Gender in America: University of Maryland Professor Jo B. Paoletti has been studying the meaning of children's clothing for 30 years
It's easy to spot the newborn girls from the newborn boys in any hospital nursery - the pink and blue blankets are a dead giveaway. But it wasn't until rather recently that those two colors were relegated to the sexes.
Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland, has studied the meaning of children's clothing for 30 years. Later this year she will release her latest study of children's clothing, a book called Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America.
In an interview with
Smithsonian Magazine, Paoletti says: 'It's really a story of what happened to neutral clothing.'
It was only in the 1940s when children's clothing began to change, and become specific to gender. Gender-neutral clothing had always been the norm with boys wearing the same crisp white dresses as girls until age 6 or 7.
'What was once a matter of practicality - you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached - became a matter of "Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they'll grow perverted,"' Paoletti says.
While pink and blue and other pastel colors were introduced as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, it wasn't until just before World War I that they had any gender specificity. And not until much later that they were set in stone like today. Paoletti, says that it easily could have gone the other way - with pink being for boys, and blue for girls.
According to a June 1918 article in
Earnshaw's Infants' Department, a trade publication: 'The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.'
Other rules created at the time said blue was flattering for blonds, and pink for brunettes. Eye-color was another important consideration with blue being better for blue-eyed babies, and pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.
By 1927,
Time was publishing charts about what colors were appropriate for which sex, while individual stores gave advice to parents about which color to dress their child in.
Pink and blue became the gender norms in 1940 with the rise of manufacturers and retailers. Baby boomers girls wore pink, and boys wore blue. But then following generations rebelled against that definition.
With the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, unisex made a comeback and female children were dressed in more masculine clothing.
'One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,' Paoletti says.'If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls...they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.'
So nothing frilly was allowed and certainly no pink - the
Sears Roebuck catalog wouldn't show any pink toddler clothing for two years in the 1970s.
'This was one of the drivers back in the '70s of the argument that it's "nurture not nature."'
Gender-neutral clothing remained until around 1985, when prenatal gender testing got parents excited about the sex of their baby. This time it wasn't just onesies that were gender-specific - it reached to all of baby's possessions.
'All of a sudden it wasn't just a blue overall; it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding a football.'
And this struck a chord with merchandisers. They found that the more you individualize clothing - surprisingly - the more you sell, Paoletti says.
New wave feminist of the 1980s, who didn't grow up with gender-specific clothing, took a different route when it came to their own children.
'Even if they are still feminists, they are perceiving those things in a different light that the baby boomer feminists did,' says Paoletti. 'They think even if they wanted their girl to be a surgeon, there's nothing wrong if she is a very feminine surgeon.'
Another factor is that consumerism is reaching to younger children. Children as young as 3 or 4 become conscious of their gender, and don't realize it's permanent until 6 or 7. Advertising has an affect on them, and 'they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,' Paoletti says.
These identifications, enforced at such a young age, is something troubling to Paoletti.
'One thing I can say now is that I'm not real keen on gender binary - the idea that you have very masculine and very feminine things,' she says.
'The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about.'
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