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Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Jo B. Paoletti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Jo B. Paoletti's study was inspired nearly thirty years ago by a simple question: "When did we start dressing girls in pink and boys in blue?" (xiii). To answer it, Paoletti pored over catalogs, baby record books, advertisements, birth announcements, greeting cards, paper dolls, photographs, childcare manuals, periodicals, trade publications for the garment industry, mothers' blogs, and artifacts of children's clothing. In addition, she conducted interviews to learn more about how fashion for the under-seven set changed from approximately 1885 to the present day. Her study draws on theories of material culture, history of childhood, consumer culture, developmental psychology, and fashion history. Paoletti's completion of the book was prompted by Peggy Orenstein's article on Disney princesses in the New York Times and subsequent best-selling book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, in which Orenstein voices the question of many parents of young daughters today: Why is everything for little girls so pink and feminine?
Paoletti begins her book with the assertion that most clothing for children is purchased by adults; thus, child dress says a lot about cultural attitudes toward childhood. For children, clothing becomes a way of fitting in and expressing identity, especially related to gender or class. Paoletti expected childhood dress to be "a modified version of adult dress," but instead found something else: "a highly complex interaction between children and adults, including both parents and grandparents" (15). Her study, chronological in nature, shows how the childhood experiences of one generation affect the dress of the next.
Pink for girls and blue for boys, it turns out, is a fairly recent phenomenon. In fact, as Paoletti notes, "the conventions of 2010 are nearly the reverse of those in 1890" (xiii). In the late 1800s, both boys and girls wore primarily white...