Dressing Your Child

[radegund]

[This started out as a comment in cangetmad's journal, but it spiralled out of control so I moved it here.]

The gendering of children's clothing is a big elephant-in-the-corner.

Gender-aware parents, in my experience (yes, that's limited, and yes, "gender-aware parents" is a fairly crude categorisation), like to aim for "gender-neutral" colours and styles. This is relatively unproblematic for boys, but because female=marked, it generally means that girls dressed thus are assumed to be male.⁰ You're responsible for labelling your girl, in other words, so that the unwary bystander is not confused.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Both the traditional "boy" stuff and the "gender neutral" stuff are most likely to be read as male; only the "girl" stuff is unerringly read as female. The iconography of "boy" stuff includes vehicles, sports, war, fierce animals (plus dinosaurs and monsters), traditionally masculine professions (firefighter, driver of large vehicle, construction worker), rough or transgressive behaviour (the pirate/burglar axis). The iconography of "gender-neutral" stuff overlaps with the "boy" stuff but also includes houses, trees, fruit, toys, school, zoo and farm animals, and not-so-fierce animals like mice and dogs (cats are for girls). The iconography of "girl" stuff (or so I've gathered - and do please tell me what I'm leaving out) includes flowers, baby or toy animals, princesses, fairies, ballerinas, sexual precociousness, emotional instability, untramelled consumerism, and the state of being the property of one's father.¹ I also reckon that the clothes themselves are more of a thing in the "girl" space: they follow adult fashion and style, and they have frills and trimmings. Some "boy" clothes have interesting pockets or lift-up-and-see flaps, but that's not the same thing. The message is that "girl" clothes are "decorative" in a way that the rest are not. (Catering to the male gaze from day 1.)

Let's just pause for a second or two to think about the implications of these iconographic distinctions for how we train our children to see themselves in the world.

OK, got that? Good. We move on.

Non-gender-aware parents broadly follow the rules.

Gender-aware parents of boys range over the "boy" and "gender-neutral" spaces, with perhaps an occasional foray into "girl" if they're particularly motivated. I've yet to meet a boy whose parents dressed him in pink frills - and I'm confident that you understand, without my attempting to articulate it in my ongoing sleep-deprived state, why that's so. Most of them, I'm pretty sure, also avoid the "war" end of "boy" space.

Gender-aware parents of girls inevitably inhabit the "girl" space, unless they steadfastly refuse all gifts and hand-me-downs. They are also free to choose "gender-neutral" and "boy" clothes, but only if they're prepared to negotiate people's assumptions that their daughter is male. The only other option is to try to steer a course through "girl" space that avoids the "daddy's little princess" T-shirts and the pink bikinis. (Bikinis. For toddlers. I mean ... gah.) That (plus "gender-neutral") is what I think I'll aim for if I have a daughter. I'm uncomfortable with the outright rejection of things female, for reasons that should be obvious. But as far as I can tell, it's not always easy to find "girl" clothes that aren't emblazoned with the ick. (Oh, look. Dressing a girl is harder work than dressing a boy if you're at all into challenging stereotypes. Colour me gobsmacked.)

[ETA (an aside): Another little kink in the story is that from what I've seen, there tend to be more "girl" clothes for sale than "boy" clothes - or perhaps it's just that they're more prominently and imaginatively displayed. So we have, for girls, a restricted range of messages but a super-abundant supply. Way to channel future women into the roles that consumer society wants them to play.]

But isn't it COMPLETELY INSANE that dressing one's child in gender-appropriate clothes should be this problematic? Isn't it UTTERLY WACKED-OUT that a significant proportion of clothes designed for little girls carry messages that range from embarrassing to nauseating? Isn't it interesting that here as elsewhere, pretty much anyone who thinks about the issues wants to move out of the socially prescribed "female" space and into the "neutral/male" space as quickly as possible, and that females who venture into supposedly "neutral" territory are likely to be interacted with as though they were male?²

There's nothing inherently undesirable about the kittens, flowers, metallic textiles, and various shades of pink and purple that mark clothing out as "girl". Dressing your girl in orange denim dungarees and a white cotton T-shirt with dinosaurs on the sleeves is not inherently more responsible than dressing your boy in a fairisle twinset in heathery shades, stripy tights and a navy A-line knee-length needlecord skirt. And yet the latter is (all but) unthinkable, while the former is (more or less) unremarkable.

