I did a survey of prisoners on the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean once. To encourage participation, and compensate them for their time, we put together little packets of useful items to give as incentives: small bars of soap, toothbrushes and wash cloths (or bandanas). We ordered them from a local supplier and were a little dismayed to receive a shipment of cloths of which about 25% were pink. We were very surprized to find that the pink cloths/bandanas were all the rage and the (mostly apparently very manly) inmates fought over those. Who knew.
As an aside, what exactly is the sociology of colour? Why is black considerd “evil” and white “pure and innocent”? In Chinese culture white is the colour of mourning, while in Western it’s its antitesis. Where do these (obviously superstitious) viewpoints originate?
Always loved your columns… I was a huge fan of your esteemed wisdom back in the day when I lived in the vibrant neighbors of Chicago… but I digress…
Your column today about the history of colors and children made me think.
Sadly, we ‘moderns’ think everyone who lived before us was just like us.
But it ain’t so.
First of all, concern over the color of clothing was left for the wealthy. Most people struggled to survive, and most owned and wore one set of clothes. The color of which mattered not. Children wore whatever their parents dressed them in, and mostly it was what we’d consider ‘hand-me-downs.’
But not babies… babies were wrapped in rags, and when they could toddle or ‘walk,’ they were dressed in little shirts or gowns, and left diaperless (the diaper was a modern invention, a result of the ‘cleanliness’ movement of the early 20th century)… the infants puddled wherever… there was no washing machine to clean the clothing.
This anonymous kind of attire for infants was not only utilitarian, it bespoke another view of the infant. Because most babies didn’t survive their first year due to poor nutrition, rampant diseases, and lack of what we consider medical care… parents throughout previous ages were conditioned not to get emotionally attached to babies. It was simply too painful to bury one child after another.
EVer visit an old cemetery? In family plots, there are far too many infant graves…
Before the development of antibiotics and medical advances of the 20th century,
very few infants made it to childhood. Because life was brutal and brief, couples married young, and had children, many children. The reasons were varied:
there was little access to birth control (few women even knew about it,and women who did were termed ‘witches’)… for rural families, more children meant more built-in help for the farm, and thus more opportunities for success and survival; and (the most heartbreaking reason in the world ) most babies died before living a year.
“Pink or blue”? A piddling trifle left for the idle rich.
As for the rise of pink as a popular color for girls, Kay Thompson’s fashionista song “Think Pink” in the 1957 movie Funny Face might have had something to do with it.
noel711, firstly, welcome to the SDMB. But, secondly…
So many sweeping assertions, so little evidence. Let’s just concentrate on the one group of your claims for which there is some quantifiable evidence. The idea that the usual infant mortality rate in premodern Western societies was more than fifty percent in the first year is nonsense. Sure, by modern standards, their infant mortality rates were astonishingly high. But very rarely that high. And if you had said that mortality rates often reached that level by the age of 10, we could have let that pass.
This is a point on which there is absolutely no need to exaggerate.
Since I’m usually a critic of Cecil’s, let me start by saying that I thought this was a well done column, with loads of examples and references and the proper equivocation between saying this is the answer and throwing hands up at an unsolvable problem.
noel711, however, gets the historic perspective entirely wrong. Although many fashions were created by and trickled down from the “idle rich,” the fashions that Cecil writes about are middle class obsessions. And the middle class was well established in both Europe and the U.S. by the mid-1800s. They were a smaller percentage of the population that today, true, but then as now they were the major force in consumer purchasing. You can see this in the growth and popularity of the huge department stores in every city and in the phenomenal distribution of catalogs from such firms as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck’s.
Infant deaths are also being exaggerated. Those were also much larger than today but the majority of infants did survive childhood by this period.
The poor will always be with us, but they haven’t been the dominant force, either in numbers or anything else, at any time in the history of the U.S. Consumerism is a product of the industrial age, which means that it was well established before the Civil War, and took a huge leap afterward, exactly the period that Cecil is writing about. Children’s clothing, as well as children’s toys, games, and books, are a major part of cultural and social history for every minute of this time. In that they were truly “just like us.”
When clothes represented a major investment of time and effort, and families generally had multiple children, making infants’ and children’s clothing gender-neutral would have made good sense, I’d think. Such clothes are quickly outgrown and can be worn by several children before they wear out, and the more items that can be worn by both girls and boys, the simpler it is to hand them down from one child to the next. And then when people began to buy fabric, and then clothes, ready-made, they were comparitively much more expensive than today.
White clothes can also be washed in hot water and dried in bright sunlight to remove stains, without worrying that dyes will run or fade. Very practical for little kids’ clothes.