Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, an interview with Jo B. Paoletti

Summary

Dressed: The History of Fashion

Episode: Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America
Guest: Jo B. Pauletti
Release Date: July 2, 2025

---

Introduction

In this compelling episode of Dressed: The History of Fashion, hosts Cassie Zachary and April Callahan delve into the intricate history of children's clothing and its profound impact on gender identity. They are joined by the esteemed Professor Emerita Jo B. Pauletti from the University of Maryland, whose extensive research on the intersection of gender and dress has significantly advanced the field.

Guest Introduction and Background

April introduces Jo B. Pauletti, highlighting her remarkable 41-year career focused on American Studies, particularly the intersections of gender and fashion. Originally hesitant to study men's clothing due to prevailing academic biases, Pauletti's curiosity led her to explore how dress influences and reflects societal gender norms.

Jo B. Pauletti:
"I've spent more than four decades working on various aspects of the intersection of gender and dress, very much pushing our field forward in that regard."
(03:28)

Early History of Children's Wear

The conversation begins with Pauletti discussing her dissertation on late 19th-century American humor magazines, where male characters were often mocked for wearing overly fussy clothing. This early research laid the groundwork for understanding how gendered clothing norms were entrenched in American society.

Cassie Zachary:
"I was working on my dissertation on cartoons about men's clothing in the late 19th century... trying to figure out what these characters represented."
(07:29)

The Ubiquity of Gender Symbolism in Children's Fashion

Cassie and Jo explore how gender symbolism became deeply embedded in American children's fashion, often so seamlessly that by age three, children are well aware of unwritten gender norms. This indoctrination begins almost at birth, with clothing serving as a primary tool for gender expression and enforcement.

Jo B. Pauletti:
"Gender symbolism in American children's fashions is ubiquitous. It's also transmitted clearly enough that most children know these unwritten rules thoroughly by the age of three."
(10:14)

Defining Gender in the Context of Fashion

Cassie addresses the evolving definition of gender, referencing Ann Fausto Sterling's concept of "sex/gender" to illustrate the inseparability and cultural construction of biological sex and gender roles. This nuanced understanding underscores the complexity of studying dress and gender as interconnected rather than separate phenomena.

Cassie Zachary:
"I'm getting to the point of view that biological sex is also cultural from the beginning because we look at a penis and we say, oh, is this a boy? There's a lot of biological variation."
(10:36)

The Role of Paper Dolls and Baby Books in Fashion Research

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on how historical resources like paper dolls and baby books provide invaluable insights into the gendered clothing norms of past decades. Cassie highlights the role of these tools in visualizing how colors and styles were assigned to genders before the solidification of pink for girls and blue for boys.

Cassie Zachary:
"Paper dolls are a really good resource because you can see a whole wardrobe for a child... how long is a baby boy shown in pink clothing? Long time."
(21:52)

The Evolution of Nursery Colors: Pink and Blue

The transformation of nursery colors from neutral pastels to distinctly pink for girls and blue for boys is dissected. Cassie traces this shift to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where marketers and retailers began standardizing colors to signal gender even before a child was born.

Cassie Zachary:
"By the late 19th century, pastel colors like pink and blue began to be associated more strongly with babies, but it wasn't until the 1930s that pink was firmly established for girls and blue for boys."
(29:06)

Backlash and Reinforcement of Gendered Clothing in the 1970s and 1980s

The discussion moves to the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting how second-wave feminism inadvertently reinforced gendered clothing by encouraging girls to adopt more masculine styles to achieve equality. This era saw a decline in neutral options as manufacturers and parents increasingly embraced and enforced gendered attire.

Cassie Zachary:
"The downside of second-wave feminism was that the way to make women's lives better and girls' lives better was to have them be more like men. Femininity itself was seen as something to be minimized."
(35:45)

Modern Perspectives and Ongoing Evolution

Cassie reflects on the current state of gender and fashion, emphasizing that definitions are continually evolving. She expresses hope that future generations will adopt more fluid and unisex approaches to clothing, reducing the rigid gender binaries that have long dominated fashion.

Cassie Zachary:
"The way that we raise our children, the way we are raised, what we do as individuals and as a collective is changing our definitions all the time. There's so much we don't know."
(43:54)

Concluding Insights

As the episode wraps up, Cassie and Jo underscore the importance of understanding the historical context of gendered clothing to dismantle arbitrary norms. They advocate for a more inclusive and flexible approach to fashion that honors individual expression beyond gender constraints.

