/ Maggie Koerth-Baker / 9:30 am Sat Apr 9, 2011

In great-grandma's time, little kids went around un-gendered

A hundred years ago, little boys wore pink and little girls wore blue—if their clothing was gendered at all. It wasn't always. In fact, a heavy emphasis on gendered clothing for children under the age of 6 is a relatively recent phenomenon. Smithsonian has really interesting story about the socio-cultural history of small children, gender, and clothing.

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  2. Makes me want to go buy a pink shirt for myself and some blue baby clothes for the little girl we’re expecting this summer.

  3. the article claims that pink and blue were not indicators of gender prior to WWI, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that blue was used in the 19th century (and perhaps earlier) as the colour for girls, because it denoted purity (as seen, for instance, in the blue robes sometimes draped around the Virgin Mary).

    I suppose, if true, this sort of thing may have varied along with how Catholic a society was.

  4. Wait, I thought evolutionary psychologists had proved that the innate male preference for red and female for blue were products of evolutionary pressures! Evolution’s done a lot in 70 years!

    2. Yeah, that particular piece of ‘research’ came from a particularly annoyingly stupid but very PR-savvy bunch of evolutionary psychologists at my old university. The explanation they had for what was in any case a non-existent phenomenon was particularly ludicrous – that women used to be responsible for gathering berries and most berries are red. Err… even if that was true, berries come in all different colours, including blue, and many red berries are poisonous, and in any case, red isn’t the same as pink.

      1. There’s no more difference between red and pink than there is between blue and light blue. I suspect the reason we clearly distinguish one but not the other has to do with gendering, but that’s pure speculation.

        1. “There’s no more difference between red and pink than there is between blue and light blue. I suspect the reason we clearly distinguish one but not the other has to do with gendering”

          Spanish has a specific word for light blue: celeste. I don’t know what this does to your theory.

          1. English has words for “light-blue” too. Azure, cyan, turquoise. What’s your point?

            I think you mean that Italian or Russian consider those colors to be a separate category of color that most people learn and recognize. For example, pink is just a lighter form of red, but you never hear it called “light red”

            See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term or http://en.wikipedia/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language

            Interesting how language shapes perception.

  5. Alternative reading of this article:

    In the 19th-century, all children wore dresses and had long hair. When boys got older, their hair was cut and they were dressed in more masculine clothes. When girls got older, they continued to dress like children with uncut hair, and were infantilized for the entirety of their lives. Yet another way women were grouped with children in a world before feminism.

    In the modern day, a feminine gender role is no longer considered demeaning to a person, and is acceptable regardless of planned life goals. As a result, parents have chosen to embrace the sex of their child from birth, and equally encourage boys to be proud of being boys and girls to be proud of being girls.

    1. “In the modern day,a feminine gender role is no longer considered demeaning to a person.”

      Oh really? I so wish this were true.
      Calling men “girls” or “ladies” is never an insult…
      And telling women ” you’re a real man” or ” you are one of the boys” is never a compliment..

    2. “In the modern day, a feminine gender role is no longer considered demeaning to a person”

      HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

      Oh, that was a good one.

  6. Well, I know one of the guys I work with, a big dude of 6 foot 4, loves how he looks in pink and violet, and stated as much when our older boss was startled to see him in a pink shirt when he changed out of his work uniforms.

  7. I am a straight male and I particularly like purple, but no matter what I can’t get rid of the instinct that purple and pink are feminine colors, despite knowing this recent pink vs. blue thing and the history of purple as the color of kings etc. etc.

    I think it’s tough to get away with wearing pink as a male. It’s taken on a different connotation nowadays – mainly douchebags wear pink. But purple, even more feminine, lighter variations, looks quite good on me I think. It’s sometimes hard to find decent men’s clothing in nice purples, though, that isn’t made for douchebags – it’s more about the style than the color.

    Anyway, if/when I have kids I’m going to dress them relatively neutrally, and if I have a girl I’m going to shield her from the pink toy aisles because I wouldn’t want her to get stuck in the trap of only liking pink like so many young girls. Pink can look nice on girls, but a mix of colors is better. Anyway, as I said before, it’s more about the style of dress than the colors. I think I would probably buy feminine-styled clothes for a girl, but that’s a harder decision because that’s more like forcing femininity or masculinity on the kid.

  8. I’ve quoted the LHJ claim for years, so it’s nice to see that I hadn’t misremembered it and passed it on to others incorrectly.

    My oldest girl in particular wore strong dark colors as a baby rather than pastels because that’s what suits our skin tone. Is there any research on baby color assumptions in non-Anglo/American cultures?

  10. I’m not finding a good reference, but many rowing clubs (cf Leander Club) use pink in their colors because that was thought of as a very strong, masculine color at the time of their founding. I’ve seen it called “light crimson” or “cerise” now.

  11. My family does historical recreation as a group hobby, spending many weekends a year in various costumes from the last 1,000 years. Our kids – and the kids of our friends – therefore spend lots of weekends in gender-INconspicuous clothes; we tend to keep them in skirts until they’re toilet trained, at least. It makes child-care a lot easier, as well as trading clothes among siblings and families. And the children seem to have no problems – no matter what gender they are (and believe me, the kids do know) they all want a sword by the time they’re four or so. They all learn to use drop spindles as tops, planes, and projectiles. They all stage both meals and fights with their dolls.Their personal colour choices, when those emerge, are expressed in their accessory choices and every-day clothes – but they have no problems at all wearing their “costume” skirts between the Osh Kosh B’Gosh outfits.

