When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

One practical aspect of the same clothes until age 6 is that kids grow so fast you need to re-use clothes. In the 18th and 19th century when having clothes made was much more expensive, and the number of children a family had was high, the re-use would have been essential. Any parent today who has had two kids of one sex and then the third comes along of the other sex finds they have a bunch of boxes of things that they don&#x27;t want to use.<p>We sought to keep our baby clothes especially and up to about age 3 clothes as neutral as possible for that reason.

I am sure with higher infant mortality and bigger families there were massive cost savings in gender neutral clothes for small children. We have our first girl due. I went to the local semi-quality big chain store and a stack of nice pink onesies were on the rack for under $5 (AUD) each. I got them to the self-checkout and found they were all marked down to around $3 which is less than a large cup of coffee around here. So although we will reuse our huge supply of robot, dinosaur and truck outfits, colour coding her gender in public for the benefit of strangers isn&#x27;t going to be a huge financial burden.<p>More pissed off with the pink toy aisles. I can buy my boys a semi-decent quality kitchen to play Gordon Ramsey in for $110 AUD on special at the same store available in pastel pink only (all the kitchens stuff has pictures of girls on it and is pink - all designed by or for Americans I guess). A similar gender neutral product in the same store is available by online order only for nearly twice the price. So the boys have a pink kitchen because fuck it - boys cook and women haven&#x27;t been trapped in a kitchen for decades.

Never heard that dresses were gender-neutral for small children in the 19th century. Seems I&#x27;ve seen plenty of old photographs that show boys wearing traditionally &quot;masculine&quot; clothing, though commonly with short pants, transitioning to long pants during adolescence.

&gt; <i>Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers.</i><p>That is the bit of history I&#x27;d like to read far more about, from primary sources. Specifically to suss out whether manufacturers and retailers <i>interpreted</i> these color preferences or <i>manufactured</i> them.<p>Also, it&#x27;s annoying when sites inject links and other shit into copying and pasting a sentence from the article to quote it elsewhere.

Now I&#x27;m not colorblind but I do know the girl in that first picture isn&#x27;t wearing pink and OHMYGODTHATSABOY...

Related segment on QI:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f7urmRaRxY&amp;t=2m12s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2f7urmRaRxY&amp;t=2m12s</a>

It&#x27;s only within the last few Presidential election cycles that the Republicans have become &quot;red&quot; and the Democrats &quot;blue,&quot; which is the opposite of what you might expect.<p>What has &quot;always&quot; been true usually has very definite origins, sometimes quite recent.

Everyone who is not colorblind perceives that there is a special emotion linked to a specific color. This applys to Children as well - they are not emotionless entitiys until the age of 6. They have thier favourite colors afore.

It would be nice to return to the times of gender-neutral clothing, and perhaps keep it that way until the child expresses a preference. After all, genitals don&#x27;t determine gender, they determine sex.

My information on why red&#x2F;pink <i>was</i> associated with males is that red dye is more expensive. Thus the wearing of red is a status symbol.<p>(Source: talk on Vikings at Jorvik Viking museum&#x2F;village)

<i>Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically?</i><p>As opposed to all other demographic segments?

do you not get the Victorias Secret catalog?

It is interesting that some social conservatives (or maybe just non-liberals?) care about consciously enforcing gender roles through clothing. This would seem to imply that they are similar in their beliefs with feminists when it comes to the nature&#x2F;nurture question: that gender is enforced through culture. But this is usually thought of as a very liberal idea (or whatever I should call it).<p>Pink as an effeminate color has always seemed kind of arbitrary to me. I just can&#x27;t see how a color would have a specific gender.