The Oyster's wardrobe, predictably, is pretty exclusively "boy" or "gender-neutral". The only "girl" clothes he has are some new socks from H&M: he's worn the plum and the turquoise but not the pale pink yet. (Non-clothing is different: he has several pink/purple/flowery/kitteny plates and cups, and two dolls (which he's just beginning to interact with now), and I'm vaguely on the lookout for a teaset.)

I can't really see myself greatly expanding his collection of "girl" clothes.³ And that, in a way, frustrates me. No, I am not going to moan about how my SON is being DISCRMINATED AGAINST OH EM GEE. But there's certainly a sense in which I do feel restricted by social expectations of his gender. I mean, I happen to like pink and purple, and I think some shades would look good on him. (He hasn't expressed much of a colour preference, FWIW, apart from definitely liking red.) Also, niallm and I are both besotted with him, and if we were into "angel" as a concept, then "daddy's little angel" wouldn't be an entirely inappropriate T-shirt message. Um. Apart from the possession thing, obviously. (Incidentally, aren't angels sexless? How did they become female in the children's clothes market?)

All of which suggests to me that we're probably socialising him in ways that may cause him difficulty later on when he encounters the hard-man stereotypes. Ho hum. You can't win. I am both disconcerted and (oddly) comforted by the thought that his immediate family provides only one component in his socialisation. And in the end, he'll have to navigate his own route through the gender jungle.

⁰ ailbhe's daughter is in the habit of referring to herself as "boy" - as in, "boy get down now", presumably because so many other people do.

¹ These last are (as you can appreciate) the ones that really cause me to incandesce. ailbhe recently recounted seeing two sets of vests in Primark: the boys' ones said things like "astronaut", "pirate", "fireman" and so on, while the girls' ones said things like "shopaholic" and "drama queen".

² cangetmad, you still on for starting that feminist baby-clothes business?

³ And isn't it also curious that his wardrobe appears to be ENTIRELY my domain, and not niallm's at all?

Comments

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of Kate's thoughtful, "Of course, it's always possible that the baby won't be a drag queen", shortly before the Gnome graced us all with her presence.

But, um, too late for useful comment, particularly as am in habit of dressing nobody but myself.

[kulfuldi.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, and I completely agree with you, particularly on how nauseating girls' clothes are. Even without having offspring, I've encountered this problem fairly often while buying for friends' kids. It's often very hard to get anything gender neutral, too. Once, when shopping for a girl, I found myself in a shop where the only choice was between 'Daddy's little princess' type stuff, which I just WON'T do, and perfectly nice red top/navy trousers combo which would have done for any child if it hadn't said 'Boy' on it in big letters. Needless to say, I went to a different shop.

Going off on a tangent....

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

SNAP!

I was thinking about exactly this problematic yesterday because my brother's offspring is due to arrive some time in July and I'd like to give them some sort of maternity/paternity present. And hey; I've always been know to give smart clothes, so I thought I'd stay with that trend. Not knowing the gender of the future baby, I started thinking about what might be fairly gender neutral, and I realised, much to my horror, that everything I could think of would be labelled "male" unless it was pink and fluffy!

For infant clothes, white is really the only non-gendered colour unless you move into primaries (which I won't be giving... I don't do primaries very well at all!), and white's just rather dull in many ways. Black = not an option; it's a baby, not a corpse. Even if you take sand-colour or brown, it'll be perceived as male, and it's really rather frightening how the male default is still so dominant, even in my own mind.

So I've decided I'm going to buy them a book instead! The clothing seems such a labyrinth that I won't even attempt to negotiate it for the mere sake of a present, and toys of any kind would be a silly gift, since my sister-out-law's mother owns a toy store. A book, preferably slightly subversive in tone and something with pretty pictures in bright colours as well as text that will make me laugh out loud. (I gave Goats Are Good to a friend when him and his wife were expecting... Hillarious book!)

[dovegrey.livejournal.com]

because female=marked, it generally means that girls dressed thus are assumed to be male.

