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Wednesday Blurbs, Pink and blue babies
To settle the pink-blue issue once and for all (or not)!
Jo B Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland, has studied the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years and has recently released a book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America. Paoletti believes that the colours didn’t become associated with girls and boys in the USA until around the 1940s. Before then, she says, babies were in gender neutral clothes (mostly white ones that could be easily bleached). Many other researchers agree with her and also with her conclusions that the rise of manufacturing, modern retailers and the advertising industry coincided with the current pink-blue divide.
Obviously selling the idea that you had to have different colours for boys and girls meant retailers were likely to sell more clothes than if they allowed consumers to go with previous gender neutral choices.
Various commentators and researchers tell us that it could have easily been blue for girls and pink for boys. Apparently there were periods in European history when those were the preferred colours in some cultures, and it seems early USA department stores varied in the colours they pushed for each gender.
Other academics, using various methods of research, come to different conclusions about how long the contemporary colour preference has been around in various countries. They also research and debate whether colour preferences in general are exhibited by males and females (and, if so, whether they are preferred across cultures and whether they are innate or learned).
If all these ‘experts’ can’t come to an accepted answer, then all Bloom blurbs has to say is perhaps it’s time for a bit of innovation. Who’s up for it?