The Actual History of Pink for Girls and Blue for Boys

[Music] hello and welcome to another desent into research Madness this time I wanted to know why we ended up with pink for girls and blue for boys and is there more to the story well it turns out that the research is rather spotty on this subject I had been taught that it really started up after World War II when we were trying to commercialize everything and making people purchase more than one set of baby clothes during the baby boom made tons of commercial sense however I was also taught that prior to that point the colors

were sort of reversed and it was pink for boys and blue for girls and that there's a big argument over the whole thing but when I went and looked at the more recent research a lot of that had been vaguely debunked and I say that simply because a lot of it came down to only a couple of references and those references were just thrown away as oh well there's just a misunderstanding we didn't switch back and forth it's always been pink for girls and blue for boys and you know the rest of it's just people

not really doing their research properly which of course I take as a complete challenge so I have dug so deep that I'm pretty sure that I found dinosaur bones in this Rabbit Hole so let's get into how we ended up with not just pink for girls and blue for boys but the entire idea of gendered color why we chose pink and blue and more importantly how we've ended up with pink being such a girly color that quite a few consider it inappropriate for boys or men entirely we're going to start with looking at blue and

pink as actual colors the term blue goes back incredibly far and is prevalent in numerous languages all over Europe so it's a very old term however the term pink is very recent it really doesn't pick up meaning a color until the 18th century prior to that point pink referred to Jagged edges so if you've ever used a pair of pinking shears in crafts or sewing you'll know that that zigzag Edge is referred to pinking and that is what brought us to the color you see the dianthus flower has those Jagged edges and we started Cally

referring to them as pinks and therefore because they are pink in color we started associating the term with the color as well the added irony to this is that before we used the term pink it was much more common to use the term Rose for the same range of colors which is yet another flower-based color so there's definitely a theme that I'm sensing here throughout the research that I'm going to show you you'll see both pink and Rose used simply because Rose is much more common before pink was now the first reference that I could

manage to easily find my way back to was from 1856 and I also found it mentioned in this book pink and blue by Joe petti who specifically talks about the broader aspects of pink blue and did a ton of research into not just written documents but also looked at birth announcements and cards and baby paraphernalia such tons of stuff and she also made it back to 1856 and it is an article in Go's ladies magazine that is talking about the impending birth of the child of Napoleon III and Eugene over in France and this Royal

child is being prepared for in large scale and this specific article talks about the fact that there is a massive lay at all the baby stuff is being prepared in light blue but the article specifies it is not because they are hoping for a boy in the case of blue for boys and pink for girls which they say is common in France however they are doing it because they are associating this baby with the Virgin Mary and they want to place it under her protection regardless of gender and light blue is a color that is

associated with the Virgin Mary so they are doing it specifically for concerns over the child's health not because of gender interestingly enough I found a few other articles about the same exact event when I looked into UK magazines and they have differing stories one says that the blue was specifically chosen because they are hoping for a boy and third says that they prepared a full blue layette as well as a rose layette for the baby and they'll be prepared for whichever gender the actual accuracy of the story is not important for this part what is

important is that blue and Rose are listed as gendered colors coming out of France and since I was struggling to find anything in American newspapers that took me further back with blue and pink I decided to track it down through some French routs and what I came up with was an article that was just a a year later is from the perspective of a French traveler in Europe and they are in Holland the Netherlands and specifically talking about the Dutch practice of decorating their doors after the birth of a child in blue or Rose depending

on the gender and apparently supposedly this is a practice that was brought over with the Spanish it's really the only way they explain it not a lot of information to go off of but it's interesting in the fact that the French as of 1857 are presenting this as something that is abnormal and something that they clearly don't see as a universal practice but something specific to the Dutch so even if pink for girls and blue for boys is somehow more deeply rooted in French history it's still somewhat of a literally foreign concept to them to

treat it in that way but this gave me a thread to pull on so I started looking for any other references in English or French about the Dutch practice I unfortunately don't have access to Dutch databases or really know the language very well interrupt that video with an update and research because due to the help of a very lovely Dutch person in my twitch Liv stream and the realization that Google Books actually has some Dutch works in the database meant that I was able to continue this research a little bit further so what I had

