Pink is the color of the summer, at least for Barbie fans eagerly awaiting the film’s release later this month. The color dominates the movie’s trailer—Barbie’s dreamhouse is pink, as is her car, her clothes, the streets in her town, the planes flying overhead and even the sand on the beach. Margot Robbie, the film’s star, is walking pink carpets to promote the movie, beverage brand Swoon has created a new Barbie-inspired pink lemonade, and fans are sporting clothes in Barbie’s signature color. Although pink is currently associated with all things feminine, it hasn’t always been that way.
It’s hard to imagine now, but pink was once the color preferred for little boys. A Ladies Home Journal article from 1890 advised, “Pure white is used for all babies. Blue is for girls, and pink is for boys when a color is wished.” And a 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department offers a similar view, “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. 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.”
The preference for boys in pink may have been a Midwestern and Southern phenomenon. A Time magazine article from 1927 surveyed large department stores nationwide, asking which color the stores’ customers felt was most appropriate for girls and boys. The majority, including those in Boston, Cleveland, New Orleans and Chicago, favored pink for boys and blue for girls. California was split with those in Los Angeles preferring pink for girls and customers in San Francisco selecting the color for boys. In Philadelphia and Manhattan, the customers liked blue for boys and pink for girls. Clearly, there was an ongoing debate and no strong preference.
Jo Paoletti, professor emerita at the University of Maryland, explains in her book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America that in the 19th century, parents preferred to dress their children in white so as not to emphasize their gender. “Few parents in 1880 would be comfortable dressing their year-old son to express his masculinity or choosing clothing to accentuate their infant daughter’s femininity…Gendered dress was considered inappropriate for young children whose asexual innocence was often cited as one of their greatest charms,” she writes.
By the middle of the 20th century, daughters were dressing like their mothers and sons like their fathers. But, in the 1970s, children began wearing more unisex clothing. At that time, women were entering the workforce in more significant numbers, entering nontraditional roles and choosing less feminine clothes for themselves and their daughters. “In the 1970s, pink was so strongly associated with traditional femininity that it was vehemently rejected by feminist parents for their daughters’ clothing,” Paoletti writes. These anti-pink feelings were so strong at the height of the unisex trend in the mid-1970s, the Sears catalogs carried no pink clothing for toddlers for two straight years.
By the mid-1980s, the pink-and-blue gender divide began gaining strength. Prenatal testing may have been a catalyst for this trend. Due to the testing, before the child’s birth, parents knew whether the infant would be a boy or a girl. This knowledge gave mom and dad ample time to decorate their nursery with a color scheme to reflect their newborn’s sex. More recently, expectant parents have been sharing their excitement by revealing their child’s sex in parties that feature balloons, cake, and confetti in pink or blue. (Although some prefer to use purple to signal they will be open to letting their child choose their gender identity).
As the gender color divide became more apparent, some downsides emerged. First, manufacturers raced to accommodate the desire for gender-specific items. Pink tricycles, pink scooters, pink razors and even pink Bic pens were marketed toward women and girls, often at marked-up prices, relative to their boy-colored counterparts. Only two states, New York and California, have “pink tax” laws preventing retailers from charging more for pink items aimed at girls and women.
Gender stereotyping was also exacerbated by the growing pink-for-girls phenomenon. Public outcries encouraged stores like Target to stop differentiating toys by gender and to remove pink toy aisles aimed at girls. Just because girls were dressing in pink didn’t mean stores could treat girls differently from boys regarding toys. Consumers didn’t want their daughters steered to dolls and kitchen equipment while their sons played with blocks and chemistry sets. (Target no longer labels which toys are for girls and boys and removed the pink wallpaper that had previously lined the “girl” aisles.)
The pink and blue distinction also makes young boys and girls seem more different from each other than they truly are. It may make people treat them differently, too. And it may make those uncomfortable with the gender binary feel forced to adhere.
Ultimately, the choice of pink for girls and blue for boys is what social scientists call a social construction. There is nothing biological that draws girls to the pink color. It’s just something our society made up. So, as Barbie hits the big screen, remember if things had gone slightly differently, we could be watching the doll come to life in a blue house, with a blue car and blue clothing.
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