Pip’s parents are defiant and refuse to obey the rules. From sources unknown, they have procured him all manner of colourful clothing, including the odd garment in pink, leading to much confusion in the local playground.
“Bella, bella”, says the lovely Italian grandmother. “What a beautiful girl.” “Thanks,” I say, “actually he’s a boy”. “Yes,” she repeats, preferring the evidence of her own eyes to anything I might say, “what a beautiful girl”.
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Go back in history, and this pink/blue coding has not always been followed. In the colourfully macho Flashman novels, the 19th century anti-hero is a dashing soldier, racing around in the “pink pants of the 11th Hussars”. The eye-catching pink, according to the author, is proof of the regiment’s derring-do.
Or there’s the glowering figure of Sir Roderick Glossop in the novels of PG Wodehouse. How to emphasise his fierce masculinity? He emerges, in one story, in his pink pyjamas, grabbing poor Bertie like an “angry cobra”.
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I have some male farmer friends and they, too, are fans of pink. Changing for dinner after a dusty day on the tractor, only a clean pink shirt is sufficient to signal their return to the comforts of the hearth.
I find myself wondering when “pink for girls” became such a certainty. I turn to Trove, the National Library’s recently rescued digital archive. There are mentions of “blue is for boys and pink is for girls” as early as a 1898 edition of the Western Champion newspaper of Parkes, although the author dismisses the tradition: “In my mind,” she says, “there is nothing sweeter for the wee mites than white”.
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Four decades on, in May 1939, the Warwick Daily News agreed: yes, some people follow the blue/pink tradition, but it made little sense. Colours should be selected to suit the individual child. Besides which, said the paper, “There is also the depressing truth that most young infants have extremely red or alternatively pasty faces, neither of which is enhanced by colours.”
They didn’t muck around with false praise in 1939.
Meanwhile, in the world of adult fashion, pink remained popular among Australian men of all social classes. In October 1904, Sydney’s Sunday Times reported on the stylish attire of King Edward VII, consisting of a white hat, lavender kid gloves and a pink shirt.
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Sydney’s Australian Star, reporting in September 1906, had only one concern: they believed the dye in pink shirts might leach poisons, especially when worn against sweaty skin. That was a problem, the paper said, given the popularity of pink shirts among what they called “labouring men”. “Pink,” the paper concluded, “is the most dangerous colour” – a sentiment now shared, it seems, by the parents of today’s boys.
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Sometime after World War Two, the mood shifted. By 1952, Queensland’s Courier Mail was decrying American films in which the cowboys wore pink shirts, implying it was a city-slicker affectation, and by August 1960 the Australian Women’s Weekly was using the jokey headline “pink is for boys” to sell the idea that a woman wearing pink would be sure to attract a man’s eye.
Later that year, in November 1960: The Weekly spelt it out more insistently: “Pink is for girls – old and young, and it’s a flatterer for all types”.
Fair enough, but in the long history of these things, this pink/blue thing is a relatively new idea – at least when enforced with the current zeal.
So, next time I’m with Pip and someone comments on his eye-catching pink T-shirt, I’ll make the point: he’s merely copying the style of a sweaty Sydney labourer, back in 1906, when wearing pink meant bravely chancing a poisoning.
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