Yes - we had this when Jane was a baby. I was determined for her not to wear pink, so she wore white, yellow, green, orange, etc, and EVERYONE just assumed she was a boy.

OTOH, from about the age of two, she suddenly went pink-crazy and has turned herself into a stereotypical girl who loves jewellery, princesses, long hair and fairy costumes. What's a parent to do?? Forbidding these things seems to me likely to do more harm than putting up and hoping it's a phase she'll grow out of :-/

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when I'm buying kid's clothes I despair of finding anything that seems to be for children - the girls' stuff is nauseating, like you say. Surelay even little girls can't like that much pink? (My friends' daughter, Eulalia, tends to go for the multi-coloured look when allowed dress herself). And the boys' stuff seems geared towards miniature adults, with subdued colours and conservative designs.

(I'm also rather continually irritated by Eulalia's mother's insistence on pink clothing as a deliberate marker of girlhood, not to mention the below-the-knee skirts for the sake of modesty that the child has been put into since she could haul herself upright. Zephyrinus gets to charge around and get himself filthy in his hard-wearing always blue clothes, Eulalia is quite deliberately hampered by hers.

Er. I should probably point out those aren't the kids' real names, just in case you think their parents are unusually cruel!)

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[ailbhe]

Black, sand, brown, red, blue, yellow, green and orange are ALL default "boy" colours if otherwise unmarked. Some pastel shades are more girl - particularly pastel yellow - but if the clothing is unmarked, people WILL default to "boy".

I have actually been known to cry about this, when my daughter and I were dressed IDENTICALLY - matching orange long-sleeved tshirts from H&M, and blue denim jeans. Um, I didn't have a big cloth nappy shaped bum, but you can't have everything. We both had dark leather ankle-boots.

And everyone thought she was a boy. Not one person thought I was her daddy, though. Gah.

[ailbhe]

Hah. We banned skirts and dresses as gifts from when L started trying to crawl until she could walk competently. Omigod I am such a revolutionary. *cries*.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I wish my friend was a revolutionary! I've just stopped buying clothes for her kids - I'd half kill myself to get something not-nauseating nor colour-coded, and the damn things would never be put on the children. My mother took a rather delicious revenge for the apparently spurned presents this Christmas - she gave Eulalia (among other things) a tambourine. Ah, blessed noisemakers and small children!

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that orange, red, blue and yellow were assumed to be boy colours! That's what being a '70s baby does for you - retrospectively it was a golden age for the gender-aware parent and baby. I don't think leedy and my other sisters and I had any pink clothes when we were very little - lots of bright orange and blue, though.

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the boys' stuff always seems very subdued and almost drab - it's not fair!

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

And everyone thought she was a boy. Not one person thought I was her daddy, though. Gah.

Oh, exactly. My daughter has lots of pairs of cord trousers and jeans. So do I. T-shirts, zip-up jumpers, hoodies, similarly. We really do dress pretty much the same, and yet - she's a boy and I'm her mummy.

radegund, you are spot on. And, yes, I don't want Gnome to think that female-marked things are trivial or weak or stupid, hence the pink trousers this week, but then I hate myself for feeling relieved when I dress her in occasional pink and know I'll go through the whole day without having to correct a gender assumption. And my corrective behaviour when I can see a boy assumption coming (calling her by her name, or "good girl" very clearly), why? Why do I have to do that? Why do I do that?

Oh, one more thing about girls' clothes, though - they're not just frilly and shiny and bizzarely labelled, they're also more often made from synthetic fibres and potentitally itchy and uncomfortable and environmentally unsound.

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[barsine.livejournal.com]

Everyone thought I was a boy because of my 'sturdy legs' and bald head. Even as an older child (8 or 9) girls in school used to laugh at my socks (grey or red) because I never had those white lacy ones that used to be popular, and once some bystanders in a road race thought I was a boy even though my t-shirt said 'Helen'!

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Girl clothing: UNICORNS. Preferably pink, sparkly, fluffy, and glittery ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[ailbhe]

I have to try very hard not to correct the "boy" assumption. I do it sometimes, because it annopys me that people assume a clever, hard-playing, outgoing, sensibly-dressed child MUST be a boy, and giving them reason to pause and think next time might bo a Good Feminist Thing, and other times I don't because I'm not sure why I mind when people get it wrong.

