Blue or pink?

[radegund]

Further to last night's post, I'm remembering a children's party I went to when I was maybe four or five, and at the end they were handing out little presents wrapped in either pink or blue paper. We queued up, and the adult at the top of the queue asked each child, "blue or pink?". I very much preferred blue to pink, so I said "blue" - which was greeted with a degree of consternation. I can't remember whether they actually let me have a blue present, but I do remember this as the first time I realised that the colours were supposed to have a gender association.

When did you? Or is it something you've always known?

ETA: I'm only now realising what a peculiar little ritual that was: if they wanted to give us all the "right" colour present, then why didn't they just hand them out? The gender test was kind of freaky, in retrospect. I think I may have felt some of that at the time, too - it certainly made me uncomfortable.

Comments

[dovegrey.livejournal.com]

Hm, I don't know. I guess it was something I was always vaguely aware of, although I didn't personally take much notice - I was never a pinky-frilly kind of girl, and thankfully my parents didn't force pinkness onto me. In fact when I was a baby she deliberately dressed me in white and lemon and shunned the idea of pinkess and blueness. Which makes me wonder when, exactly, it was decreed that boys are blue and girls are pink.