Why Pink Was a Boy’s Color, and How Colors Became Gendered

In this article:

• As fetuses, we’re assigned one of two colors: blue or pink.
• However, pink wasn’t always a girl’s color. Just a century ago, pink was a color people thought fitting for little boys.
• But a few decades before that, all babies, regardless of sex, wore white dresses for practical reasons.
• Which colors we assign to which types of people have a lot of implications on how we live our lives, and what we can imagine for ourselves and our children.

Whether it’s pineapples on pizza or college sports teams, people get riled up about a lot of things. But try dressing a little boy in pink today and people will have plenty more to say.

On one hand, you might get comments about how it’s not appropriate for a little boy, because boys like blue and trucks and guns, or something that might seem wholly obvious to whoever is speaking. And on the other, you might receive statements about how “real men wear pink.”

The thing is, little children’s clothes, toys, and accessories are so aggressively gendered today that it’s hard to imagine a world that’s different, where people don’t use colors to mark their children’s genitalia (often confused with gender identity, and which, to be honest, is nobody’s business).  

Before babies even come out of the womb, they’re ushered into a world that is either very pink or very blue depending on some genetic coincidence.

By the time they reach preschool, they’ve already learned this gender binary, accepting it as the truth of the world around us before growing up and raising their kids much the same way.

But not even a hundred years ago, little boys wore pink because it was the color for them. If you traveled back in time a few more decades from then, you’d find that little boys wore the same exact white dresses that little girls did.

So not only did pink used to be a boy’s color (shocking news for the many relatives and Facebook acquaintances who would argue otherwise), but dresses also used to be standard boy’s attire.

Let’s take a quick trip back in time and children’s fashion to better understand how two colors came to stand for two genders. 

First, Kids Wore White

In the photo above, a regular person today would see a little girl. We see the long hair, the pretty dress, delicate frills, and cute shoes, and think girl.

Not a lot of people would think boy, and even less would think future president. But in that image is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, posed and photographed at age 2.

Ask any parent today and photographing their little boy in this way might seem silly or wrong. They might even get accused of child abuse or indocrinating their son (both things I’ve seen people say about gender-neutral parenting) — and there is a very real fear of being judged this way.

But in the 1880s, when this photograph was taken, people hardly batted an eye.

That’s because it was normal for little boys to be wearing dresses. Back then, both boys and girls wore white dresses until the age of 6 or 7, which is also around the time of their first haircut. White dresses were the gender-neutral staple of the time because it was practical, historian Dr. Jo B. Paoletti explains in her book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America.

White cotton can be bleached or washed in boiling water easily, and the dresses were convenient for diaper changing. Because they worked for kids regardless of gender, they could be easily passed down from sibling to sibling.

On the other side of the pond, English boys were dressed in white, too, but were often seen with pink ribbons. That’s because red was the color of men’s uniforms, which meant that as little men, boys were given a lighter version of red — that is, pink — as a sign of masculinity.

And Then Came the Pastels

Pastel colors slowly became more fashionable for babies and small children at the turn of the 20th century, though there was no consensus about which color was more appropriate for which type of child. In general, both pink and blue were considered appropriate colors for babies.

However, manufacturers from different regions disagreed about which color was more masculine or more feminine, and whether or not a distinction was needed. A 1927 Time Magazine article even highlights some confusion over which color was right for boys.

Pink for Boys, Blue for Girls

Eventually, however, some stores began pushing for “sex-appropriate” colors for children.

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls,” explained a trade publication by Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department, distributed in 1918, echoing the conventions of English little boy fashion.

“The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” 

On the color pink, Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute explains, “It was related to the mother color of red, which was ardent and passionate and more active, more aggressive. Even though you reduce the shade level, it was a color that was associated with boys.”

Other stores, like Filene’s in Boston, Marshall Field in Chicago, Best & Co. in New York, and Halle’s in Cleveland, followed suit, declaring pink as a boy’s color. But perhaps due to the limitations of production and marketing at the time, the gendered distinction between pink and blue wasn’t as aggressive as it is today.

In fact, other stores, like Macy’s in Manhattan and Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, saw pink as a girl’s color.

To add to the general confusion, pink and blue were also assigned other types of meaning outside of gender. For example, some stores marketed blue as best for blondes, while pink was better for brunettes. Paoletti points out that others would even suggest blue for blue-eyed babies, and pink for brown-eyed babies. 

Pink for Girls, Blue for Boys

So, when did pink and blue make the big switch for good?

The decision over which color was for which sex was one that was ultimately decided on by manufacturers, and what they thought would sell more clothes to more parents.

The idea that pink is a girl’s color and blue is a boy’s took hold by around the 1940s, and baby boomers were the first to be dressed more generally in sex-specific clothing. No longer were they dressed in practical, gender-neutral white dresses — they began to be dressed as miniature men and women. 

