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3/28/12 Gazette.Net: Pink for girls, blue for boys? Prince George’s author says clothing’s not so black-and-white

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Wendy Rittman was so frustrated with the clothing options

available for her 8-year-old daughter that she opened her

own online boutique in 2011.

“We just couldn’t find the right mix of clothing for her,” said

Rittman of Mitchellville, who founded My Bougie Baby. “The

clothes I sell now say, ‘I’m a girl, but I don’t need to be in

pink and tulle to be a girl.’”

Jo Paoletti of University Park, a professor in American

studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, had

similar concerns about gender stereotypical clothing while

raising her daughter and son, now 30 and 25.

She spent the past 30 years researching why people in the

U.S. typically dress girls in pink and boys in blue, and her

research now has been published in a book, “Pink and Blue:

Telling the Boys from the Girls in America,” which is part

academic research, part history and part personal narrative

of Paoletti’s own experience with children’s clothing.

During her research, she met other Prince George’s parents

who had similar concerns and were looking for ways not to

dress their children in gender stereotypes.

“There are girls who are tomboys. There are boys who are

not macho men,” Paoletti said. “Kids that are gender-non-

conforming, like the boy who wants a pink shirt, interpret the

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Pink for girls, blue for boys? Author says clothing’s not soblack-and-whiteUniversity of Maryland professor looks at history of children’s outfits in new book

by Holly Nunn, Staff Writer

Holly Nunn/The Gazette Trends in children’s clothing in the

past tw o decades have polarized girls’ and boys’ clothing,

w hich author Jo Paoletti of University Park said puts

children into binary categories and leaves little room to

express different w ays of being a boy or a girl.



mismatch between what they feel inside and what they

see as the cultural choices given to them through clothing,

and they can be really uncomfortable with those choices.

Giving him that pink shirt doesn’t magically turn him into a

girl.”

Dressing girls exclusively one way and boys exclusively

another sends children the message that there is only

one way to be a boy and only one way to be a girl, Paoletti

said.

Lara Payne of Brentwood has a 2-year-old daughter and

has stopped shopping at children’s clothing stores or

department stores because she can’t get away from all of

the pink, she said. She shops mostly at thrift stores and looks for purple, green or orange clothes, trying to stay away

from too much pink in her daughter’s wardrobe.

But worse than the selection in stores, Payne said, are the expectations of people who say her daughter isn’t girly

enough.

“One person, who I don’t know, stopped me in a store and thought my daughter was a boy,” Payne said. “When she

realized she’s a girl, she said I should pierce her ears so that people would know. But I don’t mind if people think she’s

a boy.”

Before 1900, Paoletti explains, most babies in the U.S. wore white clothing, often with pastel accents that did not signify

gender. Pink and blue were considered nursery colors for both boys and girls until the mid-20th century, when colors

came to be code for gender, though for decades there was disagreement on whether blue was for girls and pink for

boys or vice versa.

Paoletti’s own daughter, Maria, was born in 1982, at the tail end of what Paoletti called “the unisex time,” during the

1970s and early ’80s, when children’s clothing widely was available in plaids and stripes and earth tones, without the

frills or embroidered trucks that have come to characterize girls’ or boys’ clothing, respectively.

She attributed this period to a push in American culture partly because of the women’s movement and Marlo Thomas’

children’s book and record, “Free to Be ... You and Me,” to raise children free of gender and race stereotypes.

But, Paoletti said, something had changed by the time she gave birth to her son, Danny, in 1986.

“Everything suddenly had trucks on it,” Paoletti said of shopping for her son. The unisex time ended for many reasons,

she said, including prenatal imaging to reveal sex and parental anxiety about their children’s sexuality.

Maria Paoletti of Mount Rainier, Paoletti’s daughter, has an 11-year-old stepdaughter, and recalls going into a Target

store about five years ago to purchase a lunchbox to send with her stepdaughter to day camp.

“There was a terrible selection,” Maria Paoletti said. “I mean, there were a lot to choose from, but it was all highly

gendered. All the primary-colored ones had like a basketball on them, or there were pink ones with butterflies and

flowers.”

But not all parents out shopping for children’s clothing want to see gender-neutral options.

Suzette James of Laurel, shopping at a Target on March 22 for toddler-sized shorts and T-shirts for girls, said she’s

tired of seeing pink when she’s shopping for her three granddaughters, ages 7, 18 months and 6 months. She’d like to

see more vibrant colors available. But that doesn’t mean, she said, that she wants her granddaughters dressed like

boys.

“I don’t like the idea of the girls growing up with unisex clothes,” James said. “If you have a girl, dress her like a girl.”

Making a clear distinction between boys and girls, said University of Maryland, College Park, sociology professor Philip

Cohen, is to many parents a sign of success in parenting, and clothing marketers are responding to parents’ desire to

be successful.

“Clothing is just one of the social mechanisms we use to differentiate men from women and boys from girls,” Cohen

said. “Enacting your gender is a socially competent behavior, and we want to be socially competent. Marketers took

advantage of this.”

But Maria Paoletti sees a sinister result of the extreme gendering of clothing in the bullying of children who are

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perceived by their peers to be gay.

“It’s not just annoying, but it can be harmful,” Maria Paoletti said. “If we taught our kids from an earlier age that it’s OK

for a boy to wear pink or be into dolls, there wouldn’t be this sort of alienation and abuse of children whose gender

presentation is outside the norm.”

In the past couple of years, Jo Paoletti said, she has seen some changes in children’s clothing — especially with

Internet shopping making a wider variety of clothing available — while most department stores still are gendered in

their offerings.

Jo Paoletti is working on her next project, a book about the unisex trend in the 1970s.

For more information, go to www.pinkisforboys.org.

[email protected]

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