the origin of pink for girls and blue for boys

I read somewhere just recently that when colour dying of fabric first became common, boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue, as pink dye's were more expensive and boys valued more highly than girls (china originally I think). Blue was also considered more dainty for girls as it was a gentler colour.

Just found this:

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Contrary to the above, until around 1940, blue was the common color for girls, as it was seen as daintier. Boys, on the other hand, were dressed in pink, because it is a dilution of the color red, therefore considered to be stronger. In addition, boys were commonly dressed in skirts and dresses up until the age of 6 or 7. It was not until the late 1950s that dresses for baby boys were dropped from the clothing lines in most department stores.

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There are many photos of my Dad dressed in 'dresses' as a bub.

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that using color for baby gender identification is (perhaps) a pretty recent development. Earlier in the twentieth century, color identification was used but it was reversed. That is, pink was used for boys and blue for girls. This was noted in several newspaper articles (1914, 1918) advising that since pink was the stronger color and better for boys whereas blue is more delicate and therefore more suitable for girls.



It is also stated that the current identification didn’t become uniform until the 1950s. Nazi Germany made homosexuals wear a pink marking and this may have had something to do with the switch in gender identification color.



But it is also said that blue may be associated with boys because having a boy baby was considered associated with good luck in ancient times. So the boy baby was dressed in blue since that was the color of the sky where the gods lived and was considered a way of warding off bad luck. Same thing in Greece where blue eyes were considered to be able to turn away evil.



In ancient China, red dye was relatively cheap and plentiful whereas blue dye was much more expensive and rare. So it was considered appropriate to dress a son in blue because he would bring a dowry to the family when he married.

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Oooh I love reading about these sorts of things. I always find it surprising as to why society follows certain things.

Bit off topic but, I know that wedding dresses used to be light blue until Mary Antoinette got married and she wanted something different so went with a white dress. And also she is jill in the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. And on the wedding front that flowers used to be smelly herbs to ward off evil spirits but they were replaced by flowers because of said smell.

We have pics of Dh's father as a child in dresses (actually the girls' going home from hospital outfit is one of his dresses). I personally find it sad that we still dress our babes in colours that have such gender stereotype in them (boys are stronger and worth more than girls etc).

Mind you I happily rebel against this at every chance I get. ;)

I'm pretty sure it was cooked up by someone trying to make a buck

A long but interesting article

The ghettoisation of pink: how it has cornered the little-girl market | Society | The Observer

not the article I read, and has different justification for the blue / pink thing,but fascinating all the same :).

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Bit off topic but, I know that wedding dresses used to be light blue until Mary Antoinette got married and she wanted something different so went with a white dress.

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Ooh, would have to argue against that one. For the average person, the wedding dress was any colour, as they basically wore their best dress. Clothing was expensive, especially the nicer stuff, looking at a months wages to pay for one. Queen Victoria when she was married opted for a white dress (can't remember the reason why), at that time what ever royalty did the populous followed. Will be interested to look up the Marie Anntoinette reference (sorry historical costuming nerd here, just don't get me started on Vikking clothes ;) )

beansbeans I'm with you, I happily rebel against the pink/blue thing too. ds has pink blankets and a pink cloth nappy and I dress him in rainbow pants too. Thankfully dh is with me on this one, he couldn't care less if ds was dressed in pink in public either.

Interesting thread to see where it come from and interesting article Marushke, especially the part of disney characters being in blue before a marketing champaign!