Jo B. Pauletti:
"What gender means is a constantly unfolding cultural conversation specific to time and place. Understanding that gender norms are arbitrary can help us break free from the restrictive boxes we've been placed in."
(47:33)

Cassie Zachary:
"We need to stop punishing people and taking the wrong things too seriously now. We just need to calm down and enjoy."
(46:23)

Notable Quotes

• Jo B. Pauletti:
  "Gender symbolism in American children's fashions is ubiquitous. It's also transmitted clearly enough that most children know these unwritten rules thoroughly by the age of three."
  (10:14)

• Cassie Zachary:
  "The way that we raise our children, the way we are raised, what we do as individuals and as a collective is changing our definitions all the time."
  (43:54)

• Jo B. Pauletti:
  "What gender means is a constantly unfolding cultural conversation specific to time and place."
  (47:33)

---

This episode of Dressed: The History of Fashion offers an enlightening exploration of how children's clothing has been a pivotal battleground for gender norms in America. Through Jo B. Pauletti's expert insights and Cassie and April's engaging dialogue, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the historical forces shaping the way we dress our children today.

Transcript

[April Callahan]

This is the way it feels to move through summer in Lululemon iconic aligned softness without the front seam for our smoothest look and feel ever.

[Cassie Zachary]

Summer won't know what hit it. Stretch your limits in the non stop.

[April Callahan]

Flexibility of the new Lululemon Align no line pant in select stores [e-mail].

[Cassie Zachary]

With.

[April Callahan]

A Venmo Debit card.

[Cassie Zachary]

You can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

You can Venmo everything.

[Cassie Zachary]

Need gas?

[Jo B. Pauletti]

You can Venmo this.

[April Callahan]

How about snacks? You can Venmo that.

[Cassie Zachary]

Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this or their next show.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

You can Venmo that.

[Cassie Zachary]

Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the.

[April Callahan]

Bancorp bank and a pursuant to license.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

My Mastercard International Incorporated Card may be.

[April Callahan]

Used everywhere MasterCard is accepted.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Venmo purchase restrictions apply. The History of fashion is the production of dress media with over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed.

[April Callahan]

Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are friends, fashion historians, and your.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Hosts Cassie Zachary and April Callahan, dress listeners. Some of you are about to have your listener request dreams come true. Yay. Especially those of you who are parents. Because so many of you have written to us over the years requesting episodes on children's wear. And today you received just that in the form of an overarching discussion of the history of children's wear, but also the role clothing plays in children's developing concepts of gender.

[April Callahan]

And as we have spoken to time and again on the show, gender and the notion of gender appropriateness is both a social and cultural construct that morphs and evolves over time. And of course, fashion and dress is one of the main ways that gender has been expressed and policed throughout history. But today we get a deep dive into just how early that cultural indoctrination begins and why.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Pants versus Dresses Pink versus Blue Today's guest reminds us that, quote, there are men living today that wore dresses as children, a transition that took place so thoroughly that we appear to have forgotten that dresses were ever for boys as well as girls. End quote.

[April Callahan]

Today we are thrilled to welcome Jo B. Poletti to the show. She is now a Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of Maryland, but prior to her retirement, she spent more than four decades working on various aspects of the intersection of gender and dress, very much pushing our field forward in that regard. So thank you, Jo. And in addition to her book, Pink and Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, which we will be discussing today, she is also the author of Sex and Unisex Fashion, Feminism and the Sexual Revolution. Jo, a very warm welcome to Dressed.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Professor Pauletti, thank you so much for joining us today on Dressed.

[Cassie Zachary]

Well, you're very welcome.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

I am very excited to learn not only more about your work today, but also you, because dress listeners, Joe is now retired, but only after a 30 year career of teaching and also studying the intersection of dress and gender. So correct me if I'm wrong, please, that this also means that you were kind of working in the realm of dress studies in the 1990s, which is a very, very different time for our field than it is today. So I'm hoping that you could tell us a little bit about yourself and also how you began studying dress through the lens of gender.

[Cassie Zachary]

Wow. Wow. First, a tiny bit of correction. I retired in 2017 after 41 years.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Oh, 41 years, okay.

[Cassie Zachary]

@ the University of Maryland. And before then I actually I taught God helped them all apparel design at University of Rhode island for three semesters when I was a grad student. So lots of teaching. I didn't really get into dress and gender until I was working on my dissertation in the late 70s. I heard the praise during the pandemic a lot about, oh, we're building the plane while we're flying it. And I've kind of realized that's what anybody who was studying gender in the 70s and 80s was doing, because you don't really get a lot of deep work in gender theory until the late 80s and 90s. In the meantime, we are just playing catch up, trying to find out what the scientists and psychologists were saying about it. And I just slipped into this one sideways. I was working on my master's degree and I was doing a thing on children's labor in wool industry because they wouldn't let anybody touch the costume collection at University of Rhode island at the time. That has changed. If anyone wants to go there and study the costume collection, you can do it now. But I was doing something totally unrelated. But it was like the mid-70s and feminism was definitely in the air on campuses. And a bunch of graduate students from the textiles department myself were all sitting around talking about, I don't think we used the word patriarchy. I think we just talked about sexism in the academy.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

