trend. If a mother was to introduce her newborn to her girlfriends in blue, her friends would assume that her baby was a boy. If she said no, it’s a girl, her friends would likely question her decision- as it was clearly the wrong one. It’s almost humorous to think that an arbitrary fashion trend has had such an affect on our understanding of others.
Take for example the recent media coverage of the ‘Princess Boy‘. A mother was brash enough to allow her son to wear pink dresses, and she made headlines. Jump back 100 years, and a young boy wearing a pink dress would have meant absolutely nothing. And I’d argue it still doesn’t mean a thing. Aside from that fact that clothing has absolutely no bearing on identity (in particular when someone else is making the decision what you wear), our inability to understand an infant as a person until it has been given as gender shows have integral gender has become in our formation and understanding of the individual.
And it’s rather interesting to note that this integral aspect of understanding was arbitrarily decided upon by clothing manufactures. Who knows- maybe the next industry in line to ‘genderfy ‘ itself will be the food industry. No more apples for boys- it will turn them into sissies.
While every inch of my being is telling me to argue that you’re wrong, the truth is that you make an excellent point. Who’s to say what is appropriate for anyone to wear whether it’s a dress or pants. Looking forward to seeing men going to stores to find out what’s the latest in spring fashion for dresses! I wonder…should they shave their legs though?
I don’t know about other places but things are more relaxed here in the UK once the children get to about 5 years old and they can wear pretty much any colour. I work in fashion retail and last summer noticed that most of the pink items for older children were for boys not girls. For toddlers and babies though it is so regimented with regards to colour choices with ‘traditional’ colours being segregated by gender.
Once you look around the colour fascism is something that does infect so many other areas of retail, especially in electrical goods with pink mobiles, and pink appliances such as TVs, cameras etc in order to attract female buyers …. or camp men!
A lot of people aren’t all that hung up on color, at least in my town. I work at a kids’ clothing store, and there are loads of moms who either (a) hate pink and don’t want their baby girl inundated with it or (b) prefer neutral colors. I’ve talked to plenty of moms who want their girls in green and brown instead, which is definitely what I would prefer. A friend of mine who is having a girl wanted lots of pink, but that’s because she herself likes the color. It’s not like the kid is going to know what color she’s wearing at 8 months old.
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Strangely enough–and I realize this is solely anecdotal–it’s dads that seem to purchase more of the pink for girls/blue for boys than the moms do, in my experience.
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Another thing I’ve noticed is that the color separation really becomes far less defined as the clothing sizes increase. The newborn clothes are almost all white or pink for girls and white or blue for boys, but once you get up to 12-18 months the colors have diversified considerably.
I would like a pink pair of assless chaps.
I’ve seen them. Biker’s weekend is next weekend down here and I’ll pick you up a pair! what size?
That’s funny – I think bike week might also be next weekend down here, too. Where ARE you, V?
Laughlin, Nevada. About 1/2 hours south of Las Vegas. I actually live in AZ though.
Nice! (You’re not near me, though – I’m an East Coast-er. )
In Spain, little girls get their ears pierced when they are born. My mum decided not to do it, as she wanted me to choose whether to do it when I was older. After being asked for the umpteenth time what was the name for that cute little boy, she pierced my ears. Silly gender generalisations.
Ick. That drives me nuts. I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was 14, and at that point I went nuts and filled up my ears with metal. Until my semi-dormant allergy to all things metal excepting titanium and gold flared up, that is. The ensuing gross allergic reaction was gross for me at age 18, and I’m so glad I didn’t have to go through it at age 4.
I’m just glad my parents let me decide to pierce myself with needles (although now my poor mother just wishes I’d stop with the tattoo needles).
the pink sleepers and blankets weren’t enough?
I am strongly opposed to any sort of unnecessary body modification to children without their consent.
I think it is terribly wrong to pierce the ears of a child. When the child is old enough to understand pierced ears mean a tradeoff of some pain for the ability to wear sparkley things, then they can choose to do it. But piercing the ears of an infant just because the parent thinks it is pretty, or feminine, or wants to decorate their mini-me is just wrong.
And the argument that ‘it is better to do it now while they’ll forget the pain’ is just awful. They can choose to have the pain or not have it at all when they are old enough to make the choice.