I still find it hard to believe that there are people who believe the pink/blue thing is a natural phenomenon! They are the ones who look at me weird when I say DS likes pink but won't wear it anymore as a favourite colour that it once was because of kinder and what the kids in kinder were conditioned for!
His gumboots were chosen in a slightly larger size last year in a pink, so they still fit, and they are still his favourite boots, so it doesn't much make sense to him that he's not supposed to like it ;)
I also have heaps and heaps of mothers who go on about how they didn't used pink much so they don't know where their girls get it from, it must just be natural. Some of these mothers have amnesia, because I DO remember their babies wearing pink as babies and I'd be surprised if there weren't baby photos depicting it. Nothing wrong with that so much, but the denial is very interesting, in itself!
What people discount to much and don't consider is the role of media portrayals. It's not just social circles (like the ones who say their girls never really saw anyone else wear pink...tough call these days!), it's TV depictions of what girls wear that I notice are very prevalent. We don't have TV, so the very few chances I get to see kids' TV means I notice it more - there is such a heavy depiction of pink for girls and blue for girls. No wonder they get to school/kinder thinking there's a 'right' way!
DS had any colour I could get my hands on, and only a smattering of blue. With DD it's harder because we're using a lot of hand me downs and heaps of them are pink - that's considering I culled the 'pinkest' of them to give to op shops. The other pink stuff I've tried to reserve as 'farm clothes', so that she's not associating pink with something she has to be seen in by others so that they know that she's a girl.
Cos that's the other thing - developmentally kids don't care about gender for years. Left to get to that stage themselves, they could easily get to 6 or 7 and have no preconceived notions of what girls and boys can and could do or that there even needs to be a differentiation between the two.
The story I had heard, and I only have a memory of one section of it, was that blue had been associated with boys and pink with girls (for whatever reason I can't remember now) and that during one of the periods of pestilence and even higher infant mortality the colours were switched to confuse 'God' or 'the gods' so that they would take the girls and not the boys. Again, going back to the misogyny of the time where girls were considered extremely inconsequential.
I couldn't believe what I was reading here about the Virgin Mary wearing blue - how on earth do we know that? I think this is why I find religious iconography so bizarre...!
Anyway, I have been treated as a great subvertive for my insistence on not saturating my children with the idea of gender appropriateness and of 'confusing' them. It won't take long for this society to 'correct' my kids of any terrible ideas of equality (not sameness) and predetermined preferences they are supposed to have :( At least they'll always have the questioning and challenging of assumptions as their foundation :) I'll just have to ride it out while they tangle with convention and realise it's all artificial and is accepted because it makes thinking less hard for people (people just don't know what to say anymore when they don't have a gender 'marker' for children even the age of my DS, who is 5.5yo!).
ETA: I have been reamed on BB before by people who thought I was doing my DS a disservice by not letting him know blue was the conventional colour for him. I've been questioned for not supplying DD with dolls etc. So, I'm glad this thread hasn't done that to anyone and that it's started from the POV of questioning the same things I did!

Awesome post Mayaness :).

I think many who participate in this social construct (coloured clothing) are not aware and are not intentionally participating in the underlying meanings that people decades or centuries ago gave those colours. If I had any idea what (some) people once considered why pink was for girls, I wouldn't have bought pink at all. But I had no idea and I guess others don't either :).

A bit like how Christmas and Easter have an undeniable pagan origin, which well predates any Christian understanding, but most people are unaware of this and don't actually participate knowingly in pagan activities when they celebrate those holidays.

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I couldn't believe what I was reading here about the Virgin Mary wearing blue - how on earth do we know that? I think this is why I find religious iconography so bizarre...!

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Mary is consistently depicted in religious iconography to be wearing blue...apparently, she's wearing blue in the artwork/statues etc because the Church, who commissioned the art, had 'verified' several 'apparitions' of Mary - it's reasonable to expect that the Church would want her depicted accurately....although of course we have about as much surety that Mary wore blue as we do that Jesus, an Israeli, was white with dark blonde hair and blue eyes...;)

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Mary is consistently depicted in religious iconography to be wearing blue...apparently, she's wearing blue in the artwork/statues etc because the Church, who commissioned the art, had 'verified' several 'apparitions' of Mary - it's reasonable to expect that the Church would want her depicted accurately....although of course we have about as much surety that Mary wore blue as we do that Jesus, an Israeli, was white with dark blonde hair and blue eyes...;)

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Actually they knew that because of the huge social colour stereotypes back then too. If my memory serves me correctly, the women all wore head veils, the virgins were pale blue and the married women darker blue. Because they want to reinforce the virgin aspect of the birth, they usually depict her with light blue headscarf. Someone might know more about the actual shades etc... but that is my understanding of why she wore blue :).

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that Jesus, an Israeli, was white with dark blonde hair and blue eyes...;)

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I was going to say the same thing before I got to the bottom of your post - no way Jesus was the pale, blonde hair blue eyed man always depicted. More than likely Jesus would have been very dark skinned, dark haired and very swarthy.