And how being in a college of home economics, you got no respect. And history classes. It was all men's history and art history was all male artists and all that literature, et cetera, et cetera. And I said in History of Costume, there's no men's clothing after Beau Brummell. And they said, somebody, thank you. I wish I could remember which one it was said, why study men's clothing? It's boring. And I'm just enough of a contrarian. That's what I needed. I'm sitting there saying, you've just spent an hour talking about men and now they dominate everything. And now it's don't study their boring clothing. Because obviously that doesn't mean anything. And I guess it goes back to my frustration with costume studies at that time and for quite a while afterwards of being so women's clothing, high fashion oriented. That studying, for example, everyday dress. It was a curiosity. And Claudia Kidwell and Shelly Foote did some great work on working women's clothes and stuff like that. And the exhibit suiting everyone from the mid-70s, it was about ready to wear. But a lot of the people that dominated the field in terms of publication because dress was just starting to come out at the time, were very focused on rich women's wardrobes and people who designed for them. So men were boring. So I ended up doing my dissertation on cartoons about men's clothing in the late 19th century in American humor magazines, of which there were three weekly humor magazines. And this character called the dude that was used to make fun of men who wore old fashioned clothing or were too fussy or too something. And I was trying to figure out what were they to was this a. And I'm revisiting my dissertation now, figuring out what I would do differently if I wasn't trying to build the airplane while I was flying it. Because I think I used the word gender like half a dozen times in the entire thing. Back then it was sex roles.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

And it was very much tied to biological sex and the roles expected of that. And that's about as far as that kind of definition would go. And then I just. I don't know. I think what it did was it finally married my curiosity about what it was like to live in a different time. Which was why I was interested in historic costume to begin with as a kid and with my frustration with traditional gender roles especially. I was beyond a tomboy. I was my brother's little brother until puberty. And then it was like, oh, this is happening. I guess I have to be something else. So it really. It's funny, it's. The little neurons were Connecting between the clothing side and the gender side. Oddly enough, there are things you don't notice. I love how you worded this as studying dress through the lens of gender. And I realized that at some point, probably when I switched over into the American Studies department, I was studying gender through the lens of dress. And I became less of a dress historian and more of a gender historian.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Interesting.

[Cassie Zachary]

But even though I was still looking through clothing, but my primary thesis, the way I was tried to explain it, was more in terms of how we understand gender. And on a personal level, again, I'm always interested in the everyday. And how do people, actual people, make sense of these messages they get from infancy on about what you are and what you should do and what you call yourself and everything else. And, of course, Pink and Blue, the book that finally came out of all of this work, came out. It was like catching a wave. I'd been doing this research for over 30 years, but the book came out. And yet it was an academic paper here and something else there, and everybody just found it curious and interesting, and all of a sudden it's political.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah, very much so now.

[Cassie Zachary]

And I didn't see that coming. I tend to be too focused on little things. Yeah.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

One of the reasons that I really enjoyed reading your book, Pink and Blue Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, is it's telling a couple of different stories concurrently. I would argue there is this sort of overarching history of children's wear that's happening. But then also there's this story more specifically, how gender is expressed through those clothes. And you write in the book, you say, quote, gender symbolism in American children's fashions is ubiquitous. It's also transmitted clearly enough that most children know these unwritten rules thoroughly by the age of three.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yes.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

And that was a bit startling to me. And your book really does tap into all these sort of fascinating research studies by child psychologists. But for the purposes of our discussion today, how would you like to define how we're going to talk about the term gender, specifically in terms of children?

[Cassie Zachary]

Wow. There's the airplane right there.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Right.

[Cassie Zachary]

We're building wallets, and it's still flying. That's the thing, is there's a wonderful now retired gender scholar, Ann Fausto Sterling, who's a neurobiologist, and she started using the term sex slash gender, because she's more and more convinced that it's. For a long time, the standard thing is sex is biological, and then gender is the cultural and social things that are expected for sexual. And she's saying, no, I think they're actually more closely related than that. Interesting that the very way that we define sex is cultural because the only thing we have to go on is what a baby's physical appearance is when they're born. Unless you do additional tests, you don't know what actual biological sex. I'm using the air quotes. I know this is not going to be. So you have to imagine air quotes sometimes that we, what we call sex or biological sex is also cultural from the beginning because we look at a penis and we say, oh, is it? This is a boy? Where this baby might actually be somewhere between male and female. Because we know now that there are many biological variations. So there's that. And I think I'm getting to that point of view. I'm not sure what to do with it. Hard keeping that airplane in the air sometimes. But certainly when I was starting out, they were just starting to really accept this idea of sex and gender being these two separate things are related. But sex is biological, gender is something else, and sexual orientation is something else. Whereas if you went rewind a hundred years before, then they were all the same thing.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah, yeah. So this is the airplane that you're speaking of.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, exactly that. The way I studied sex and gender for most of my career was in the 70s way of saying there's biological sex and there's cultural gender stuff or social that's socially transmitted. And I'm glad I retired when I did because this is now somebody else's dissertation waiting to be done of how do you reframe all the things we see people doing if these two things are actually more closely related and there is no such thing as biological sex that's separate from everything else.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

One of the things that I learned from your work were about the Baby X studies that I did not know about this from the 1970s. I'm a child of the 1970s. But I'm hoping that you might tell us a little bit about those. Because what I'm hoping this will do is to illuminate for some of our listeners how gender constructs in that sense of how we're using it from the 70s form in early childhood development.

