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Pink is powerful

By Jocelynne Scutt - posted Friday, 27 January 2012


After keeping the sex-identity of their child hidden from all but close family, his having reached school age Sasha Luxton's parents have disclosed him as a boy. On U-tube, the child comments on societal expectations, particularly colours and dress. As to pink and yellow being 'girls' colours', whilst blue and green are 'for boys', he says: 'I think that is really silly.' A photograph shows the boy, five-years-old, wearing a pink tutu and fairy wings. Answering his mother's question: 'What about dressing up in a tutu and being a fairy. Do you think people would think that boys are meant to do that or girls are meant to do that?' Sasha responds: 'Girls … I think that is so silly.

Such criticism is not new, although identification of female and male, boys and girls, with pink and blue is of relatively recent origin. In Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, Jo B. Paoletti points out that baby girls in pink, baby boys blue, became de rigueur in the 1940s. Only in the late 19th century did colours begin to replace white as babies' dress: white prevailed so long as bleach was the available method for keeping clothes clean.

For centuries … children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. 'What was once a matter of practicality-you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached-became a matter of "Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they'll grow up perverted …"' .

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Initially, rather than 'for girls', pink was the colour for boys. As Paoletti reports, particular colours as sex/gender signifiers did not take hold until just before the first world war. She cites the June 1918 issue of trade publication Earnshaw's Infants Department:

The generally accepted rule is pink for the 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, … more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.

Paoletti says other publications considered blue to be 'flattering for blonds', whilst pink was the colour for brunettes. Alternatively, 'blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for [the] brown-eyed … ' . Stores carrying infants' clothes and associated products took the 'pink is for boys' line:

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading US stores. In Boston, Filene's told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle's in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Contradictions inherent in 'pink for girls, blue for boys' exist, too, in directives as to 'appropriate' attire for boys and girls. Jeanne Maglaty of Washington's Smithsonian Institute observes that childhood photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt are 'typical of his time'. Born in 1882, photographs show him at two years, wearing an ankle-length white dress and ringlets falling to his shoulders in profusion. It was not until age 6 or 7 that a distinction was made in dress: frocks for girls, short pants – and later trousers – for boys. Within the last fifty years, a dress distinction was neutralised by the coming of rompers – a trouser suit, generally with bib and braces. When this became western children's standard attire, both girls and boys wore trousers – reverting to the gender neutrality of Roosevelt's time, albeit in the opposite direction.

Pink features not only in baby clothing. In the pop world, pink's illustrious aura has no sex/gender distinction. Pinkney Anderson– known from childhood as 'Pink' - came out of South Carolina and the Indian Remedy Company's travelling road show to be recognised as a major force for jazz and blues. Pink Anderson's major albums include American Street Songs, Carolina Bluesman and Carolina Medicine Show Hokum & Blues. Many titles continue to resonate: 'Everyday In The Week', 'Wreck Of The Old 97', 'Baby, Please Don't Go', 'Thousand Woman Blues'.

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Anderson's force as a musical power lives on through the band Pink Floyd ('The Pink Floyd Sound'). 'Pink' is for Anderson, whilst Floyd stands in tribute to Floyd Council. The band, originally known as The Tea Set, was listed on a bill including another 'Tea Set'. History says guitarist Syd Barrett had Anderson and Council's Piedmont Blues in his collection. As a tribute, 'Pink Floyd' was named. The power of Pink Anderson and The Pink Floyd Sound stands uncontradicted.

Meanwhile, musical men have no 'pink' monopoly. Known universally by her stage name rather than 'Alecia Beth Moore', Pink turned victimisation in to survivorship, powerlessness into power. Like Pinkney Anderson, Pink took her title from childhood, converting a bad experience into an expression of confidence:

It's just a nickname that's been following me my whole life. It was a mean thing at first, some kids at camp pulled my pants down and I blushed so much, and they were like, 'Ha ha! Look at her! She's pink!' and then the movie Reservoir Dogs came out – and Mr Pink was the one with the smart mouth, so it just happened all over again …

Yet negative connotations have been attributed to the colour pink. In other words, pink has been getting a bad name. 'PinkStinks', titled 'the campaign for real role models', challenges 'the culture of pink', seeking to give girls 'inspiration to achieve great things'.

Zoe Wood of The Observer recounts - as a major achievement claimed by PinkStinks – the change in London children's store Hamleys. PinkStinks' '… campaign against the toy industry's narrow view of gender roles gains ground after Hamleys abandons colour-coded floors':

When two sisters launched an "anti-pink" campaign two years ago to liberate girls from a toy industry dedicated to churning out pretty princesses for girls, they had no idea of the fuss it would cause. 'We got hate mail from all over the world,' says Emma Moore, one half of PinkStinks, the group she runs with her twin sister, Abi. 'They said things like "you must be lesbians, you're ugly". The reaction was so extreme you'd think we'd tried to cancel Christmas.'

Notwithstanding the backlash, the sisters [are] at the vanguard of a movement whose time may have come. When … Hamleys stopped labelling its floors in blue for boys and pink for girls … and rearranged toys by type rather than gender, there were loud cheers from those who believe the pre-teen pink-blue divide has gone too far.

