The THINK PINK for girls colour coding has not existed forever. It is claimed to have really taken off in early 1940s advertising campaigns. The same is true of baby clothes. They always used to be white, and both sexes were put in dresses as babies. I have a picture of my dad in a dress at the age of one (1913). In fact pink was said to be a military choice, and in paintings the Madonna was always dressed in blue. Girls schools used to prefer blue for girls uniforms. It was said to be the most flattering colour for the largest number. Summer dresses were often blue and white.
The 1940s advertising start of the pink / blue divide “fact” is all over the internet. Is it true? No. We have a set of original Wife and Home magazines. I checked. Other sources say the pink/ blue difference increased from the 1920s on. These are all 1932 to 1934, so apparently it was already overwhelmingly pink for girls.
The dressmaking patterns in Wife and Home suggest ‘red and white checked gingham’ for girls dresses, and ‘blue and white checked gingham for boys shirts.’ That’s red and blue though, not pink and blue.
Pink / Blue colour coding was in use by the time I started school. We were issued with NHS school medical cards, where the terrifying visits of the nit nurse, or bloody extractions by the school dentist could be noted. Back then, in the earliest NHS days they were already colour coded. Murky pink with F for girls. Murky blue with M for boys. Why not G and B, we thought at the time. NHS children’s spectacles came in pink or blue.
So the cards were issued at infants school, aged 4. In my class of forty, they ran out of blue. Three of us, being alphabetically challenged … Viney, Walker and Young … got pink cards, with the F crossed out, and M written in. Why? Early bureaucracy issued exactly 50% pink and 50% blue cards to schools. After a war, it is said, there is an increase in male births to replace those killed. So there I was stuck with a pink card until I was eighteen. It was worse at my all boys grammar school, though kids from other schools had suffered the same indignity, and like me, were alphabetically challenged, so we were in line together. Once a year we stood in line, dropped our trousers and pants, and the doctor put a wooden spatula under our testicles and asked us to cough. I don’t understand why all three male PE teachers needed to be in the room to watch intently, but it was the same with showers after games. We endured ribald and crude comments from our blue-carded classmates. I think of that pink card and my face reddens. I remember the Nazis made homosexuals wear pink triangles in concentration camps, and a referential comment to pink and gay would have been cast in our direction annually. Not that the word ‘gay’ was used in the early 60s. Of course, if the same happened in the 21st century the pink carded victim would have to opt for painful and expensive gender re-assignment, but would be able to sue the local education authority for millions to cover the cost. The pink for gay association is said to be a response to the Nazi pink triangles, but why did the Nazis make that colour choice? It suggests the association already existed.
In textbooks we did units on gender. It was always a good talking point. The ‘more than 50% of medical graduates are female but 90% of senior consultants are male’ (Well, it was true twenty years ago) or ‘Women have more acute hearing. More women than men can sing in tune’ or ‘89% of murderers are male’. We did something on pink and blue too. Our designer hated the pink / blue coding and was appalled when we suggested the list of statistics should be presented in pink and pale blue boxes. It led to a long discussion that proved it was a good ELT topic for promoting discussion. As we always said, most subjects use language to present facts. ELT uses facts to promote language interaction.
It was true for children’s clothes when we had kids, well, but only by the second set of baby clothes. The thing is, there was no standard ultrasound. Amniocentesis tests were available, but without other warning signs, were considered a possible risk to the unborn child. We had no idea of the gender of our babies. If you had a test, the nurse would ask if you wanted to know. Mostly, people we knew declined. Each of our three kids was ‘wait and see.’ It was all part of the excitement.
The main task for those of us at the viewing end during childbirth was exclaiming ‘It’s a girl! or ‘It’s a boy!’ I’ve done each for our second and third. For our first child, after twenty plus hours of labour, I was expelled to the corridor at 5 a.m. because of a planned Caesarean. In fact, the young Australian doctor did a ventouse extraction instead. He came out, muttered, ‘Congratulations. It’s a girl’ and staggered off. I went in to find it was a boy. The midwives were laughing in hysterics when I told them. It was the twelfth child that doctor had delivered on the very long shift and ten had been girls. I spoke to him the next day. He was distraught. The whole hospital knew of his error and dozens of nurses had offered to explain or even show the difference to him. He believed it would follow him throughout his career, and he had been hoping to specialize in obstetrics. I pointed out that he was a handsome young guy and that there could be advantage in the situation. He brightened up.
So what happened in those days was that the neonate clothes came in white or primrose. Relatives and friends would buy before the day, but always in white or primrose. Near universal ultrasound leads nowadays to ‘gender reveal’ parties (something unheard of then). Nearly everybody knows, so neonate clothes come mainly in pink and baby blue. The conditioning is set on day one. (There’s another story here about certain communities using ultrasound to ensure male babies … but that’s a different tale).
So the pink and blue colour coding gets set in far sooner. It has accelerated. Looking through those 1930s magazines, baby girls and female toddlers are overwhelmingly in pink. Not teenage girls, or adult women though. I don’t recall any girlfriends dressing in pink in the 60s / 70s either.
It changes. We inherited an Aga when we bought our house, and we had the kitchen re-done fifteen years ago and considered sprucing it up. We went to a specialist Aga / Rayburn re-spray company in rural Wiltshire. They had an array of mainly pastel colours, but told us the most popular was now pink. Not a standard Aga colour, but they could do one. Now it is an Aga colour. They said Posh Spice (aka Mrs Beckham) had started the trend. In the end we stuck with the existing white and just left it.
But ‘pink for women’ was almost becoming aggressive. There is no corresponding blue campaign.
Take wine. On Mothers Day and Valentines Day all the supermarkets put out huge displays of pink wine. Think pink. For most of my life, rosé wine was a bland compromise. If you had some at the table who wanted red, and some white, you might choose rosé. I come from an era when one bottle did four. Now I’d just order one (or maybe two) red and two white. Few ever ordered rosé from choice, except for the dread Mateus Rosé in a funny bottle. It was never a ‘serious wine.’ Now if you’re female, it’s assumed that pink prosecco is your ideal drink. It doesn’t work in our house, though champagne (NOT pink) is considered a treat on such occasions. In the last ten years you have winemakers vying to sell ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ or just plain ‘very expensive’ rosé wine. I sometimes get misled by the descriptions, most recently by a Sunday Times Wine Club case of ‘very special rosés’ and always end up gazing at the glass and thinking ‘it’s still extremely bland.’
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