[Cassie Zachary]

Baby X is a wonderful story. It actually began as a story. It's fiction that appeared in Ms. Magazines. It was about a child that was being raised without gender, which is pretty revolutionary for the 1970s. We're talking Ms. Magazine here. So it was all about this baby that is unnamed, other than Baby X that is raised to sometimes do this and sometimes do that. And they don't ever reveal the child's gender. It's an interesting case of culture wagging science. Because then you start having people in child development saying, this would be an interesting experiment. And sometimes they'd actually called a baby X experiment, where they would take a baby and dress the baby in boy clothes, girl clothes and neutral clothes, and have boy, girl and neutral toys in different situations. And notice how adults would interact with the child differently.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

And what they found, what we now know for sure, and we knew pretty quickly because there was no question in these, all these studies, that if a child was presented as a boy, they would talk to it in different ways more directly, roughhouse with it more that without even thinking. That's the thing is people were just automatically reacting to it based on its appearance. The neutral babies, really, they would kind of try different things. Some of them actually checked inside the baby's diaper. Wow. The need to know in order to know how to interact was very strong. And this was. I mean, again, now we know no matter how people believe about gender today, they do believe that we respond in that way. And they believe that we then teach little girls to expect to be treated in a certain way and dressed in a certain way and handled in a certain way, talk to in a certain way. And boys have their own realm that they live in. Now, the political part of it or this social complication is some people think that's great. Some people say that obviously that's natural, that's normal, that's the way children ought to be raised. And other people say, isn't that terrible? Because what we're doing is unconsciously training boys and girls to be a certain way, assuming that's their nature. But we don't know, and we still don't know. I always have to, at some point in these interviews, insert this thing. If we don't do experiments on children to see that baby Echo experiment wasn't trying to see how the kid would grow up. It was looking at the adults. So we can't take a control population and say, we're going to raise these kids as boys and see what happens. We don't do that. We just do that kind of at the population level, not the sample level.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Right, right. Well, thank you so much for this. This is all fascinating, but this episode is actually about the clothes themselves. So I'm hoping that we can turn our attention to that now. And in your book you write, quote, for American babies and small children, white dresses were once like T shirts are today. So let's start in the 19th century. Could you flesh out for our listeners what exactly you're referring to here in terms of these white dresses and also the time period that we're speaking about.

[Cassie Zachary]

I really need to exercise. Exorcise. That's.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yes, that.

[Cassie Zachary]

That meaning people's way of seeing a baby in a dress and thinking they are dressed into this baby like a girl, because they weren't. They were dressing a baby like a baby. And to dress a baby like a baby for centuries, that was usually for most people, a plain or fancy, if you had the time, white washable dress, long enough to cover their little toes, keep them warm and all that. And they were absolutely unisex. Occasionally you'd have something that you might think that looks like a boy dress or a more feminine dress. But you have to be careful because you're absolutely looking at it through a modern lens. So just as you go to a gift shop today, I was in a gift shop the other day, and they have T shirts for the place I was. And for little kids because their bodies are all the same shape, a T shirt, the only way you can tell is if you add things to it to make it boy or girl. But a plain white T shirt or a plain brown T shirt, white, as long as pink and blue, is now so coated. That's hard to get away with. But it was possible to dress babies for a long time in neutral things because the category of what was neutral was pretty big anyway. But certainly the white dress that people used to look in their costume collection and say, wow, we have a lot of christening dresses. No, these are every. This is what they wore day and night, every day until they started to walk, and then they wore short white dresses. So it was the ubiquitous unisex garment once upon a time.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah, yeah. And also, I think it's super fascinating that around this same time, it wasn't gender, but it was actually age that was truly this definitive element of how children were dressed by their parents. So at what age do we start to see these distinctions emerge about what is appropriate dress for boys versus girls?

[Cassie Zachary]

And that changes quite a bit for boys, because girls, there was one quotation that the girl wears forever the baby petticoat, that women grow up wearing dresses, different styles of dresses, but boys have to, at some point adopt male clothing, be breached, put into some kind of trousers. And if you're talking about, say, the 1880s, that might be when they started school. Whenever that was, which ranged, it was mandated. So it might be five, it might be six, it might be Seven There were advice columnists who would basically say the time to do that is when they start acting more manly. So there was this really interesting thing of the idea about they had about gender was that it would naturally emerge and that it was wrong to dress a child, especially a boy, because it's the boy's clothing that changes first. And that was what bothered them was the way boys might be misled if they were dressed wrong, that a boy should not be noticing sex earlier than it was appropriate for him to. And, and that's part of the reason there are people who say, oh, it's easy to change a baby in a dress. It's easier to change a baby in a dress today. And we don't do it. Boys don't wear dresses. So there I would argue that probably snaps on a onesie are harder than changing a diaper and dress. But we don't do it. So once the boy either was again you have to read through the lines of this well grown between big for his age and kind of husky or whatever. Then he could wear more masculine clothing. Or again that transition of going to school, being more out in public and it's along with the first haircut. So long haired little boys with wearing dresses totally normal into the first decade of the 20th century. And depending on the parents and where they lived in the country, it could have been longer than that because this wasn't something people keep wanting to know like when did this happen? It's not like a switch. It really just rolled out all over the country, rural, urban, different places depending on what access they had, what religious views they had, everything else. Yeah, but the first changes occur in boys clothing. That's why it had to be all the different chapters. Or there's how girls started wearing pants and then there's how boys stopped wearing dresses and started becoming more masculine. Because it doesn't happen at the same time.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Right, right. Well, one of my favorite resources that you refer to again and again in the book, we see this happening over several different decades. And those are paper dolls.

