Pink: A not so ladylike color

I told my friends at the Strong National Museum of Play about my interest in gender based colors; specifically my surprise that pink has only been a “girl’s color” in recent decades. As a result, Chris Bensch, Vice President of Collections at the Strong, has been keeping his eyes open on the subject and sent me an interesting piece from the online magazine Slate.

Entitled, “Pink is for Battleships, a history of a decidedly unladylike color,” it contains some interesting pictures and commentary on pink’s history as a male color.  What caught my eye, however, was the notion that the use of pink and blue to differentiate boys and girls baby clothes was a trend wholly invented by the clothing industry.

It seems that baby clothes used to be white. Most were handmade and it was easier to hand down the same clothes from boy to girl to boy baby (remember they used to have big families) then to make new ones.  

Then store bought clothes came into fashion and between World War I and II everything changed.  Here is how author Jude Stewart puts it:

"In the prosperous era between World Wars, mothers switched from homespun to manufactured baby clothes. Merchandisers liked how color-coding babies’ clothes bolstered sales—after all, whatever rule you were following, color-coding meant you couldn’t dress little Johnny in Sally’s hand-me-downs. Department stores began competing to establish a color-coding rule: In 1927, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Marshall Field’s in Chicago, and Maison Blanche in New Orleans all pushed pink for girls, but other stores—Macy’s and Franklin Simon of Manhattan and Bullock’s of Los Angeles—positioned pink as a boy’s color."

Then, after World War II, the color pink emerged as the girl’s color. It makes you think that if a bunch of department stores could have that kind of impact on gender, think what would happen if Wal-Mart took a position on something so essential to how we see ourselves. Or, come to think of it, maybe they do and we are just are too immersed in our own culture to see it.