Around 2008, gender reveal parties became a cultural phenomenon. If you have not been to one, then you have almost certainly seen pictures or videos of one online. The purpose of these parties is to reveal in some creative way if the expectant mother is having a boy or a girl.
Whether it is cake, smoke, confetti or balloons almost all of these parties use color to reveal the surprise; pink for a girl and blue for a boy. But when did these colors come to be associated with gender?
Up until the early 1900s, all babies and young children generally wore white dresses. White was easy to bleach, and unisex clothing could be passed down to the next child no matter the gender. As mass manufacturing of clothing increased, merchants started marketing gendered children’s clothing as a way to sell more clothes, though there was no consistency between manufacturers until the 1950s as to which colors were for boys and which were for girls. An analysis by Del Giudice of U.S. newspapers and magazines between 1881 and 1930 showed 34 records of pink for girls and blue for boys and 28 examples of the reverse.
Gender-neutral clothing for children became popular again in the 1960s with the rise of the women’s liberation movement and remained so until around 1985. Around the mid 1980s, pink for girls and blue for boys exploded in popularity. It extended beyond clothing into all baby items: crib sheets, pacifiers, decorations, toys, even car seats. One theorized reason for this is the rise of prenatal testing. Once parents could know in advance the gender of their child, manufacturers capitalized on the opportunity. More well-to-do parents could now buy everything pink knowing they were having a girl, and then buy it all again in blue if the next baby was a boy.
Since the 1980s, pink for girls and blue for boys has become deeply entrenched in the American psyche. While some studies have tried to suggest a biological reason for young girls’ preference for all things pink, it seems likely that it is a purely cultural and somewhat arbitrary phenomenon created by marketing. Studies with infants have shown no gendered color preference before the age of 2. Interestingly, a look at men’s fashion might suggest that the gendering of colors is beginning to erode as it is increasingly common to see men wearing pink and purple.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy or to stump your in-laws.