[Cassie Zachary]

I love them. I was such a paper doll person when I was little. I used to cut up Sears catalogs and Wards catalogs to make whole families of paper dolls. So when that dawned on me, and I can't tell you when or how, it just popped into my head that paper dolls would be a really good resource. The reason being, number one, it's where you can actually see a whole wardrobe for a child because it might be baby grows up paper dolls. But the best, the very best Ones are the brother, sister ones that are twins. And there's this whole series in Was it Good at Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal, one of those that was brother and sister paper dolls. And here you have them at different ages, at different activities, everything else. And here is the boy version of an outfit and the girl version of an outfit. And they're twins. You can see exactly like, what makes something a boy version of a playsuit, what makes it a girl version, and how long. How long is baby brother or the little boy toddler doll shown in pink clothing? Long time. The most recent one I found of a. It was a snow suit for forget which paper doll it was. Anyway, a snowsuit for a boy who was a toddler that was pink was in the 1970s.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Oh, wow. Interesting.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah, I mean, it was really. And plus paper dolls. Who doesn't like paper dolls? But the problem is, if you look at costume collections, so many of them were collecting wonderful examples of things, unusual things for kids. Clothes maybe was something that. This was something that was the mother's favorite outfit and the child had died or just playing the mother's favorite outfit. Most of the things that we had in our rather small costume collection at University of Maryland were girls clothing. So it's the same old, you know, boys clothing is boring, but they're all dressy. So finding play clothes, finding sleepwear. Where else are you going to find it besides mail order catalogs and paper dolls? And that's where I found them. That and baby books. That was my most fun one.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

That was another fun resource. I was like, that's so cool. You, like, get a scene. And it's UCLA that has this massive collection of baby books.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yes. And there's my whole. My Accidental Life. If I'd planned things, maybe it would have been even better, but I don't know. I went to a conference, not a costume conference, it was American Studies association. Went to the reception toward it at the end of the day that I wasn't going to go to. And I thought, well, it's a good thing I'm new in the field. I need to go chat with people. So you get into the what else do you say? Where do you teach? And then what are you working on? And I say, whatever. And this one person said, did you know that UCL Biomedical Library has been buying up baby books on ebay? They're making everybody really pissed off because there are people who collect them out there and they want them for themselves. But they now have this huge collection of baby books from like the late 19th century, when child study became a thing and baby record books became a thing. They have a travel grant. So I got to go to UCLA for a week and the first one I opened up had two little scraps of fabric of baby's first rompers. There was a boy and there was their chambray, a pink chambray and a blue chambray. And I'm like, I can go home right now. Because the baby books, of course they have lists of things, like all the baby presents they got, sometimes everything they got for their first birthday descriptions. Because people wrote thank you notes.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

And you had to have those lists in order to know who to thank for that particular outfit or toy or whatever. My gosh, what a source. I ended up using like 1300 baby books. And they're still there. They're still there. Anybody who wants to go and ask different questions because it was. I couldn't get over. I feel sorry for the historians of tomorrow who have only Facebook and Instagram to how are they going to know.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Dress listeners. I'd venture to say that most of us are aware that hormones are critical factors in women's health. But how many of us know exactly what they do and how to maintain optimal hormone levels when you hit menopause or perimenopause?

[April Callahan]

Well, we have a game changer for you. Hormone Harmony. A powerful herbal formula which combines 12 powerful adaptogens into one single capsule. Each of these ingredients is carefully selected based on scientific evidence and has been proven effective in clinical studies for women of various ages and hormonal profiles.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

There are no GMOs, artificial fillers or flavors or any other junk in Hormone Harmony or only science backed ingredients in amounts that are clinically proven. And with 50,000 and counting, rave reviews from women all over the world who are experiencing better sleep and energy levels as well as improved moods. What are you waiting for?

[April Callahan]

For a limited time, you can get 15% off on your entire first [e-mail]. just use the code dressed at checkout. That's 15% off your entire first order with the code dressed@happy mammoth.com dress listeners.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Did you know that this summer you can get your shopping done online and save money at the same time? Introducing Rakuten. Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop.

