f innocence。
Looking around, despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’
lives and interests。
Girls' attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA,
but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies,
it's not. Children were not colour-coded at all until the early 20th
century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a
practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil
them. What's more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually
considered the more masculine colour, a pastel version of red, which was
associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary,
constancy and faithfulness, symbolised femininity. It was not until the
mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant
children's marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it
began to seem innately attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female,
at least for the first few critical years。
I had not realised how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception
of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological
development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts
developed after years of research into children's behaviour: wrong. Turns out,
according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was
popularised as a marketing gimmick by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s。
Trade publications counselled department stores that, in order to increase
sales, they should create a "third stepping stone" between infant wear and
older kids' clothes. It was only after "toddler" became common shoppers'
term
