Pink for girls, blue for boys
In 1918 a trade magazine said pink was for boys. The real history is messier than either rule.
- The 1918 quote
- Real (Earnshaw's Infants' Department)
- Pink-for-girls settled
- 1940s, in the US
Today in Europe and the US, pink means girl and blue means boy. The rule is barely a century old. Through the 1800s most small children of both sexes wore white: it could be boiled clean, and early dyes would have washed out. A small boy in a white dress with pink ribbons was nothing unusual.
Then came the famous line. In June 1918 the trade journal Earnshaw's Infants' Department told shops the 'generally accepted rule' was pink for boys and blue for girls, since pink was stronger and more decided, blue daintier. The quote is real. But it spoke for one corner of the trade, other writers said the opposite, and later searches of old print found the pink-for-boys rule was never widespread. Practice was inconsistent for decades.
The historian Jo Paoletti traced how American stores and parents drifted toward pink for girls in the 1930s and 40s until it became the norm. Mamie Eisenhower's pink inaugural gown in 1953 helped tie pink to ladylike femininity. Paoletti argues that prenatal tests, which let parents know the sex and shop ahead, sharpened the split from the 1980s on.
So neither 'pink was always for girls' nor 'pink was always for boys' holds up. The older logic, that pink is a light red and red was a manly, military color, shows how one hue can flip meaning within a lifetime. Pink had adult glamour too: 18th-century France adored it, from Madame de Pompadour's porcelain to the frothy dress in Fragonard's The Swing (1767). Color meanings are conventions (see color psychology).
Swatches
- Pink · girls (since about the 1940s)
- Blue · boys (since about the 1940s)
- White · all small children (1800s)
Colors
Sources
- Paoletti, J. B. (2012). Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Indiana University Press.
- Del Giudice, M. (2012). The twentieth century reversal of pink-blue gender coding: a scientific urban legend? Archives of Sexual Behavior 41(6): 1321–1323.
- Earnshaw's Infants' Department, June 1918.
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