[April Callahan]

That's right. You can earn cash back when you shop at 3,500 stores for fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, concert tickets and so much more. How does it work? Brands pay Rakuten for sending them shoppers and this is passed along to you as cash back.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

From Levi's to Expedia, Sephora to Petco, when you shop with Rakuten, your cash back can be deposited directly into your PayPal account or they will send you a check. Membership is free and you can even maximize your savings by stacking cash back on top of other deals like store sales and coupons.

[April Callahan]

Get the Rakuten app now and join the 17 million members who are already saving. Cashback rates change daily. See rakuten.com for details. That's R a K u T E N Your cashback really adds up.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

I love that you just gave that example of that boys book that had blue chambray and pink chambray in it, because this leads me into directly the next question that I wanted to ask you about, which is the title of your book, which is Pink and Blue. So when did pink and blue first become designated as quote unquote, nursery colors? And I'm hoping that you can tell us a little bit about the debate, at least in America, as to their assignment to boys versus girls and vice versa.

[Cassie Zachary]

Okay, I'll start with the second part first, because the debate occurs, as far as I can tell, because we're looking at what was written down and recorded among the people who were manufacturing things and needed to know, because they were getting wind of this trend, but they didn't know exactly what it was. The introduction of baby colors like pastel colors, baby blue is really obvious. And pink and other soft colors that's kind of late 19th century, as washing methods become a little less aggressive and dyes are a little bit less fugitive. So that having something that's a pale color doesn't just mean that it's faded. So they start having these nursery colors, little bits of that even earlier as an accent. You might have the white dress, but they might have a sash of a pastel color. Not always pink or blue, but pale colors like that were associated with young children and young people. So a young woman might wear pink, but a matron probably should not. But there's somebody needs to look at the vocabulary of age and fashion at some point of what, what is youthful and what isn't.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Oh my God, there's another dissertation that.

[Cassie Zachary]

Someone can do, somebody else's dissertation. And another air and another airplane that we're working on while it's flying, I'm afraid, because we constantly reassess what age means anyway, right? And then the manufacturers and retailers, because they want to make the right thing, market it in the right way merchandise it in the right way in their stores. They want to know what the trends are. I don't think they're trying to start the trend. They're trying to pin it down so they can use it. And the famous quote that I have is from the infants department. It's the, it's like the women's wear daily of the children and infants wear manufacturers in the US where there's. And again, I was thinking I was looking for something else and I was at the Library of Congress opened up and here's this thing, pink or blue. And I was like, oh good, here is the answer. I was going to look up and find the answer when it started. And they were complaining because the greeting card people, because everything for babies all of a sudden, wouldn't it be great if you could sell the right thing in merchandise and be eye catching and up to date and all this sort of thing. So they're complaining that the nursery baby card people are confusing people by sometimes having the wrong colors or whatever. So they wanted to just lay down the law to their readership. Their wide readership in the New York area was manufacturing baby clothes saying it's pink for boys and blue for girls, right? And you see back and forth in different places. They'll say, no, it's this. And they'll give you. The reason they give in this particular article is because pink is a pastel version of red, which is a male color, therefore. So you also get this area of psychology of color and the cultural associations of color as late as the 1930s. I think it's the second half of the 1930s. Like Lord and Taylor did a survey shoppers in their infants department of which they thought it would be, which was appropriate. And 75% said pink for girls, blue for boys. But that 75% is not 100%. So very slowly you have. It's spreading across the country of pink is for girls. And then I ran into. We had a graduate student from Nebraska when I was in the textiles department who was from a very German Catholic town in Nebraska. And she said, oh no, it's still blue for girls. And this was in the 1980s because. And that was because the association with the Virgin Mary who is shown wearing blue so often. So there would still be pockets here and there and then. And if you look worldwide, it's the same thing is I had again, accident. It wasn't accident. I did plan the. But I didn't plan to have a girl in 82 and then a boy in 86. But I did, and I had graduate students who from different countries. And one of my students from Korea gave my son a couple of little onesies that were pink. And I said, oh, tell me about this. And then later on she came back to visit the U.S. i guess it was like 20 years later. And I said, what's it like in Korea now? And she said, oh, it's the way it is in America, the globalization. And now it's pink for girls and blue for boys. There's somebody else's dissertation is looking at it worldwide. Because as soon as I started publishing things, then I'd hear from other countries saying, oh, no, here we give out Jordan almonds and we give out pink ones for boys. And I'm like, okay, fine. I think we've now established the fact that there's nothing biological about pink and blue.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah. Also too. Just tapping very briefly back into that retail space question. I love the fact that you had a chart in the book talking about the major department stores and what their take on this topic was. Like Macy's versus like Marshalls versus And in different cities. Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

Because they were. And it wasn't even my chart. This was a chart from, I want to say, Time magazine. Need to check my own sources that they published because some royalty in Belgium was expecting a baby and they were hoping for a boy and they were decorating the nursery in pink. And apparently the journalists at this magazine lost their minds and decided to send somebody out to call all over the country. And lo and behold, depending on where you shopped in New York, some were pink for boys and some were pink for girls. And that was the 19, I think 27. So you can see this very slow rollout and acceptance of this because people didn't know to anticipate one of your other questions. People didn't know what they were having. And you had baby showers before the baby was born that you had to buy something for.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Right. Well, you know, on the same topic of retail and moving into the 1970s, so I'm pushing us forward in time by like 50 years. You note that children's wear in the pages of Sears catalogs disappears. The color pink disappears almost entirely. I know that you know why this is, but will you share that with our listeners?

