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Oh,
Baby
To
the Editor:
Miriam
Axel-Lute, in her prepartum quest to enlighten the cluelessly
congratulatory [“It’s a . . . Baby!!” Looking Up, March 23],
might be interested to know that it wasn’t too long ago boys
were living “la vie en rose” and girls were singing
the blues. Although the French introduced pink-for-girls and
blue-for-boys in the mid-19th century, it did not become standard
issue stateside until after World War II. Hitler was an early
adopter of the pink link (triangle for homosexuals), although
the Catholic Church chose blue for the Virgin Mary, their
ultimate female. Since the word pink comes from the
flower Dianthus, commonly known as “pinks” for the
way its petals appear to have been trimmed with pinking shears,
Freud might say there’s a good reason boys have shied away
from the color. But whichever way you cut it, people have
always been quick to try and circumscribe it somehow.
In 1918, the trade journal The Infant’s Dept. referred
to “the generally accepted rule,” explaining that “pink being
a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for a boy;
while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier
for the girl.” And the Sunday Sentinel, in 1914, advised
readers to “use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if
you are a follower of convention.” Greeting card companies,
however, favored the reverse in birth announcements (citing
18th-century paintings The Blue Boy and Pinky),
which caused clothing manufacturers to complain that they
were unduly confusing matters. According to a 1939 poll of
New York shoppers conducted by Parents Magazine, most
agreed with Hallmark and the “English school” painters, but
about a fifth did not.
As Axel-Lute charitably allows, it’s difficult to speak of
infants without knowing if they’re male or female, and in
this respect our grandmothers’ generation may have been less
gender-bound than our own, given the Victorian practice of
referring to children as “it”—admittedly more of a Brit thing.
Author E. Nesbit writes: “Everyone got its legs kicked or
its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage
that very minute, but no one seemed to mind.” In any event,
it seems that plus ça change, plus c’est le mums choose. And
yet, just like with our eternal euphemizing to elide the realities
of inequality (if we just start calling them “black” instead
of “colored,” etc.), it’s clear that it’s not the color that
matters, it’s what we perversely persist in making that color
mean.
As Mary Ellmann put it in the 1968 book Thinking About
Women: “[Sexual opinions] are often bold—I mean in their
flights beyond embarrassment. I rather like their crazy proliferation
too—in that sense, sexual opinions are sexual themselves.
They mate with each other and multiply—incessantly!”
Carol
Reid
Albany
To the Editor:
I
just got done reading your great piece in today’s issue and
I wanted to let you know you’re not alone. My wife and I just
had our first child on the first of March and we didn’t know
the sex throughout the entire pregnancy. We chose not to know
the sex for many of the same reasons you do—wayyyyy too many
assumptions and predictions that come with the knowledge of
the sex of a baby who often is months away from even drawing
their first breath. Plus, the volume of people who know these
days is absolutely crazy. We were in Albany Med and every
doctor/nurse that asked us what we were having and heard our
reply (“A baby”) almost fell over with surprise. The entire
operating room (my wife needed to have a C-section) was placing
bets with excitement because nobody seems to make it without
knowing the sex these days. I’m 29 and my wife is 27 and nobody
could believe we weren’t the hip young kids who knew the sex
of their baby ASAP.
Off to change a diaper. Thanks for the great piece.
Lars
Thompson
Albany
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