5/10/2015

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

By Jeanne Maglaty
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SMITHSONIAN.COM
APRIL 7, 2011 Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread

smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. Shoulderlength hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.
FROM THIS
STORY
PHOTO
GALLERY

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was
photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of
their first haircut. Franklins outfit was considered genderneutral.
But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says
Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue:
Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, to be published later this year. Thus we see, for
example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.
Why have young childrens clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up
with two teamsboys in blue and girls in pink?
Its really a story of what happened to neutral clothing, says Paoletti, who has explored
the meaning of childrens clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore
dainty white dresses up to age 6. What was once a matter of practicalityyou dress your
baby in white dresses and diapers white cotton can be bleachedbecame a matter of Oh
my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, theyll grow up perverted, Paoletti says.
The march toward genderspecific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue
arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid19th century, yet the two
colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War Iand even
then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.
For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants'
Department said, 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 sources
said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes or blue was for blueeyed babies, pink
for browneyed babies, according to Paoletti.
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When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sexappropriate colors for girls and boys
according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filenes told parents to dress boys in pink. So
did Best & Co. in New York City, Halles in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Todays color dictate wasnt established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans
preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. It could have gone the other
way, Paoletti says.
So the baby boomers were raised in genderspecific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers,
girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and
tomboy play clothes were acceptable.
When the womens liberation movement arrived in the mid1960s, with its antifeminine,
antifashion message, the unisex look became the ragebut completely reversed from the
time of young Franklin Roosevelt. Now young girls were dressing in masculineor at least
unfemininestyles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that in the 1970s, the Sears,
Roebuck catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing for two years.
One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as
women is through clothing, says Paoletti. 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.
John Money, a sexual identity researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, argued
that gender was primarily learned through social and environmental cues. This was one of
the drivers back in the 70s of the argument that its nurture not nature, Paoletti says.
Genderneutral clothing remained popular until about 1985. Paoletti remembers that year
distinctly because it was between the births of her children, a girl in 82 and a boy in 86.
All of a sudden it wasnt just a blue overall it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding
a football, she says. Disposable diapers were manufactured in pink and blue.
Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change. Expectant parents learned the sex of their
unborn baby and then went shopping for girl or boy merchandise. (The more you
individualize clothing, the more you can sell, Paoletti says.) The pink fad spread from
sleepers and crib sheets to bigticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys.
Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when
the next child was a boy.
Some young mothers who grew up in the 1980s deprived of pinks, lace, long hair and
Barbies, Paoletti suggests, rejected the unisex look for their own daughters. Even if they
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When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

are still feminists, they are perceiving those things in a different light than the baby boomer
feminists did, she says. They think even if they want their girl to be a surgeon, theres
nothing wrong if she is a very feminine surgeon.
Another important factor has been the rise of consumerism among children in recent
decades. According to child development experts, children are just becoming conscious of
their gender between ages 3 and 4, and they do not realize its permanent until age 6 or 7.
At the same time, however, they are the subjects of sophisticated and pervasive advertising
that tends to reinforce social conventions. So they think, for example, that what makes
someone female is having long hair and a dress, says Paoletti. They are so interested
and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.
In researching and writing her book, Paoletti says, she kept thinking about the parents of
children who dont conform to gender roles: Should they dress their children to conform, or
allow them to express themselves in their dress? One thing I can say now is that Im not
real keen on the gender binarythe idea that you have very masculine and very feminine
things. The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about. And
there is a growing demand for neutral clothing for babies and toddlers now, too.
There is a whole community out there of parents and kids who are struggling with My son
really doesnt want to wear boy clothes, prefers to wear girl clothes. She hopes one
audience for her book will be people who study gender clinically. The fashion world may
have divided children into pink and blue, but in the world of real individuals, not all is
black and white.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed the 1918 quotation about pink and
blue clothes to the Ladies Home Journal. It appeared in the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's
Infants Department, a trade publication.

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