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because it's like the downside of second wave feminism that the way to make women's lives better and girls lives better was to have them be more like men. That femininity itself was bad. And that was part of your child of the 70s so you baby X to a modern eye, looks like a boy. It's wearing, they're wearing pants, they have short hair, they do some kind of feminine things. But there was no way, apparently, I mean, they could have done what adult men were doing during the peacock revolution and have flowered ties and shirts. And the thong bathing suit was meant to be unisex.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah. Rudy Gernrick.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yes.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Was a big proponent of that.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. Which shows the fallacy of unisex. Because if some really unisex, supposedly unisex on the rack, but on the body, it's very clear what your biological sex is anyway. So, yeah, pink just kind of all the very girly things like fade out, disappear. It used to be fairly common for like Easter clothes and things like that to be fussier, dressier and more pink and even that. Yeah. People were trying so hard and of course that's what happened. The backlash. There's two backlashes. One is the parents of those kids say, I tried, but my son is still biting his cheese into the shape of a gun. So gender is biological. You also had people who were older kids at that time who were not happy being misgendered. It's one thing, I was in my 20s at the time and my now husband had long hair and I had short hair and we both wore jeans. And you get this, I can't tell the boys from the girls anymore. And we'd like, aha. If you're a 10 year old boy being misgendered as a girl or vice versa, you don't have the same warm and fuzzy feelings about unisex clothing. So when those kids grow up and start being parents, especially the moms, they don't want their little girls to think that in order to be a better person, you have to be masculine. So in the 1980s, between my 1982 baby and my 1986 baby, I could no longer buy solid color Oshkosh B' Gosh overalls. I could buy ones with ruffles or little bears wearing footballs or airplanes or whatever. They were all becoming gendered and there were fewer neutral options. And I was having to go out and get new clothes because I had a May baby and then a November baby. So hand me downs were not an option. So I was just going to go out and buy the same thing I got in 1981, 82, and it was not possible. And then in the mail I got my sample of Love's diapers for boys and girls. That was when they first.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

I remember seeing those commercials on TV when I was a kid, yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

Babies have been wearing diapers for as long as there have been diapers and babies. And you folded them differently for little boys because they tend to pee forward instead of peeing down. But that's only true, like, in certain body positions. All of a sudden we need to have gender diapers. Gender diapers. And it's also the time when they start putting, like, little. They have the little bows and things like that for baby girls that have hair, or if they don't have hair, you just stick on something with KY jelly or whatever, and you have an upsurge in the number of baby girls who are having their ears pierced, other than just the Latina girls. And because babies don't pick their own clothes, I'm assuming it's the parents that are doing this. So what's different about these parents? Well, and that's when I started looking generationally and saying, okay, I'm starting to get a feeling with this children's clothing thing that some of it is the parents picking things. But who are the parents? The parents were the kids from 20, 25, 30 years ago who remember what they wore, and they either liked it and want their kid to wear that or didn't like it and don't ever want their kid to wear that. Then the other thing was that those parents, beginning in the mid-80s, had information that my parents didn't have. Now, I did for the second one because I had amniocentesis for the second one because I was an elderly pregnant woman at the age of 37 or whatever.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Just wild.

[Cassie Zachary]

It's just wild. Yes, I know. I think they may have had to adjust that age since then, but all of a sudden, people know at 20 weeks around there what they're having. And if you only know one thing.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

About your kid, you're very attached to that fact.

[Cassie Zachary]

And we live in a consumer society. What's going to happen?

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Right?

[Cassie Zachary]

So nursery design, clothing design, gender reveal parties. It just goes on. And I keep saying, what if you could just do a test for whether what instrument your child should be able to play? But you just know that people in a consumer society, once they know something to hang on to, now you know what to buy. And sometimes people would actually say, you know, I'm concerned about. I've had genetic testing. I'm not really concerned about anything in particular, but I want to know what to buy. So there it is. It couldn't get more obvious than that of people just saying, I want to get ready for the baby. And that doesn't mean painting the nursery in a neutral color just in case. Doesn't mean buying a whole bunch of yellow and lavender and light green baby clothes in the newborn sizes. It means full on gendered identity from not even day one.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Pre birth pre birth right.

[April Callahan]

This episode is brought to you by Polestar. There's only one true way to experience the all electric luxury SUV Polestar 3, and that's to take a test drive. It can go from 0 to 60 in as little as 4.8 seconds with the dynamic handling of a sports car, but to truly understand how it commands the road, you need to be behind the wheel up to 350 miles of range. The 3D surround sound system by Bowers and Wilkins. It's all something you have to experience to believe. So book your Test drive for Polestar 3 today at polestar.com Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

And so is the relief from EBGLIS.