Part of this is because of better dyes and manufacturing, which allows for clothes to be brighter without the risk of the color disappearing when clothes are laundered. Though pink used to be a color worn by both men and women without gendered significance, it became more strongly associated with women in the 1950s thanks to several key people.

Primary among them was another figure from the White House: former first lady Mamie Eisenhower.

She attended her husband Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration in 1953 wearing a pink dress that has since been credited in turning the cultural tide towards pink as a woman’s color.

She didn’t like it just because it was a woman’s color per se, because it wasn’t yet, at the time. Instead, it became a woman’s color because Mamie liked it so much.

She wore a lot of clothes in the color, but she also decorated with it. In fact, she decorated the White House with so much pink that the building was nicknamed The Pink Palace while she and her family lived there.

This association produced what was called the “Mamie pink,” and gave rise to pink bathrooms, pink kitchens, and most crucially, the idea of pink as a ladylike color.

From there, the idea only became stronger through cultural figures like actress and singer Kay Thompson, who, in 1957’s Funny Face, performed a song called Think Pink!

The song is like a prophecy for what being born a girl would be like for most of us in the years that followed. Thompson, who plays fashion editor Maggie Prescott, sings about pink shoes, pink hose, pink gloves and pink chapeaus; pink cheeks, lips, shirts, slips, chemise; a pink hat, shoe umbrella, even the poodle, pink shampoo and toothpaste, too; “everything that you can think — and that includes the kitchen sink!”

The Pendulum Swings Back and Forth

Pink as a little girl’s color was challenged in part by the women’s liberation movement in the US, and Paoletti notes that as a result, pink toddler clothing became less popular in the catalogs of retailers like Sears in the 1960s and 1970s.

As part of the second wave of feminism, the women’s liberation movement sought equal rights and opportunities for women, and its leaders at the time thought that one way to do so was to dress little girls up in gender-neutral colors and fashions.

The idea was that feminine clothing limited girls’ opportunities in life, and so little girls began being dressed in more masculine or un-feminine types of clothing.

In this sense, it wasn’t that baby clothing and colors went back to being gender-neutral the way they were at the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s baby picture — it’s that women rejected feminine clothing.

“One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,” Paolett explains.

“‘If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls… they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.’”

Thus, feminism at the time operated within the gender binary, and the pursuit of a better future meant dressing — and acting — more like boys.

This idea lasted for around a generation before gendered kids’ clothing made a comeback in the ‘80s. Paoletti traces this reversal to two key factors.

The first is the invention of prenatal testing, which let parents know the sex of their child before birth. Suddenly, it became very exciting to know your unborn baby’s genitals, and to prepare (read: shop) accordingly.

The second factor is that manufacturers were quick to respond. Pink and blue clothes ushered in pink and blue diapers, swaddles, crib sheets, strollers, car seats, and toys. Suddenly, parents who had a little girl as a firstborn but were expecting a boy as their second child would have to shop for the same things all over again, but in a different color.

Parents knew their child’s gender and which color matched it even before they were born, and eventually, these children learned it, too. By the time those same kids got to school, they’d learned that long hair and dresses (which little boys like Franklin Roosevelt had just a century before then) were only for girls.

A Silly, but Powerful Binary Bind

The fact is that the cultural decision to make pink a girls’ color after that brief period of disagreement in the early 1900s could have gone either way. But it’s because of this somewhat silly series of events that we’ve seen all sorts of wild stories of gender reveal events — the wildfire, the crashing plane, and the deadly explosion among them.

But outside of all this blatant destruction is a kind of damage that’s less visible: the intense pressure among parents to conform to and maintain this gendered binary. Relatives are horrified to see a little boy playing with a pink toy, and we put pink headbands on the bald heads of infant girls lest they be mistaken for boys (que horror!).

“What was once a matter of practicality,” Paoletti says, “became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted.”

Even when we try to resist the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, we still can’t help but operate within that gender binary, the way pink is defended as something “real men” or “tough guys” wear. We just go back to “securing” masculinity.

In contrast, the idea of rejecting gender in clothing and parenting more generally is met with ridicule. In the angry commentaries and thinkpieces I was able to find (which I refuse to link to), the main argument is that gender-neutral parenting subjects kids to bullying once they make it to the outside world and its rigid gender binaries.

But isn’t that a tacit admission that there is something wrong with how the world is divided in two by something as arbitrary as gender? And doesn’t that mean that the problem is with the outside world, and not with the child?

Rejecting gender when raising kids may seem a little drastic, but it’s no less drastic than forcing kids to perform masculinity and femininity just because everyone else is doing it (and because a bunch of companies said so), only for them to struggle with their gender identities later on.

It’s no less drastic than letting girls eventually hate pink because of what it stands for, and keeping boys away from hobbies and passions they might have just because, like the color pink, they’re “girly.”