Gender Bent: Pink for Girls, Blue for Boys
Our culture teaches us from day one that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. The rule is so deeply ingrained that it’s easy to assume it must somehow be natural, or at least rooted in ancient traditions. But pink for girls and blue for boys is actually an arbitrary and relatively recent development in Western culture that has more to do with selling diapers than anything else.
Until the 19th century, almost all children wore gender neutral clothing. These easily bleach-able garments made sense for both male and female babies who liked to get their clothes dirty and didn’t like to stick their pudgy legs into pants.
It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that more colorful baby clothes became the norm. Around WWI, pink and blue colors started being tied to a baby’s gender, but not in the way they are today. Back in 1918, an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal gave mothers this advice about dressing their babies:
Another article in Time magazine in 1927 showed that several top department stores firmly believed that pink was best for boys. Pink was often tied to boys because it was seen as a younger cousin of masculine, warlike red.
So when did pink and blue settle into the gender roles we know today? After World War II, women returned home from the workforce and a new culture of femininity came to dominate popular culture. With it came an explosion of gendered products, starting from infancy. Manufacturers found that the more products they could make gender-specific, the more stuff they could sell.
Brands settled on pink for girls and blue for boys, but scholars point out that it easily could have gone the other way. In fact, there was still some leeway in the 1950s — in 1955, Life Magazine declared the “Peak Year for Pink” for both men’s and women’s fashions.
Gender neutral clothing and toys for kids became popular again in the 1970s, when feminism influenced mothers’ preferences for themselves and for their kids.
In the 1980s and 90s, manufacturers returned to the pink and blue rule with a vengeance, and pink has since become totally associated with femininity. In fact, toys and clothes have become more tailored to gender than they’ve ever been before. These strict guidelines about gender-specific products for children go hand-in-hand with gender stereotypes. In one famous example, the University of Iowa painted their visiting locker room pink in order to make their opponents feel weak and submissive before games.
But there have been recent signs of a cultural shift away from the strict pink blue divide, including a rise in gender neutral clothing options for kids, companies that won’t brand toys specifically for girls or boys, and even protests and artwork challenging the effects of such tight gender stereotypes. Next time you’re shopping for your brother’s birthday, remember that if recent history had gone slightly differently, you easily could have been looking for that perfect pink gift for him. And to learn more about gender norms, go to genderbent.lookdifferent.org
