The History of Pink
Heather Mitchell, HMP Couture Imagery
This weekend the Barbie movie came out and with all the hype around it I cant help but reminisce a bit on the brand and what being a Barbie girl meant in my life. Any of my friends who knew me growing up can attest that I was a Tom Boy through and through. I would tell everyone I hated the color pink and wanted nothing to do with Barbie. Then, I would go home, and secretly play with my Barbie.
I loved playing with the dream house, the convertible, and all the accessories but I would do it behind locked doors because according to the world I grew up in, I was not supposed to be both. The permanent dirt stains on my knees did not go with my canopy bed; the two were constantly at odds.
It was Barbie or GI Joe.
Athlete or princess.
Cleats or heels.
We had to choose.
Over thirty years later in April 2019, Heather Mitchell did not want her daughter to have to choose so she took a stance. Disturbed by a comment that labeled her daughter athletic and other girls as "girly girls", she decided to photograph her "athletic" daughter wearing one high heel and one softball cleat:
"It kept playing over and over in my mind," Mitchell told USA TODAY. "Why does she have to choose? She can be anything she wants. She can be a girly-girl, she can be smart, she can play ball and the next day she can choose to do something different."
When I first saw these images a few years ago, I absolutely loved them. My favorite is the picture included with today’s post because it perfectly captures the struggle I felt my entire childhood; the struggle against who I knew I was and the category I was trying to fit into. I identified with some more masculine traits, which meant I couldn't also like other girlie things like Barbie or pink. I put so much weight into what I was told is feminine and masculine because my young mind did not realize that everything I had put so much weight into was just a social construct that shouldn't carry any weight at all.
In the Forbes article, Here's How Pink Became a Girl Color, Kim Elsesser teaches us that pink was long held as the preferred color for boys. Articles dating 1890, 1918, and 1927 all confirm that pink is for boys, and blue is for girls. Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York, told CNN she believes that American millionaire Henry Huntington started turning the tide in favor of pink being a girls’ color when he acquired “The Blue Boy” which depicted a boy dressed in blue, and “Pinkie” which portrayed a girl in pink attire. The acquisitions, which were widely publicized, left the American people believing "for hundreds of years, blue had been for boys and pink had been for girls. But this wasn’t true." Other articles will tell us it was the turn of the century when stores realized they could make more money by tying a specific color to gender - if we're not dressing everyone the same then parents need to buy more clothes. Before that, not only did no one feel the need to dress girls in pink or boys in blue, but they felt it was wrong:
“Few parents in 1880 would be comfortable dressing their year-old son to express his masculinity or choosing clothing to accentuate their infant daughter’s femininity...Gendered dress was considered inappropriate for young children whose asexual innocence was often cited as one of their greatest charms."
- Jo Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America
It was in the 1940s when pink was first tied to girls and then later escalated in the 1980s when it is suspected that prenatal testing gave parents ample time to prepare for the arrival of their little ones. After that pink themed toys exploded in the marketplace, further contributing to the pink and blue gender divide and perpetuating the image that to be feminine, to be a girl, you should look and dress a certain way.
Some people today might want you to believe that a push against gender identity is all new and part of "woke" culture, but truthfully this is nothing new; people have been pushing against these narrow labels since they were first introduced less than one hundred years ago. I am excited that we are continuing to fight this today because I hope that more little children everywhere will be able to grow up without a label telling them who to be. I want every child to have a blank slate that lets them play with the Barbie, put on the cleats, and wear pink not because they feel they have to or because they're trying to make a statement, but simply because they feel like it.