I don't like most pink, so I dress Linnea in dresses - not pink ones if I can manage it - to establish that femme is not bad. I do also feel terribly relieved that I won't need to make any decisions about gender assumptions all day.

She has girly shoes now her feet are small enough. Girls' H fittings are narrower than boy's H fittings. *seethe*.

I did once consciously NOT correct someone who thought she was a boy. She was playing on a pink bike in the Early Learning Centre and a girl in a pink dress came up and said "You can't play on that, that's for girls!" so all I said was "Pink isn't just for girls, why don't you play on the blue one over there?" and felt terrible for letting someone think she was a boy. My *first* instinct was to say "It's ok, she IS a girl." Oh, the shame!

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[ailbhe]

My mother hated the 60s and 70s because it was so hard to find pure cotton underwear and socks. The early 80s were apparently better.

She mainly made our small-child clothes herself, because she didn't like what was in the shops. We wore a lot of dungarees and no pink. All five girls.

[leedy.livejournal.com]

because female=marked, it generally means that girls dressed thus are assumed to be male.

Yes! I wore a lot of, well, the same kind of colours I wear now (browns, dark greens, orangey-reds, plums, wines) as a little kid, and preferred trousers/dungarees to skirts - I remember being mistaken for a boy on several occasions. Of course, the Archetypal 70s Unisex Child Haircut (ie a bowl) didn't help...

And I am completely with you on the ickiness of so many current little-girl clothes.

[ailbhe]

There's very little point in giving small children clothes. Until the child can decide what to wear in the morning, most of 'em won't be used. It's very hard to match someone's tastes exactly.

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I just hate getting to the point where someone I've been talking to for a couple of minutes will say "what's his name?" and I'll have to stop, back up, correct, deal with apologies and/or minor aggression about why she's dressed like that, then. Ugh. Actually, have you had people treat Linnea's clothing like it's some kind of code when you "reveal" her femaleness? Often people will pick up on Gnome's pink shoes, or the heart-shaped design on her red coat, and say "oh, of course, the X". I haven't yet responded, "no, actually, it's because she was born with female genitalia that we're treating her as female until she's old enough to express her own preference", but I am always tempted.

[dovegrey.livejournal.com]

Surelay even little girls can't like that much pink?

I'm afraid my daughter does! We dressed her in neutral colours until she was able to choose for herself what she wanted to wear, and it turned out that what she wanted to wear was pink, pink, and more pink! I always dressed her in trousers, but now she chooses to wear skirts (even though I think they're far more inconvenient). It's possible she's picked up these ideas of what girls wear from playgroup, but she's very strong-minded and does what she wants. And what she wants, it transpires, is pink :-/ I can only hope that she'll grow out of it...

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[ailbhe]

Yes, I've had people examine her clothes - she now has navy blue shoes with little flowers on, for example - but all I want to respond with, in general, is a whimper.

I have told people outright that they assumed she was a boy because she's not wearing any pink, though.

It's all so *tiring*. Dispiriting. Miserable. Infuriating, which feeds back to tiring.

And oh god what will I do if the tadpole is a boy? How can I raise an equal-opportunities boy? I have no idea how to go about it. I can't just dress him in girls' clothes, because they're almost all so hideous that I won't dress *anyone* in them. Praps I'll buy him a vest that says "shopaholic" or "supermodel".

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[ailbhe]

Actually, I had no idea either, until everyone assumed Linnea was a boy all the fucking time. *cries*

Re: Going off on a tangent....

[leedy.livejournal.com]

I don't think leedy and my other sisters and I had any pink clothes when we were very little - lots of bright orange and blue, though.

But, as I mentioned below, people did still occasionally think I was a boy! Especially when wearing my stylish wine/beige velour top and my jeans. Though yeah, it definitely seems like there was a lot more non-pink, brightly coloured kidwear available in the 70s.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Eulalia now wears a terrible mustard yellow "princess" costume by choice (and wallops me with her scarlet sceptre when I visit, ow) so there is non-pink hope ahead for you!

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yes, the child's will has to come into it somewhere, after a bit...

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think I would've, too. Boy Ick just isn't as noxious as Girl Ick. Bah.