性别代号：女孩穿粉色，男孩穿蓝色_英美文化

性别代号：女孩穿粉色，男孩穿蓝色

女孩穿粉色，男孩穿蓝色，不是很常见么?但这两种颜色为何成了区分性别的常用色，这个问题倒是值得探究。

Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather.[1] Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.[2]

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut.[3] Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.[4]

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance. Thus we see, for example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.[5]

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically[6]? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?

It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing. For centuries children wore dainty[7] 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.[8]

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid.[9] Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.[10]