Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Thread by @activationfxn starting with https://todon.nl/@activationfxn/102251491860764643

notes in square brackets added
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Learned a thing today: The cultural expectations around the use of the colors pink and blue as gender signifiers originated in the U.S. at the turn of the last century.
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Until the 1900s, U.S. babies were dressed the same regardless of whether they were AFAB or AMAB. They were all dressed in plain white dresses, and usually had long hair until a few years before adolescence.
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This is a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1884. Such fashion for children was typical at the time. Check out those mary-jane shoes.

[
image description: A picture of FDR as a child, dressed in a frilly white dress and mary jane shoes with a feathered hat and long blond hair.
image: see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franklin-Roosevelt-1884.jpg
]
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This styling was extremely practical. It was easy to see spills and stains on the white cloth, the clothing was easy to bleach, and the dress made it easy to change diapers.
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[content warning: use of possible pronoun slur]
In fact, Americans in the Victorian era saw little difference to distinguish between AFAB and AMAB babies at all. Gendered pronouns weren't used for babies and toddlers; instead, babies were referred to as "it" or "baby." Imagine mothers in the 1800's complaining, "It cried all night!"
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Putting gender-specific clothing on a baby or toddler was seen as incredibly skeevy by the Victorians. Parents still expected their babies to adhere to traditional gender roles when they grew up, but gender was strongly linked to sex. Dressing an AMAB baby in a little suit and tie might look adorable to many modern Americans, but it would be extremely cringe for a Victorian. Think "Toddlers in Tiaras."
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This started to change in the early 1900s. People start putting their baby/toddler boys in masc clothing and giving them short haircuts with the goal to distinguish between "boys" and "girls" earlier. The reasons for this shift are somewhat unclear, but it's hypothesized that there was a "crisis of masculinity" at the turn of the century. Urbanization moved people from farms into cities, and it's thought that many men felt threatened by the huge shift in their gender role as they moved from traditional "masc" farm work to different occupations.
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Pink and blue start to be used to code gender in the early 1900s. Pastels were thought of as "youthful" colors, and a wide variety of pink or blue baby blankets, clothes, and announcement cards were produced. But it hadn't yet been settled which color was for which gender. In 1927, the expectant Queen of Belgium had a nursery decorated in pink in anticipation of a baby boy.
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After decades of ambiguity, the question seemed largely settled by the 1950s. Pink was for girls and blue was for boys. There's strong evidence that the capitalist drive for profit drove some of the promotion of gendered children's clothes. Before the pink/blue convention, parents could use the same wardrobe of white dresses for each of their children. With different colors for AFAB/AMAB babies, parents could no longer fully utilize hand-me-downs for each kid.
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By the 1980s, advertisers had created such a strong association between pink and femininity that pink was "toxic" for boys and men. The fact that the opposite was less true, and that it was not considered humiliating for women to wear light blue, is a remarkable reflection of societal misogyny. You may remember that it was a big deal when men started wearing pink button-ups in the late 2000s. And we're only now letting go of the pink/blue gendering of children's clothes.

All of the above information was from the work of historians Jo Paoletti and Hanne Blank, and was shamelessly regurgitated from the podcast "Every Little Thing."