Good article, it is way past time to degenderise colours and clothing
I think this goes beyond mere pink & blue. At infancy, most babies are indistinguishable as far as sex goes. This is an identity thing for the parents, mostly the Mom, I would guess. Before you push this aside, ponder it for a bit. Parent/child identification is an important part of bonding.
Don’t underestimate it.
I agree, my relationships with my daughter and son are initially rooted in the knowledge that I had a “little girl” and a “little boy”. My daughter, to me was sweet and pretty, my son, sweet and handsome. My daughter was dainty and had a girlish cry from the beginning, my son would grunt, snore loudly and was direct and stubborn. Their personality traits related to their gender roles and helped in my relating to them as a little person with an identity. And my daughter has the same conundrum I had as a child. We can never decide on a favorite color because we like them all :P
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In the 1800s most infants were dressed in white, and gender differences weren’t highlighted until well after the kids were able to walk. Both boys and girls wore dresses or short skirts until age five or six. Differences in clothing were subtle: boys’ dresses buttoned up the front, for example, while girls’ buttoned up the back. Why no attempt to discriminate further? One theory is that distinguishing boys from girls was less important than distinguishing kids from adults. Childhood was a time of innocence, whereas adulthood typically meant grueling physical labor. Perhaps mothers decking out their little boys in dresses thought: They’ll get to be manly soon enough.
By midcentury baby clothing in colors other than white had begun to appear, but gender-based distinctions were slow to emerge. In 1855 the New York Times reported on a “baby show” put on by P.T. Barnum, exhibiting “one hundred and odd babies” dressed in pinks, blues, and other colors seemingly without regard to gender. In a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-’69 blockbuster Little Women, a female twin is distinguished by a pink ribbon and a male twin by a blue one, but this is referred to as “French fashion,” suggesting it wasn’t the rule over here. A Times fashion report from 1880 has boys and girls dressed alike in white, pink, blue, or violet, and another from 1892 says young girls were wearing a variety of colors that spring, including several shades of blue.
But from the 1890s onward, boys’ and girls’ clothing styles started to diverge, with boys dressed in trousers or knickers at progressively earlier ages. Jo Paoletti of the University of Maryland, a longtime specialist on the topic, reviewed more than 500 descriptions and images of children’s clothing appearing in print between 1890 and 1920 and notes a rapid “masculinization” of boys’ wear, for reasons that remain obscure.
As part of this differentiation, there seems to have been an effort to establish characteristic colors for girls and boys. But it took decades to develop a consensus on what those colors were. For years one camp claimed pink was the boys’ color and blue the girls’. A 1905 Times article said so, and Parents magazine was still saying it as late as 1939. Why pink for boys? Some argued that pink was a close relative of red, which was seen as a fiery, manly color. Others traced the association of blue with girls to the frequent depiction of the Virgin Mary in blue.
I’m not convinced, however, that there was ever a consensus that pink was for boys and blue was for girls. On the contrary, indications are the two colors were used interchangeably until World War II. Examples of pink as a mark of the feminine aren’t hard to come by, one of the cruder being the use of a pink triangle to identify homosexuals in Nazi prison camps. After the war the tide shifted permanently in favor of blue as a boy’s color. In 1948, royal-watchers reported Princess Elizabeth was obviously expecting a boy, since a temporary nursery set up in Buckingham Palace was gaily trimmed with blue satin bows. By 1959 the infantwear buyer for one department store was telling the Times, “A mother will allow her girl to wear blue, but daddy will never permit his son to wear pink.”
How did pink get ghettoized as a girls’ color? Nobody really knows. Professor Paoletti thinks the choice was largely arbitrary, but others credit innate biological tendencies. Research on color preference in monkeys has shown females prefer warmer colors like pink and red — supposedly an infant primate’s pink face brings out its mother’s nurturing instincts. A color preference study of Caucasian and Chinese men and women showed both Caucasian and Chinese women strongly preferred red and pink, while Caucasian men strongly preferred blue and green. However, the Chinese men showed a broader range, with many picking red and pink — possibly because in China red is considered lucky. To me that suggests the biology argument is pretty weak. Sure, my favorite color is blue. But it’s entirely possible I say that because I was always told I should.
Might answer some people going. “Hmm…”