Pink Is for Battleships
A history of a decidedly unladylike color.
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CREDIT: Photograph of Alexandra and Her Pink Things 2006 by JeongMee Yoon. © JeongMee Yoon. All rights reserved.Pink Toys
What's the most politicized color of our age? Pink, we'd have to say, takes the cake. When we think pink, we think Disney princess, Barbie, and Fifi the poodle, and then we think feminists slashing Barbie and Fifi. The ubiquitous pink ribbon has now become the universal symbol of girl power.
But pink hasn't always been this way. In fact, pink has a decidedly masculine, even butch side: At different points in history, for different countries, it has served as the color of imperialism, speed, and strength in many forms. This slide show reveals a history of this often unladylike color.
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Photograph of paper dolls from "Polly Pratt's Sister and Brother," CREDIT: Good Housekeeping, 1920, by Jo Paoletti, courtesy of the Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, N.Y.Paper Dolls
The ironclad pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys rule took root only in the latter half of the 20th century, says Jo B. Paoletti, associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America*. Before then, babies were usually dressed in white or pale colors of all kinds, so clothing could withstand frequent hot washings. Often parents chose colors according to their babies' complexions: Brown-eyed babies wore pink, and blue-eyed ones wore blue.
Before that, some pink-blue rules did exist, but they varied from region to region. The French considered pink a suitably delicate shade for girls, while blue was appropriate for boys—but this rule was reversed or ignored in many parts of Belgium and the United Kingdom. In Catholic Germany, little girls were dressed in blue in honor of the Virgin Mary, while little boys wore pink, considered a watered-down shade of masculine red.
In America the rules were as certain as they were contradictory. When Meg's twins, Daisy and Demi, are born in Little Women, sister Amy follows the French tradition, putting a blue ribbon on the boy and a pink on the girl.* Ladies' Home Journal flatly contradicted this notion in 1918: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. 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."
*Corrections, Feb. 20, 2010: This article originally gave the incorrect name of Paoletti's book. Also, because of an editing error, this page included examples of similar rules instead of contradictory ones.
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Pink Globe
Several factors combined to make the pink-and-blue rules less murky, says Paoletti, although the emergence of the modern rule took a long while. In the prosperous era between World Wars, mothers switched from homespun to manufactured baby clothes. Merchandisers liked how color-coding babies' clothes bolstered sales—after all, whatever rule you were following, color-coding meant you couldn't dress little Johnny in Sally's hand-me-downs. Department stores began competing to establish a color-coding rule: In 1927, Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, Marshall Field's in Chicago, and Maison Blanche in New Orleans all pushed pink for girls, but other stores—Macy's and Franklin Simon of Manhattan and Bullock's of Los Angeles—positioned pink as a boy's color.
After the drabness of wartime, the economic boom following World War II was awash in brilliant colors, including pink. Notable examples include the 1955 Dodge La Femme pink-and-white automobile (slogan: "By appointment to her majesty—the American woman") and the "Think Pink!" sequence from the 1957 film Funny Face starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire.
Ironically, Paoletti notes, it was anti-pink backlash from 1970s feminists that finally cemented pink's association with the feminine—a backlash that continues in waves. In 2008, sisters Abi and Emma Moored launched Pinkstinks.co.uk to oppose the rampant "pinkification" of girls' products; their Christmas 2009 boycott of a pink globe shined an unrosy spotlight on the pink ghettos in toy stores. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot's 2009 book Pink Brain, Blue Brain explored a different angle: While pinkifying toys can be detrimental if it pushes girls toward a limited learning experience, girls' fascination with pink can also be harnessed—for example, pink Legos could lure girls to improve their spatial-relations skills.
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Pink Men's Clothing
Pink is also the provenance of powerful men, both gay and straight. Rumors reported by the BBC suggest the rowing teams at boys' schools Eton and Westminster raced for the right to claim pink as their school color in the 19th century. (Westminster won.) The salmon-pink pages of the Financial Times newspaper are so iconic that Brits frequently refer to the "salmon press" as shorthand for the business sections of general newspapers. The 53 sovereign states that previously formed the British Empire are still colored pink by many cartographers. London clothier Thomas Pink is loath to dissuade a legend sealing its imprimatur over pink—namely, that scarlet fox-hunting jackets are now called "pinks" thanks to their unbeatably good tailor, a favorite of the 19th-century British horsey set.
The color wandered over the ocean, taking root in Tory America in 1945 in Massachusetts. Nantucket Red is a weathered shade favored by ultra-preppy men and women and uncannily similar to Barbie's bubble-gum trademark shade.
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The Right Honorable Louis Mountbatten, 1CREDIT: st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, admiral of the fleet of the British Royal Navy. Public domain.Admiral Mountbatten
Perhaps the oddest manifestation of a powerful British pink is Mountbatten pink, a grayish-mauve shade of camouflage used by Adm. Louis Mountbatten of the British Royal Navy in 1940. Intended to match the roseate sky just before dawn or at dusk, Mountbatten pink took its most iconic form in the HMS Kenya, "the Pink Lady." Battling Germans off the Norwegian coast, one battle raged pinkly as few battles ever did: The Germans' pink marker-dye, used to target shelling, matched the Pink Lady's hull so well that they were firing more at their own shells than at the ship.