[April Callahan]

After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

And most of those people maintain skin.

[April Callahan]

That'S still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EVGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg per 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief. Ask your doctor about es and visit es.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I want to ask you one last final question because our time together is about to end here today. But you have spent three or four decades now thinking about dress, gender, sexuality. Where do you think we are today? This is a big question, admittedly. Where do you think we are today? In Terms of not only children but also adults.

[Cassie Zachary]

Still rethinking my favorite metaphor. We're not just building the plane while we're flying it.

[April Callahan]

It's.

[Cassie Zachary]

It's not the same plane all the time. Interesting that the way that we raise our children, the way we are raised, what we do as individuals and as a collective that is changing our definitions all the time. There's so much we don't know. The whole field of gender science and sexology is so new. We're going only back to what the 1870s and 1880s. And so much of what we've thought in the past was wrong. In the same way that people used to think that the sun moved around the earth.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

So we used to believe that homosexuality was caused by. In men anyway. Was caused by a weak father and a strong mother. There are still people who believe that. Just like we still say that the sun rises and sets, although it doesn't. This is very important to us as individuals. At the same time, it shouldn't matter. And that's my own personal feeling after all of this time. I keep telling people the way we think about gender now is not the way we're going to think about it in 20 or 30 years. Can we stop punishing people and hurting people and taking the wrong things too seriously now? If you want to see how confusing this is and how few confusing it's going to be in the future, think about, just think about what truly gender free or unisex clothing would look like. There's someone else's dissertation topic. Bizarre and challenge. Because the fact is our bodies do tell a story about us, which we then modify with our clothing. But we can modify it in different ways from day to day. I can tell you right now just. I live in a retirement community. I'm kind of in the middle of the age group in my 70s. I can tell you that older bodies are pretty androgynous.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Interesting.

[Cassie Zachary]

If you want to look masculine or feminine when you're in your 80s or 90s or hundreds, you have to work at it. And some people do, but a lot of people don't. You know, I love the whole RuPaul. You're born naked and the rest is drag. It really is. It really is. So we just need to calm down and enjoy.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah, Jo, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much. And I just have to say I think this conversation that we're having and the reason why I wanted to talk to you right now is because I think this is this incredibly important topic right now because so much stuff is happening and I'm hoping that this really helps or maybe enlightens some listeners into the true arbitrariness of this topic of gender.

[Cassie Zachary]

Yeah. It's amazing how something can be both arbitrary and important.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

And yet it is.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah.

[Cassie Zachary]

Thank you. That was a wonderful conversation.

[April Callahan]

Joe, thank you so much for joining us and for your work on this incredibly important topic. Perhaps now more than ever, dress listeners, it is a critical time to remind people that the historical record clearly shows us that that gender dress is truly trained into us. We are all just born in our bodies and any meaning associated with dressing them, as Jo's work so poignantly points out, begins at birth. And now, as she said, with the development of genetic testing, the rise of gender reveal parties, etc. Sometimes this even begins before birth.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

Yeah. So she also reminds us that what gender means is a constantly unfolding cultural conversation specifically specific to time and place. When you start to understand that quote unquote gender norms are arbitrary and most often employed as forms of social controls, you can start to unbuild this box that we've all been placed in and conditioned to fit ourselves in. And I think this is especially relevant discourse today in the context of both women's and trans rights currently being threatened and stripped away in the United States in particular, in really, truly devastating ways for many. And as fascia cannot be separated from politics, I'm sure at some point we will discuss what's happening in the US Further, but this is an episode on children's wear, so I'm not going to go off on a tangent rant about that today.

[April Callahan]

Yes, but coming your way in the.

[Cassie Zachary]

Future.

[April Callahan]

That does it for us today dress listeners. As always, we will be posting images to accompany this specific episode on our social media channels, which is Instagram and Facebook, where you can find that media content with the hashtag dressed555. Until next time, may you consider how the wardrobe of your childhood influenced who you are today. Next time you get dressed, please head.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

To restpodcast on Instagram or rest podcast without the underscore on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episodes.

[April Callahan]

And remember, we always love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do [e-mail] DressedHistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history history courses. And you can check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books so if you are interested you can always find a link in our show Notes to our Bookshop Bookshelf. So that address is bookshop.org shop forward/dressed and there you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles and.

[April Callahan]

Do you love Dressed but want to skip the ads? You can now sign up for ad free listening with any tier on our Dressed History Patreon where you can also chat with your fellow fashion history lovers and attend one of our live Q&As and so much more.

[Jo B. Pauletti]

We are also excited to now be part of the Airwave Network and their premium ad free history subscription Airwave History plus available on Apple Podcasts, the subscription range dressed and also 27 other popular history podcasts ad free for just $5.99 per month. More information on Patreon and Airwave is available at the link in our bio.

[April Callahan]

Thank you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way very soon. The History of Fashion is a production of Dressed media.