'so how old is your little boy?'

If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve heard ‘so how old is your little boy?’ or something similar, then I’m pretty sure I would no longer have a dilemma about whether or not to return to work. My baby is a little girl, but, for some reason, the fact that she is not dressed up as a pink doily seems to lead apparently rational human beings to think she is a boy. We are currently mostly dressing her in stripes, red, blue or multicoloured, denim, and white. There are no trucks or helicopters to be seen. There’s even the occasional semi-puffed sleeve, handknitted cardigan or denim dress. But apparently this is just not feminine enough for a ten-month old. People appraise my daughter and give a hearty ‘hey mate’ obviously meant for a little boy. When I gently correct their mistaken assumption, I can tell that I’m being judged for not following convention and causing someone else to make a faux pas regarding her gender.

As a child of the 1970s, I find the current fashion for the rigidly gendered clothing of pink for girls and blue for boys both mystifying and old-fashioned. What ever happened to brown and orange? Yet it seems that I am the one who is old-fashioned, as things that were old are once again new. I have attended various groups and classes with my daughter and often felt like we were the odd ones out: most of the other girls had at least one item of pink on, some were festooned in head-to-toe pink like giant uncooked sausages with eyes.

I can rehearse the cultural meanings attached to pink and blue baby clothes with which I’m sure we’re all familiar: the former are dainty and pretty, the latter are practical and sturdy. It doesn’t take a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory to work out that these are values that conventionally accrue to femininity and masculinity: they lay the foundation for the ‘natural’ roles of women as carers and men as breadwinners. These are values that second-wave feminism interrogated - hence the fashion for brown and orange back in the day - as conservative and stifling to both girls and boys, women and men. Yet they are still being uncritically reproduced in infant fashions throughout the land.

Cultural critic Marjorie Garber points out how comparatively recent the fashion of pink for girls and blue for boys is. Before the first world war, boys wore pink and girls wore blue. Pink was considered to be a ‘stronger, more decided colour’ while blue was thought to be ‘delicate’ and ‘dainty‘ (cited in Vested Interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety, p 1). Of course, the same perceptions about masculinity and femininity are displayed, but the fact that they are attached to the opposite colour shows that there is nothing natural about the associations being made.

So why does it matter if little girls are dressed in pink and little boys in blue? On an everyday level, I guess it seems like I’m obsessing. No-one is forcing me to dress my daughter in pink - although given the number of gifts we received that were pink, I’m not 100% sure about that. But I’m becoming increasingly offended when people assume that she’s a boy because she’s not wearing pink. Are our notions of femininity, particularly for little girls, so narrow? Can they only aspire to be ‘delicate’ and ‘dainty’ - or,worse, Barbie - if they want to win conventional approval? Does the lack of pink signify that she is somehow ‘un-feminine’ or - gasp! - proto-lesbian?! These questions seem ridiculous when applied to a baby, but as she grows up, becomes a girl and then a woman, what gender theorist Judith Butler calls ‘the policing and shaming of gender’ (Critically Queer, p 582) will begin to kick in even more.

And the policing of gender also has economic implications. If women can be confined to realising their ‘innate’ feminine abilities as carers and nurturers, they can be channelled into low or unpaid work, or work that is perceived as lower in value. From there it’s but a short hop, skip and a jump to the maintenance of unequal pay and lesser economic power.

The cultural meaning of clothes is, of course, even more circumscribed for little boys. But that’s a whole other post. It seems like these days the policing of gender begins in the crib.