If pink is for little girls, it wasn’t always
Prior to the 20th Century, infants had worn simple white gowns for practical reasons – they were cheap, and could easily be boiled and bleached. Gender-coding of pink and blue didn’t become popular until the post-second World War baby boom,
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In Little Women, Louisa May Alcott writes: “Amy put a blue ribbon on the boy and a pink on the girl, French fashion, so you can always tell.” This suggests that the classification of pink for girls was a French innovation, yet the origins are unclear. By 1890, this concept still hadn’t travelled across the Atlantic. That year, Ladies’ Home Journal noted: “Pure white is used for all babies. Blue is for girls and pink is for boys, when a colour is wished.”
Similarly, in an article on baby clothes in the New York Times in July 1893, readers were advised to “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl” because “the boy’s outlook is so much more roseate than the girl’s…that it is enough to make a girl baby blue to think of living a woman’s life in the world.”
In her 2012 study of the clothing of children in the United States up to the age of about six or seven, Jo Paoletti identified when girls were assigned pink, and boys were assigned blue. She noted that Sigmund Freud introduced the idea that very early experiences unconsciously shaped our adult natures, particularly our sexual desires. With the publication of further psychological studies on the subject of sexual identity in child development, this led to the belief that a child’s gender should be reinforced as early as possible.
By the late 1940s, feminine details were purged from the clothing of little boys, particularly pink. This was because there was a belief that masculinity in baby boys should be protected and reinforced to ensure they were not harmed by being mistaken for a girl which, so the thinking went, would lead to “dangerous” homosexuality.
In 1941, Dr Leslie B Hohman wrote of the dangers of “Girlish Boys and Boyish Girls”, as his article was entitled, in Ladies’ Home Journal. He gave the example of a 12-year-old boy whose mother was concerned he was displaying too much “girlishness”. Hohman sent the boy to military school to retrain him as “a normal manly youth”. Blamed for this excessive femininity was his mother’s “admiring notice at 18 months when he stroked with apparent delight a pink satin dress she wore”.
Similarly, girls were given pink to ensure they were sufficiently feminine, in order to fulfil roles as wives and mothers.
Second-wave feminists in the 1970s targeted pink as a colour that pigeonholed girls and stymied their potential, and instead promoted unisex clothing for children, in gender-neutral green and orange. However, this led to a backlash.
During the 1980s, pink was reinforced as a girls’ colour for both clothing and toys and this was enhanced by new prenatal technologies. Ultrasounds revealed to parents the sex of their child during pregnancy and they could shop for, and be gifted, the appropriate colour.