found was quite a few references from English and French Travelers into the Netherlands talking about their various experiences with this practice some said that there was a small board put outside with the information about the birth others said that there was a lace cap or a pin cushion or a door knocker they all had slightly different ways of talking about whatever this practice was and they all mentioned different colors representing different genders white red pink and blue all got mentioned in there in various ways and it was pretty unclear what the actual practice was but

in the 1808 version that I found they do mention a very specific word which that allowed me to then put that word in because it actually means what I need it to mean and follow it back in dictionaries and other writings from the 18th and 19th centuries in Dutch so this term took me to not only those references but also to actual surviving pieces in museums so this is what they are talking about it is a little square of lace with trimmed edges and the background of it is red or to some eyes might be

a little bit more pink depends on how faded it is and this would go out onto the door after the birth of a child to announce the birth of a child and to tell people to leave them alone essentially it worked sort of like an old version of maternity and paternity leave where this would go up all of the neighbors the friends the family everyone would know that they just had a baby and they would essentially leave the entire family alone during that time not just in the sense of don't bother them with menial things

but in the sense of you can't collect debts you can't arrest them you can't bother them and yes they did occasionally get kind of overused and so there were some regulations on how long it could go for at the very least but this was a practice done in a few specific cities and areas in the Netherlands during the 19th 18th and potentially all the way back to the 17th or even 16th centuries and this essentially was just a way of saying we had a baby leave us alone the part where it comes into the colors

and gender is the fact that if they put it up as is it denoted that they had a boy if they slid in white sort of making it party color half red half white in the background that meant that they had a girl so there was inevitably going to be some confusion by Travelers who weren't necess understanding what that specifically meant in terms of what color represented what or whether it was red or pink or all those different things so I can see how the mixup occurred and how this piece of lace was also misunderstood

as both a little Board of information a lace cap a thing that essentially replaced where the door knocker was or a little cushion for the door knocker I can see how things got a little mixed up with what this means interestingly enough this general practice is still being done in the Netherlands not this exact thing but the idea of decorating out in front of your house after birth to kind of let everyone know so that way they don't need to come bother you about that information is still being done and that term does still have

a lot of associations with maternity so this specific thing did exist its Origins are unknown a lot of the early histories will mention that it might have appeared during the time of the Spanish Netherlands but some sources will even say that it actually was the Spanish that said put something in your door so we won't bother you as we invade which seems terribly unlikely and a lot of the historical references that mention this say it's not likely to actually be the case because the regions in which this is practiced don't line up with where the

Spanish were or weren't it seems to be kind of scattered around so it's not likely that that's the origin of the practice more likely that it was around that time that it was started so that does go back further but the color is a bit mixed and it definitely doesn't answer pink and blue for us as for why we ended up with pink and blue it's a little bit more difficult to say the most common theories that I've seen have to do with potentially that as we mentioned before light blue is associated with the Virgin

Mary pink is associated with Jesus in a lot of earlier representations this seems to potentially have been the case in France where we know the practice existed prior to the Protestant Revolution and that's when they switched over to the opposite way at which point it became more of an emotional opinion of the genders and an emotional opinion of the colors not surprisingly throughout history we've had a lot of strong opinions about what colors mean green for example we usually associate it with plants and new life and things like that but things like blue and red

or derivatives of red are really strongly emotionally opposed to each other so we tend to think of blue as very calm and red as very energetic and depending on how they view the genders during that time they would choose accordingly so they might see blue as a girl's color because they think of the feminine energy as being calmer and more Serene more innocent they might think of red as much more aggressive and angry and therefore very masculine or they might think of it as the opposite way that girls are super emotional and therefore it makes

more sense for them to have red tones and that boys need to be more calm and level-headed and Associate it that way so depending on the culture at the time and the way that they viewed those genders they took these two very opposing colors that generally get termed as calm and emotional and applied them accordingly so I personally feel like this makes the most sense in the fact that we just already happen to associate those colors on opposing sides and we did the same thing with genders in different time periods in different locations in different

ways and that's how we ended up with that color but even if this is the source blue and pink as gendered colors it doesn't answer how we started applying those specifically to infants to announce births to dress them in that clothing and eventually came to the point where pink became a severely gendered thing for adults as well and that is where we have to go back to that Dutch practice because I found by the time we reached the mid 19th century they were not the only ones doing that what makes this really important is the

