I attended Yet Another Baby Shower the other day and, as usual, the clothing given was “sexed” by color (blue in this case). So, I’m wondering. Where and when (and, for pity’s sake, why???) did the tradition associating the color pink with girls and the color blue with boys get started?
After I read the information that Green Bean linked me to (thanks! it was very informative), it occurred to me that I had actually asked the wrong question. What I really want to know is, why do (some/many/most?)people feel it necessary to colour code babies?
Anecdotal evidence of this: The mother of a friend of mine was extremely upset when said friend refused to get an amniocentesis. She complained that she had to know what sex the baby was so that she would know what colour clothing to get it. (My friend told her, “Green”.)
Basically, we begin gender training in children very early. It’s the same reaon why we give girl babies dolls, and give boys stuffed footballs. Unless a stranger undresses your baby, without “color coding” they would not be able to tell the sex of the infant. By dressing a female in pink, and a male in blue, we advertise the sex of the infant. If you’re a believer in evolutionary biology, it could be because our ancestors prized male babies above females, and women wished to advertise their success in producing male babies, and this got handed down in our subconcious.
We also treat male babies differently then females. I remember reading of an experiment where researchers took the same infant out on different occasions, dressed as a girl, then dressed as a boy. The “girl” was cooed over, patted gently and touched lightly by strangers who stopped to admire “her,” while the “boy” was gently punched, rubbed briskly on the arms and handled more roughly than when “he” was a “she.”