Sadly, the era of carnation-colored destroyers ended abruptly in 1942 due to an unfortunate snag: As soon as the sun fully rose or set, the big pink ships lost their camouflage, leaving them brilliantly visible on the horizon.
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Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka Model 11 "cherry blossom" rocket. Public domain.Kamikaze Plane
The Brits weren't alone in donning pink for war. Japanese kamikaze pilots flew suicide missions in WWII in planes packed with explosives. Cherry blossoms (sakura) painted on the planes' hulls served as an age-old Japanese homage to life's transience. Just as the quick burst of a sakura's petals drop to the ground, the thinking goes, so must warriors be ready to fall unquestionably in battle.
Self-sacrifice in wartime has a female face, too: Yamato Nadeshiko, the Japanese feminine ideal, named for the willowy-pink Nadeshiko flower native to the region. (Yamato is an ancient and soul-stirringly nostalgic name for Japan.) Normally lovely, silent, and submissive, Yamato Nadeshiko occasionally brandishes her takeyari (bamboo spear) in WWII propaganda, ready to kill anyone who threatens her family or her honor.
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Photograph of 2008 Giro d'Italia winner Alberto Contador by Filippo Monteforte/Getty Images.Giro d'Italia
Speed, stealth, and bravado take on a swaggering pink hue in the Giro d'Italia, a long-distance cycling race throughout Italy each May. Every day the current leader of the pack wears the maglia rosa (pink jersey) until finally claimed in exultation by the winner; the jersey's color evokes the pink pages of the race's newspaper sponsor, La Gazzetta dello Sport.
The dizzyingly fast blur of pink assumes other forms. Pink-sheet stocks get their name from the colored paper their quotes were once printed on. Infrequently traded and prone to sudden price swings, these zippy micro-cap shares could take speculators on a wild ride. On the Speed TV show Pinks, drag-racers stake their hotrods on the outcome of a televised race. The show's slogan—"Lose the Race, Lose Your Ride"—is summed up nicely in the pink slip, which handily suggests both getting fired from a job and the owner's certificate of a car.
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"Distinguishing Marks for Protective Custody Prisoners." Homosexual men were designated with the inverted pink triangle (second column from right). Public domain.Pink Triangle
The gay-pride movement reclaimed the inverted pink triangle branding "sexual deviants" in Nazi camps, but even before then, early feminists were plumbing pink as a color of wrested power. In 1928, Parisian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli coined the term "shocking pink," both for the vivid hue and as the name of her signature perfume. Schiap (as she was known among friends) adored shock, but doubly so when that shock called for a transgressive flash of pink, as in the giant lamb chop-shaped hat she designed with Salvador Dalí or in her dress with a trompe l'oeil breast stitched to the fabric. (Incidentally, Schiaparelli's firebrand feminism works best for the clotheshorse set. Frumpy activists are unlikely to live by Schiap's cardinal rule: "Never fit a dress to the body, but train the body to fit the dress.")
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Pink Film
Why are women drawn to pink, anyway? Because it matches their pudenda, says Esquire's Answer Fella— not before enlisting professors at Emory, Colby College, and Harvard to back him up. Engorged tissue, orgasmic flush, and fertility are all conjured with a blush of pink.
Then again, hoo-has aren't universally cheery. Arty Japanese erotic movies called "pink films" (pinku eiga) were produced in response to censorship laws from the 1960s through the 1980s; since it was now forbidden to display either pubic hair or other "working parts" during sex, porn had to get viewers thinking dirtier instead. Pink films like Go, Go, Second Time Virgin; Flower & Snake; and Daydream are moody masterpieces of the genre, as alienated from a pink peek of vagina as you can get.
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The White House went pink on Oct. 7, 2008 to raise awareness about breast cancer. Public domain.Pink White House
Whether imperial, suicidal, fast or empowered, pink is sure to polarize. For every woman proudly sporting a pink breast-cancer ribbon, another woman gags at what she sees as the cute, diminishing symbol. In an op-ed for Salon, "Slap on a Pink Ribbon, Call It a Day," journalist Barbara Ehrenreich is puzzled by the telescoping of women's activism today to a single, uncontroversial aim: breast-cancer awareness. Ehrenreich writes:
So welcome to the Women's Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol—a circle on top of a cross—we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors—black, brown, red, yellow, and white—we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk "for the cure." And while we once sought full "consciousness" of all that oppresses us, now we're content to achieve "awareness," which has come to mean one thing—dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.
No other color has such power to peeve women or tempt them to rip it up and reclaim it. Somehow it encapsulates the whole predicament—how American women now earn more advanced degrees than men but still earn 77 cents to every male dollar. Can women finally bridge the pay gap? Can pigs learn to fly? Well, maybe they can—after all, they're pink, too.
Click here to read a slide-show essay about the unlikely uses of pink.
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