fact that the idea of a birth announcement using a color coding system does track very well with other references that I found throughout the 19th century well into the 1890s as the main way that we tended to use colors for representing gender it's not about what the babies are wearing it's about the announcement so when someone had a baby they would send out cards announcing this and they would use colorcoded cards or add a little ribbon to the card perhaps other decorations in order to announce the gender of the baby after it was born and

this seems to be the primary use of those colors regardless of what they are really until the 20th century simply because most infants and children throughout the 19th century even before that are dressed in white and they're dressed pretty agender so we don't differentiate between boys and girls clothing until near around Age 4 to 6 the reason for this boys clothing is going to resemble men's clothing and when you think about 19th century closures that's a lot of buttons we don't want to deal with all of those buttons and diapers or bathroom emergencies so until

the little boys are able to take care of all the Fasteners on their own and be fully potty trained they're not going to put them into adult style clothing with the exception of like little costumes and fun things like that but on a daily basis you're usually going to see white G SS on children regardless of gender the white is chosen because it's just plain practical for laundering when cotton became more popular in the late 18th century that's when little white dresses for children took off in popularity they can be boiled bleached scoured they can

be blued up to look more bright white we were already dealing with white as our primary undergarments So shirts shifts all sorts of other Basics things that needed to be laundered for cleanliness purposes most often were in white so it only makes sense that we would continue to do so for or infants and children who need their clothing washed on a regular basis if nothing else White shows dirt more easily so you'll know when it needs to be washed but on top of this the dies that were being used in the 19th century were still

primarily natural dyes this does start to change but it doesn't actually fix the problem so much as create a new one but these natural dieses were relatively temperamental when it came to heavy washing especially boiling and long-term exposure to things like the Sun so they would fade out with time so something like a yellow would start to look pretty much like a dingy white before too long now of course we're trying to come up with new analine dyes and other chemical types of dyes throughout the 19th century some natural colors can manage to hold up

better Coach Neal for example is a very Vivid red that comes from insects and it tends to hold up to Boiling in comparison to other Reds and pinks however it's very expensive so things that are considered wood pinks are much more likely to fade out and respond poorly to Boiling so things like safflower pink needed to be replaced in order to be viable options for heavily laundered clothing they did start to discover options by the mid-century aloin for example they discovered if they added tin and a gentle heat that that would produce Pink as of

1851 but the problem is with a lot of these dies they're very experimental and it's not just what color can we make it's what color can we make and safely put up against human skin we've all heard of the stories of Arsenic and the same goes for a lot of the other dies that they were inventing during the 19th century science wasn't always putting Safety First and there are more than enough stories of people being poisoned or at least irritated by the dyes in their clothing and infants are even more so susceptible to this they're

very sensitive when it comes to their skin so a lot of the prescriptive literature of the time just says keep them in white it's just a lot easier and safer you don't have to worry about how the clothing was dyed but as of the 1890s we're really starting to move towards more modern synthetic dyes that are much safer much more stable in their colors and there are more and more options for children's clothing coming out even though color is becoming a more viable option for children's clothing they're really not sure where the gender lines fall

on this what color means what is a big question some will say blue for boys and pink for girls but some will say things like blue and pink are for girls both of them and then yellow or allh is preferred for boys and there is actually a reversal of the colors comparison to what we're used to today it's just happening at the same time this article from 1897 describes the first lady Mrs mckin who knitted baby socks for Grover Cleveland Jr she made them in blue quote by mistake as all the world which has experience

and such things well knows blue booties are for girls and pink are for boys so clearly there was a misunderstanding there whether that means Mrs McKinley is of the blue for boys mindset and Mrs Cleveland is of the pink for boys mindset or something else I'm not sure but there's definitely a little bit of confusion here add in the fact that not everyone wants to use gendered colors many actually prefer to do it by complexion so doing blue for a fair baby and pink for a brunette is increasingly popular around the turn of the century

but regardless of this conversation white is still the standard for the vast majority of children's and infant wear as of the beginning portion of the century we're still looking at age 4 to six for most boys to move into more masculine specifically style clothing rather than children's clothing and remember when you're purchasing a leet for the baby all of the things you're going to need immediately after birth of the diapers and the clothing for a newborn they don't know what gender they're getting so they're buying a leet whether it's all white or trimmed in blue

