When a new mother approaches with an infant swaddled in green, the modern-day American faces a dilemma: Is it a boy or a girl? Better not guess wrong. “Is that your, um, son?” we might ask, cringing inwardly if the child turns out to be a girl.
Americans of the 1800s would have been puzzled by the awkwardness, writes Jo B. Paoletti in Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America (Indiana University Press).
Before the early 20th century, it was acknowledged that male and female babies were virtually indistinguishable. Though gender mattered very much later in life, a baby was a baby. To underscore that fact, infants were dressed in flowing white dresses.
Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, studies apparel design and textiles, as well as the psychology of dress, consumer culture, developmental psychology, and the history of childhood. In her new book, she describes how, over the past 100 years, parents have increasingly gravitated toward children’s clothing that telegraphs their offspring’s gender to the world.
Before the turn of the 20th century, dressing little boys in “manly” clothing was seen as inappropriate and creepy, as if assigning to a toddler the sexual qualities of a man. Young boys’ styles were much more like the clothes of adult women, until they were “breeched” at age 6 or 7. But starting around 1890, parents began dressing their children in more gendered ways. “They invested much more in masculinizing their sons than feminizing their daughters, because fear of sexual depravity—particularly the supposed physical and psychological danger of masturbation and the threat of homosexuality—was focused almost completely on boys,” writes the author. Paoletti also notes that in addition to changing social mores, economic forces may have been at work; clothing manufacturers realized that gendered clothing was harder to hand down from one sibling to the next, and they were eager to capitalize.
Do the clothes worn in childhood really make the man (or woman)? Paoletti thinks not: “There is no evidence whatsoever that homosexuality is any more or less prevalent now than it was when boys wore dresses until they were 5, or that lesbianism spiked among the first generation of girls to wear pants.”
Yet the memory of how our parents dressed us does influence how we choose to dress our kids, says the scholar. Unisex children’s clothing had a brief resurgence in the 1970s and early 80s, which Paoletti attributes to baby boomers’ desire to break free of the sexism of the highly gendered 50s. Now the pendulum has swung; young parents who grew up wearing gender-neutral garments, perhaps remembering painful instances of mistaken identity, now reach for frilly dresses and tiny football jerseys.
Still, young children must learn the rules of gender before bending or breaking them. Toddlers cross-dress without scruple, but older children are likely to have strong opinions about what kinds of clothes boys and girls are allowed to wear. “Visit a class of 4-year-olds,” Paoletti recommends. “Existing in the time between awareness of their sex and security in its expression, they apply every rule they observe with uncanny precision.” That is normal and healthy. But the author says not to blame parents who worry that gender conformity will stifle their children’s growth: “Expert advice changes every generation. Parents who gave their children frequent ‘sun baths’ in the 1920s weren’t trying to increase their chances of developing skin cancer. Much of what we know about how children learn gender came after the unisex era, so we can’t fault those parents for not knowing it,” Paoletti writes in an e-mail.
For the most part, children have lived in a color-coded world of pink and blue since the 1950s. But Paoletti has a surprise: When gendered children’s clothing emerged, over a century ago, pink was considered the stronger, more masculine color. In 1890, Ladies’ Home Journal recommended pink for boys and blue for girls. Other sources advised parents that fair-haired tykes looked best in blue, while pink was more flattering for dark-haired children. For many, pinks and blues were interchangeable hues in the nursery palette.
Only in the past 60 years has pink become indisputably feminine. Yet recently its jurisdiction has come into dispute. Pink polo shirts have made their way into the wardrobes of mainstream, heterosexual young men, and even male babies can be paraded around in pink “Mama’s Boy” T-shirts without causing a stir.
Paoletti predicts that pink will one day be gender-neutral, but not yet: “The current gendered meaning of pink is so strong that when a boy or man wears it, it is not ‘just a color.’ Notice how the Twitterverse reacts to a news anchor wearing a pink tie. And choosing to wear pink still seems to prompt men to offer some sort of rationale, which they would not need to do if it were a neutral color,” Paoletti says in the e-mail.
Today, gendered clothing continues to dominate children’s departments—especially pink clothes for girls. In recent years, fashions for teenage and preadolescent girls have become more sexually provocative, and now that trend is creeping into the closets of younger kids. The emergence of “prostitots” is demonstrated on television programs like Toddlers & Tiaras, a “reality show” about miniature beauty contestants and their trophy-hungry parents.
“The popularity of the show speaks to a general sense of discomfort with sexualized behavior for children,” writes Paoletti, noting that many reality shows are meant to make audiences feel superior to the people on screen. “But the pageant parents clearly see this as a legitimate and desirable form of self-expression for their children. Historically, beautiful-baby contests are not new, but the conflation of beauty and sexual attractiveness is more problematic.”
Little boys, too, are not immune to sexualization in the media. A 2010 commercial for a line of faux-denim Huggies diapers showed a toddler strutting suggestively down the street, garnering the admiration of passers-by. Some viewers were appalled, but online commenters who posted criticism on YouTube “were ridiculed for having dirty minds and no sense of humor,” says Paoletti, who argues that the line between “gender appropriate” and “sexually attractive” has become blurred. On a 25-year-old woman, the message sent by a bikini is clear, but what does it mean on a 4-year-old?
Children can use clothing for true self-expression and exploration, writes the author. However, that isn’t always easy. “My children are grown, but I have a granddaughter who is nearly 11. She’s adventurous and athletic and has never looked good in pastels. It’s sometimes been a struggle to find clothes that express her personality. Adults have so many clothing choices compared to children, and I think that is sad. Fortunately, I sew.”
