The Actual History of Pink for Girls and Blue for Boys

We should definitely bring back the idea of 'just dress them in whatever' for the first couple years of life. Less baby consumerism is good.

What I find weird is that girls can wear blue and nobody questions it so long as the kid's gender is somehow defined (i.e. the baby is wearing a bow), but people freak out at a boy wearing pink, regardless of cut and accessories.

Oddly enough I was told by my grandmother that in Ireland green was for boys and yellow was for girls but it was very common to interchange it.

"I have dug so deep that I'm pretty sure that I found dinosaur bones in this rabbit hole" is such an underrated line.

I got very frustrated in the lead-up to the birth of my first child of people asking the sex of my child so they would know whether to get pink or blue baby clothes. I flatly told everyone to buy purple or green or yellow, and I carried that forward with my second child.

Pink as exclusive for girls: my mother works in a kindergarten and one boy wet himself and had to change clothes. The kindergarten keeps individual sets of clothes per kid for that purpose, provided by the parents. But this kid didn’t have any stocked with the kindergarten, don’t know, if the parents forgot to give clean clothes to the kindergarten or whatever. So they put him in pink underpants from the general kindergarten funds, so he didn’t have to sit there in wet pants and the parents went wild and accused the kindergarten team of risking their sons psychological health, all because of a pair of pink spare underpants. And the boy probably didn’t think of anything at all…

Now THIS is the kind of random information I come to YouTube for!

My daughter was born in 1966. At that time, we lived in Buffalo, New York, where there were a few different ethnic neighborhoods. I remember a lot of Poles and Italians. I used to take my daughter out for walks dressed in a pink bunting that had been trimmed with some lace and some ruffles. More than once, I was stopped by a sweet grandmotherly lady, who always said, "Oh, what a darling little boy you have!"

The pink/blue idea continues into adulthood. A few years ago I distributed used clothing for our local homeless folks. Pink was considered such a taboo color by the men that they would refuse a pink clothing item, such as a t-shirt, even if that was the only one in their size at the moment. Even any pink(ish) warm clothing or blanket in the winter. Purple as well. What an unfortunate mindset about clothing colors!

"Pink is going to the market, Blue is going to the golf course." That really says it all. On another note, I'm okay if it was more like pink is more popular among girls or the opinion that blue looks better on women rather than the absolute rule of pink is ONLY for girls and blue is for boys. It's also stupid that while girls and women can get away with wearing any color, if a boy and man wear pink it somehow emasculates them. It's just a color! I like the idea of white being a genderless color used for the baby's first few years. Modern baby showers put more of an emphasis on the gender of the baby rather than the actual arrival of the baby, regardless of gender.

In the novel Little Women, 1869, when Meg had her twins they "put a pink ribbon on the girl and a blue one on the boy, French fashion."

Dutch person here, did a little more digging into the lace kraamklopper thing and found a newspaper column written by a historian living in Haarlem. He writes that it goes back even further to 1525 and that it wasn't limited to just Haarlem and Alkmaar or new mothers. For instance, sick people would wrap their door knockers in linnen and for newly born babies they used, you guessed it, white cloth. So anyone who needed rest and didnt want to be disturbed could use it I guess. Kinda like putting your phone on airplane mode. Pretty cool.

When my baby was about 9 months old I was picking him up at daycare and thought “oh, who is the new little girl?” It was my son, in emergency back up clothes, that I gendered “girl” because the black and white shirt had tiny ruffles at the shoulder. Which goes to show that even the littlest thing can be taken as a gender cue, because at that age you can’t tell by anything else!

I used to work for a major infantswear company & we noticed sales for yellow clothing dropped drastically in Spanish speaking areas. Found out that it was because yellow was associated with death, particularly stillbirth.

Unreasonably amused by "guessing at what the appearance of the small visitor will be."

My teenage son was talking to me about this literally two days ago! He even spoke correctly about the history of it (topical as I'm planning a baby shower). I was surprised he knew this! Just sent him your video with renewed faith in his public school education. Here's hoping he learns more from the video!

me, (before I got to 8 minutes in), curiously asking my Dutch husband if this is still A Thing in the Netherlands. his response cracked me up. "Great. The Netherlands. The original creators of the Gender Reveal party." ... :rofl:

I'm Dutch. Dutch people still decorate their house, yard., window, front door when a baby is born. Nine out of ten times it will be bleu and pink. So. Boy or girl. Sometimes they will use another pastel colour. They will put a sign out with the name of the baby as well. And sometimes leave it for a ridiculously long time

Colorblindness is much more common in males than females, and I wonder if that's a factor in the gendering of pink. Wearing pink isn't much fun if you can't see that it's pink. My husband (before we were married) had a pink tie. When I asked him about it he was surprised; he thought it was white. He can't differentiate between red and green, between pink and white, and between purple and blue.

The Virgin Mary and blue thing was still a think when I was born in the 80's. My Flemish and very Catholic great-grandma sent all blue girls cloths after I was born. She said it was because blue was the color of the Virgin. My great-grandma said (no idea if this is accurate, or if she was just making stuff up) that Catholics did blue for girls because they wanted the blessing of the Virgin Mary and wanted them to led a life modeled after the female saint. But that protestant didn't do the saints so they switched things around just to be different. Being associated with birth announcements also makes sence. In Belgium when you go to visit a new baby for the first time you get a little gift or favor and these are color coded. When I was born my family was still doing blue for girls and pink or white for boys, but with the rise for more international media that was switched.