or pink or another color without knowing the gender ahead of time they are not choosing this based off of the birth of the child they're choosing it based off of the color that they like knowing ahead of time what you're going to have isn't actually common until the 1990s where it became more common and more accessible to people with not just a medical need but in general so knowing well in advanced is a very recent change so all of these things that are being purchased for newborns are not going to be gendered specifically because you

just don't know and you're going to end up needing to use them regardless but this topic became a much more concerning conversation as dies improved and more and more clothing for children was coming in colors and we were going for younger and younger gender Styles we started producing what we call fast colors as of the beginning portion of the 20th century companies like sundor and everfast came into being and they specifically made dies that were not supposed to fade out much if at all within the wash or in the sun customers very quickly caught on

to this and according to many articles by the 19s and 20s they would not accept anything that wasn't color fast so it was no longer an option to keep doing things out of the older styles of dies that would Fade Out part of this concern apparently was around the fact that there was less and less household help AKA servants in the households and people would would do their own laundry instead they would send it out to larger public laundries where things were going to get rather roughly washed and if things weren't color fast they were

definitely not going to come back without fading so there apparently added concerns over the way that we were doing laundry as of the 1920s but more and more children's clothing started being advertised in lots of bright and fun and fashionable Colors by that point as mentioned it also started being more gendered by 1923 Sears catalog which is a great example of the average clothing that we're really going to see in the US during this time has boys clothing for as young as Age Two And this is really interesting because you'll see a lot of children's

clothing marketed rather gender free even above that age at some point you start to see some girl specific clothing sort of creep in but a lot of times it still refer to as children's clothing boys gets very specific much earlier by this point and is decidedly different in style but there are increasingly less babyish clothing items for girls as well Navy becomes a really popular color for girls clothing just whatever seems to be trending at the time they aren't specifically keeping it to pink and blue or children's colors as we're used to them today as

for the old adagen question it is becoming increasingly concerning to people they're writing into all of these newspapers and magazines to ask which way is it supposed to be tell me what way I should be doing this I hear both and I'm not sure as a new parent what the answer is so clearly there is a growing concern and confusion over this it really culminates in a survey taken for the modern baby book where they went and interviewed department stores around the US in 1929 and they found that it was completely mixed it's not specific

by region as you can see New York City has multiple examples back and forth Chicago has multiple examples back and forth I'm sure you could probably map this out in a certain way and really get down to exactly who's shopping at what type of store and maybe a pattern would start to appear there but it seems pretty mixed at the point and like there's not really a wrong answer whether it's blue for boys pink for girls or pink for boys and blue for girls so there is not a universal decision just yet of course articles

will always say if you can't figure it out or you can't decide just go with white that's always the safe option and other safe options became more popular as well when Macy's opened their first baby center in a department store in 1936 they had both blue and pink for infants but they also had yellow and that was specifically for age 1 to 3 once they moved into Age 3 to 6 they had a much wider range of color options they list hin blue Japonica Brown Primula pink crocus Moonlight Alpena green and a Bonia romance so

very floral themed there but tons of different colors for children which clearly are not gender specific however due to the gendering of children's clothing and other social things that were starting to take place this is where we start to see the shift and part of this is due to the fact that children are moving away from infant likee clothing at an earlier age for both boys and girls so this article from 1936 specifically States try to put a boy in anything sisser than 10 or navy today boys now dress like boys at an early age

but they also say girls go tailored just as soon which is to say that this is less about a gendered thing and dressing like a girl when they're younger and more a matter of no longer wanting to dress like a baby they want to dress like an older child and part of that includes colors that are not worn by infants but are worn by children so they're moving very quickly away from these baby things into children's clothing which is not gendered in the same way but this is really where we start to see the peak

of gendering infants starting in that late 1930s and moving through to the 1970s by the 1970s though there is a lot of resistance to this one article talks about in these liberated days the notion of pink for girls nursery and blue for boys is becoming old hat psychologists are saying more color so bright primary tones regardless of gender become a really trendy thing for babies because there's more and more concerned about the way that children see color the way that they interpret it the happiness levels when they're surrounded by colors and so they want big

bright primary colors regardless of the child's gender but this genderless swing does not last for long and we start heading back the other way somewhere along the way in this mid to late 20th century we get to the idea that it's not just pink for girls and blue for boys it's that pink is a girlish color and cannot be worn by boys or men blue that's a little bit more even in the 1950s where you would think the gendering is going to be at its peak pink is still a really popular color for little boys