Concerns about the commercialisation of the 'pink is for girls' phenomenon has made Disney shops a target, filled as they are with row upon row of pink tutus, pink fairy wings, pink wands, pink make-up cases with miniature pink lipstick tubes, powder puffs, hairclips, bows – alongside shops featuring lacy pink underwear including 'trainer bras'.

Yet should the feminist fightback against what Peggy Orenstein, in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, terms 'the princess industrial complex', be directed toward labelling pink as powerless and pernicious?

Former X-Files star Gillian Anderson stands as another tribute to 'pink power'. As a child she lived for some time in London's Haringey and Crouch End. Returning to the US meant taking an un-American accent with her. Of pre-adolescent and teenage life in Michigan, she says: 'I hadn't taken into account how alien American culture would be and how my Britishness would set me apart … ' London's Sunday Times reports that Anderson was 'teased about her accent', becoming a 'rebel with an outrageous hairstyle …' And what colour was the hair? Anderson '[was] "this girl with combat boots and hair dyed pink …"' No kowtowing to pink as 'pretty, passive and obsessed with shopping, fashion and makeup'.

Indeed, Gillian Anderson has waged a number of battles – in addition to the pink hair. Her instructions for the role of X-Files' Scully were not to star alongside David Duchovny's Mulder at all: she should walk several paces to the rear while taking a wage-packet at half the sum paid to him. Anderson resisted – and won.

The original association of pink with power and strength is not misplaced. Girl babies survive at far higher rates. . Girl babies survive at far higher rates than do boy babies. Combined research from Stanford, Yale and Brown medical schools shows girls born preterm do better than boys, with premature birth creating 'greater problems' and producing more lasting brain effects in boys. Far from being 'passive', 'submissive', flaccid, inert or any of those other antonyms decrying pink, girl babies and girl children have strengths which may be overlooked. This does not mean these strengths are not there.

'Tomboy' exists because girls climb trees, swing from monkey-bars, play rough and tumble gam*es including softball, basketball and hockey. Far from being 'sissy', skippy or skip-the-rope requires coordination, agility and muscle power. Even activities placed firmly into the domain of the 'weak' by those who abjure the tutu, dance is far from lacking strength and power. The ability to move to music is recognised, too, as a potent factor in gaining psychological equilibrium and sense of self, both vital to well-being.

So are affirmations of pink as a power signifier anti-feminist? Do those affirming pink's power undercut girls and women's ability to grow-up as humanbeings of strength and fortitude? Is there a generational divide here, as asserted in the controversy surrounding the 'Slut Walk' movement that engaged women in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and elsewhere?

The controversy over 'slut' was not that those demurring or objecting did not support the original marchers in Canada, where a police officer unwisely asserted that rape was a caused by women 'dressing like sluts'. Clearly, he was wrong. Rape is a consequence of male assertion of 'right' over the woman who says no or who does not say yes. Rather, the controversy related to whether 'slut' could be 'reclaimed' as a word affirming women and womanhood.

Unlike 'mistress', 'spinster', 'loose woman' and 'pink', 'slut' has never had a positive meaning, nor positive connotations for women. Once, a mistress was a woman of power in the household, a woman holding the larder and cellar keys, who ordered household operations, wielding strength through management and administration: no mean skill there. Once, a spinster span – earning her own income and preserving her independence. Spinsters led challenges to the 'right' of men to auction their wives in the marketplace, often swooping down to spirit the woman away. Loose women had agency and autonomy – they walked free and independent, the property of no man. Pink is a word of power. In the past, this was recognised. No reason for not doing so now.

'Slut' has ever meant 'slattern' – a dirty, sloppy, smelly and slovenly woman. Do we wish to 'reclaim' that having no redeeming feature, applied against women by those having no capacity for recognising, or acknowledging, women's strength, power, autonomy and agency – in general or in sexual terms?

PinkStinks has supporters of all ages. Its ingenious inventors are sisters of 40, operating through social networks with volunteers and some 5000 FaceBook friends and half that number of Twitter followers. The Slut Marches did not comprise young or younger women alone. Nor did the divide fall on one or other side of generational lines.

PinkStinks' concern is understandable. Yet will it advance young girls' perception of themselves to be told their wish for pink is an indicator of a lack of identification with power and self-worth? Rather than put down pink – and girls with it, let's acknowledge it as a colour of strength. Rather than putdowns in the playground, let's encourage a culture affirming girls and women as indomitable. After all, when crossing a busy road like William Street in the heart of Melbourne's legal industry, cars halt invariably in two circumstances alone: when confronted by black-gowned and white-bewigged barristers dashing and dodging through the traffic, or the woman wearing pink.

No reason why a woman cannot be both – a professional woman garbed in the black of her calling, and one who in other circumstances wears pink. Both are entitled, and right, to recognise pink is powerful.

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About the Author

Dr Jocelynne A. Scutt is a Barrister and Human Rights Lawyer in Mellbourne and Sydney. Her web site is here. She is also chair of Women Worldwide Advancing Freedom and Dignity.

She is also Visiting Fellow, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.

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