  12. For what it’s worth, I’ll point out that “girl” originally meant “child”, ungendered. (I’m told that a mid 15th-century text refers to “knave-gerlys” to specify male children; I don’t have the specific citation to hand.)

    I’ve always approved of the fact that my niece’s preferred color is purple, avoiding the pink/blue distinction.

  13. One other thing that’s important to point out is we didn’t just masculate boys clothing but also feminized the infantile. No woman in 1884 would be seen showing her bare legs FDR’s photo. But as the 20th century progresses, skirts shorten and high socks become fashionable and indeed, “sexy”. So did things like pigtails, traditionally seen as juvenile. Once the societal conception of adult femininity appropriated those types of styles, it also shifted our idea of what constituted a “gender-neutral childeren’s style”.

  14. This is very true. Photos of HP Lovecraft as a child are indistinguishable from those of a little girl. Is it really so surprising that the clothing industry would seek to genderize little children? And is it really such a bad thing? It’s not as if anybody has to dress any sort of way. Rebellion takes many different forms.

  15. I vividly recall a certain day in kindergarten (now forty-some years ago) ….

    The teacher announces that we’re going to do craft activities, with construction paper and scissors and glue. I brim with happy anticipation.

    Teacher sets out two stacks of colored construction paper.

    I take a pink sheet of construction paper, because pink is the pretty color that I like.

    But the teacher gently takes away my pink paper, returning it to the stack, explaining:

    “No, no, Karl … pink is for girls, blue is for boys.” (That’s a quote: you can quote me.)

    Then she hands me a blue sheet of paper.

    Valentine’s Day!

    The day of love? More like the day of betrayal — they say you can have what you want, then when you get it, they immediately take it away from you.

    After that, school was more or less all downhill (until college, where my sense of free will kicked in again).

    1. I feel your pain. Self-expression as a child is so very important, but well-meaning carers can often crush a child’s will or imagination with such false ideas.

  16. In great-grandma’s time, women stayed at home and kept house, and men went out to work. Let’s cherry pick some more….

  17. The blue and pink I don’t buy. I’ve seen really old baby clothes for sale and they are nearly always only white.

    And they can call it a dress I call it a easy access clean up outfit. They didn’t have button snaps and onesies back then.

    There are lots of reason for having such similar baby outfits. Primary being that people made alot of their own clothes and kids had to wear hand me downs.

    Why not just write a article about the 1600’s when the rich all wore lacey things.

  18. If the November 1931 issue of Fortune is to be believed, the transition between pink and blue had been settled by the 30s. The obvious driver towards this consensus was urbanization and consumerism. I mean consumerism in the good sense here. It is a real nuisance to have to make your own baby crib, spin and weave your own baby blankets, or wire up your own neonatal monitor. On the farm, consumer goods are relatively sparse, though Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward and Wells Fargo did their best.

    In 1920, the nation was half urban for the first time. That meant you got paid in money and went shopping, not sewing or woodworking or soldering circuits for the new baby. That meant Pepperell’s was selling three million baby blankets a year in 1930 and the business was growing. Selling millions of baby blankets and carriages and the like meant mass production and msss marketing. It was basically what we have now. When the Duchess of York – read “Madonna” – decided to do her daughter’s nursery in maize, maize was in, at least in trendy circles, but most people stuck with pink for girls and blue for boys.

  19. Strange there’s no emphasis that it’s a cultural thing. Red for example would be gender neutral for the Chinese.

    Or would that be dark pink? eh? eh?

  20. My greatgrandfather had 5 or 6 older sisters, he was the only male. To ward off the evil eye, they had him wear an earring as a young boy. Don’t know more about how he dressed.

  21. Pardon me for being totally geeked out by finding my researched covered by BoingBoing. As many commenters have noted, there’s more to the subject than could be covered in the article. You can find more on my blog pinkisforboys.org where I post stuff while I wait for the book to come out.

    1. @34: It’s a great article. Congrats on the book!

      I can’t recall wearing skirts on a regular basis as a young kid in the mid-70’s. I do recall a lot of bright colors that weren’t pink. I don’t hate skirts (especially when it’s 90), but I do hate pink as applied to clothing. I don’t own a stitch of it. It’s a lovely color for flowers and some birds, but I find it infantilizing on adult women.

      It was a struggle to find neutral clothes for our son when he was an infant and impossible now that he’s a toddler. American society takes particular pride in stiffling creativity in males, the clothes seem to be part of the training.

  22. There are many photographs of me as a toddler wearing plaid overalls of various (and often multiple) hues along with saddle shoes. Orthopedic saddle shoes, no less.

    I’m not exactly sure of the mechanism, but I’m quite positive these outfits lead directly to my various neuroses, and my distinct aversion to any stiff sort of footwear or loud patterns.

    In short, it’s my mom’s fault I can’t wear Doc Martens.

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