Why is pink a girl color and blue a boy color? In the 19th Century, pink used to be associated with boys, since it was a stronger, more decided color. Blue, on the other hand, was regarded as a girls’ color, because it was considered dainty. It wasn’t until the 1940s that marketers started to switch it around. Jeanne Maglaty has a great article about this in Smithsonian Magazine, called “When did Girls Start Wearing Pink?” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gendered Colors”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Sometimes the history of a word surprises you, and sometimes it really surprises you.
Oh, yeah? Try me.
Yeah. Well, Grant, I’m sure you have the same experience I did when you first learned
That back in the 14th and the 15th century, the word girls didn’t just refer to young females.
Right, right.
Yeah, back then the word girls was often used to refer to a group of children.
Of any sex, male or female.
Right, both boys and girls.
And over time, as you know, the word girls came to specify female children only.
But remember that shock of learning it for the first time?
Because you don’t think at first, even when you’ve been studying language for a while,
You kind of forget that words can be completely overturned.
There’s like a revolution in a word, and its definition just switches.
Speaking of which, I had the same experience recently when I was reading an article in Smithsonian Magazine
About why we tend to associate the color pink with girls, that is, female children,
And the color blue with boys.
It turns out that there’s a historian named Jo B. Paoletti.
She’s at the University of Maryland,
And she’s been studying the meaning of children’s clothing for the last 30 years.
And what she found out pretty much turns what we think about those colors on its head.
It turns out that in the early 1800s, people tended to dress all babies in white.
You know, that bleach is really easy.
And as time went on, parents began to make more of a distinction between the genders.
But the weird thing is that originally pink was associated with boys and blue was associated with girls.
So you go back and you look at trade publications from that period and you see things like the generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for the girls.
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.
That’s amazing!
Isn’t that bizarre?
And then nobody knows why, but sometime around the 1940s, this began to switch.
And it’s just fascinating to me that when you look at what you might call the etymology of color,
The meaning of those particular colors, they weren’t always like that,
Just like the word girls didn’t always mean what it means today.
That’s crazy.
So we don’t know why in the 40s it switched.
No.
I mean, I think part of it had to do with marketing.
You know, if you’re doing marketing and, you know, fashion is all about creating a need that you don’t really have.
And so say you decorate the room in pink for a girl the first time and a boy comes along the next time, you’ve got to buy all new stuff.
Right.
So I think that’s possibly one reason.
So it’s not that there was a nascent woman’s revolution in the 1940s,
And when the men started doing the laundry, they started mixing the colors with the whites.
So these little boy onesies came out pink.
Or the little girl onesies came out pink.
Great. You sound like you have some experience in that.
I’ve been doing my own laundry for like 35 plus years.
Those mistakes are long past.
That’s great.
Well, color etymology, word etymologies, we love talking about it all.
Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.