clothing it's also a pretty popular color for men's clothing as it was in the 19s as well we go through different phases so pink being worn by men or boys even as of the 1950s was apparently not that concerning it's showing up in plenty of trendy magazines so it clearly wasn't a big problem just yet what seems to be happening though is that these lighter pastel colors are being associated with infants and that there is a growing interest in little girls continuing to be little girls for longer little boys need to grow up and be

men much earlier they need to be concerned about their specific adult gender whereas girls need to remain as little children for longer in their pink fre pretty dresses and the infantilization of girls becomes a thing during that time period And there's a lot to unpack with that that I'm not going to get to today but that is an increasing concern of that era that girls are more associated with childhood and innocence so that seems to be where the pull of these colors being associated with girls more so really comes from add in the fact that

we start to see a lot of color media as of the mid-century most things were being printed in black and white up until that point so now suddenly we see a boom of color movies of color advertisements and all of these things are suddenly very bright and Vivid think about the way the kitchens or bathrooms or houses presented in the mid-century and we're going to think about color bright and vibrant color and this is also an era where the household in general is becoming more and more associated with women it hit a peak in the

19th century with the idea of the different spheres for women and men where women take care of the household but we sort of transitioned away from that in the early 20th century but we move back into it with the Vengeance as of the post World War II era and the household full of these bright and vibrant and beautiful colors is becoming more more associated with women so when we see things like MiMi Eisenhower who's decorating the White House and she really loves pink it's her favorite color so she does pink and green and that is

being shown in magazines and articles in big bold bright colors other associations with famous women who became well known for pink like marily Monroe or even Barbie as of the 1970s really start to gender pink not just as a children's color but as a woman's color it's just specifically a feminine in color there are variations on this pink it's not the same baby pink for everybody in a lot of cases it's much more vibrant and in your face but pink becomes associated with this innocence and girlishness that is carried through into adult women in this

era and becomes more and more associated with femininity so we take that and we add in the concerns about sexuality that happened in the 20th century certainly homosexuality existed well before that but they really weren't concerned about it on a household psychological level until we get into really more the mid 20th century and there are more and more published articles talking about how it's really important to make sure that your child is trained from a very early age as to what's appropriate for their gender this 1941 article tells a story of a young boy who

basically just touched his mother's prank frilly Lacy slip and because she didn't correct him it set him down a path to liking all of the things that his mother enjoyed all the things that the girls enjoyed and this became an increasing concern over his sexuality when he was a little bit older they sent him off to military school to set him back on the right track so there was a direct correlation drawn pretty quickly between liking girlish things like pink and boys questioning their sexuality some psychologists would say that by the age of three gender

identity has been developed and by dressing boys not just in pink but in other childish colors like yellow and green you can start to confuse them which just completely changes the mindset from really only half a century earlier when these same children would have been dressed as genderless babies up until age four or five in little white dresses with any random smattering of colors on them rather now they're saying by age three they need to be fully set in their gender so there is a concern over making sure that the clothing is as gendered as

possible even if it's shaped in genderless ways like rompers which is a really common thing for babies going all the way back to the 19 teens they're now going to choose to make gender choices based off of color because the style is gender free the colors have to make up for that so hence we end up with this really strong stringent idea of setting up you have to have color differences for infants off the bat it's really important for children to recognize their gender differences and we start to associate specific colors one way or the

other that's more than just a little cute baby announcement but instead really matters when it comes to the psychology of this child interestingly enough of course today we've sort of pushed back on that idea that we have to gender children to that extreme degree and that we really need to put those colors on them at a certain age and that we can't dress them in more unisex ways because it's more practical instead we've gone back to the blue and pink as a sort of announcement of the birth even though it's happening before the birth with

gender reveal parties it's still very much like like those early announcements that likely originated the use of those colors so we've sort of Gone full circle even though we have a much more stringent set of what that color means today than they ever did historically all of this to say of course that the idea that a color has a specific gender or is more masculine or more feminine is entirely made up and specific to our modern-day society's culture it doesn't stretch back terribly far because it's just mixed up and all over the place and they're

going to associate these colors different ways in different eras and different places so the concept of pink is a girly color and blue is a boyish color it's all basically just madeup nonsense and go with whatever makes you happy