But totally off topic.....

I guess my bewilderment IS the preoccupation with getting it 'accurate', like it matters to people's belief systems and how they live their lives that they are looking at a true likeness of someone they believe in. I think it's relevant and not OT because this belief that colours mean something for our kids' position in life has facilitated the current obsession with colour coding, and the discomfort people feel when someone doesn't follow that convention. Like the discomfort people felt in the old days when someone didn't go to church, and when women started to wear pants and even now when boys have long hair (don't get me started on that and the stupid things other kids told DS at kinder this year about his hair!).

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Actually they knew that because of the huge social colour stereotypes back then too. If my memory serves me correctly, the women all wore head veils, the virgins were pale blue and the married women darker blue. Because they want to reinforce the virgin aspect of the birth, they usually depict her with light blue headscarf. Someone might know more about the actual shades etc... but that is my understanding of why she wore blue :).

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So true! Just after I posted I thought to myself that those 'apparitions' the artwork is apparently based on would quite likely have been influenced by whatever the gender/colour norm was at the time :)

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I guess my bewilderment IS the preoccupation with getting it 'accurate', like it matters to people's belief systems and how they live their lives that they are looking at a true likeness of someone they believe in. I think it's relevant and not OT because this belief that colours mean something for our kids' position in life has facilitated the current obsession with colour coding, and the discomfort people feel when someone doesn't follow that convention.

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Totally agree with you, Mayaness :)

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I was going to say the same thing before I got to the bottom of your post - no way Jesus was the pale, blonde hair blue eyed man always depicted. More than likely Jesus would have been very dark skinned, dark haired and very swarthy.

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I have friends from Palestine who are very fair. It's entirely possible that he could have been a red head. Although darker colouring is dominant it's actually a fallacy that all Arabs are dark and swarthy.

I gave my boy a buzz cut last night. Although I loved his long hair he wanted a buzz cut and I think that it would be unfair to impose long hair on him now he's decided he doesn't like it anymore :(

I asked DS why he wanted his hair cut and the only reasons he could give me were that the other kids said he looked like a girl and that he wanted to look like the other boys. I didn't get it cut then and there, despite being told I was being unfair by a few people (and was most likely thought of as unfair by a great many more!), because I know (ya know, as his mother) that he actually likes his hair. His inclination to get it cut was about conforming to what other kids were conditioned to believe about boys and girls. I told him that everyone KNEW he is a boy and they were just repeating stuff that didn't make sense and that they didn't even believe, because some people do that.
Well, a few months later, what happened to the boys who started the year with short, spiky hair that was gelled into mini-mohawks? They were ALL growing their short hair out to longer lengths and finished the kinder year with a much softer look! Not coincidentally, DS wasn't hassling me about a hair cut by then either. He still mentions it from time to time, and only when DP is reefing through his hair to get tangles out (he steadfastly refuses to heed my curly hair advice, because what would I know? I have only had curly hair all my life and DP hasn't!).
When DS had the opportunity to get his hair cut earlier this year, thinking he wanted it really short, he actually refused to get in the chair, I had a hair cut appt so it wasn't a complete loss. The hairdresser has known DS and I since DS was a bump and didn't push it - because he knows what DS is like and was really not wanting to give him a look that went against his nature. I was relieved that he didn't get to cut his hair then, because he was thinking about social pressure. The interesting thing was that when he went for a maintenance cut last month he got really sad that his sunbleached ends were gone! He loves them and said he couldn't wait for them to come back...which means he has to have longer hair ;) The non-kinder circles we move in are much more open-minded, so over summer and term holidays we don't have the same conversations!

Meh. My son has long hair, his dad has longer hair. My son has had blue and red nail polish on for the past 3 weeks which his sudo cousins put on him along with their little brother the same age. That gets my goat when I see your posts maya I want to give these people a piece of my mind. I'd be more concerned about being small minded than what colour my son likes. Lemme at em.

Country town = pushing the proverbial uphill ;) So, we just plug along, and they probably put it down to us being from Melbourne...the hippie hills, at that :p
ETA: Should say that the KIDS circles we move in are more open-minded! The neighbours' kids are older and love DS the way he is, as do the surfing and Booby Club kids!