When did it start - the gender specific clothes?

[GreatNorthRoad]

We seem to be going backwards.

I am a child of the 70s and practically everything I wore could be described as uni-sex. Ok so I had the odd skirt, but jeans were plain blue, joggers were grey/blue, trousers were shades of brown etc. I daresay there were some pretty dresses, but things like jeans didn't need sparkles to make them suitable for a girl.

I think it became widespread about a decade ago. I do not remember in the late nineties there being boy and girl versions of large numbers of standard childhood items. I think that things like pink bikes, scooters, globes etc were not widespread. I bought my son a dolls' house in 2000 and it was house coloured. A couple of years later the same house in the same catalogue was pink.

I wonder what started it. I think maybe it was a bit earlier than that. DS1 is 13 and the baby girls he was "friends" with had pink applique on their jeans, although I agree the toys came a bit later.

It must be women that have perpetuated it though - as women still have the majority of the caring responsibilities and therefore presumably buy most of the children's clothes.

I definitely did perpetuate it with my daughter, although at the time I was unaware how the pink thing was going to explode. We never went down the sparkly route, but she had smocking, florals etc. She also now owns more bottles of nail varnish than I have owned over the course of my life, although she uses them as dolls with personalities, not make up.

I think the reason I did it was because I felt I had no idea how to be a girl when I became a teenager. My parents weren't feminists but they were opposed to materialism, and thought clothes that weren't very practical were vain, superficial and a waste of money when other people were living in abject poverty. I also felt that a lot if people looked down on femininity because everything associated with boys is seen as superior, and I didn't want my daughter to feel that way. I still think the superiority of boys' things is a problem now. I also brought my children (both sexes) up in a somewhat fantastical and overly-emotional way (anthromorphic approach to animals etc) because I think those elements of femininty are positive.

In some ways I now regret the clothes and pink thing. it has had a positive and negative impact on DD. I would probably do things differently with the benefit of hindsight. I do think these things matter and have an impact.

It must be women that have perpetuated it though - as women still have the majority of the caring responsibilities and therefore presumably buy most of the children's clothes.

IME it's fathers who want their DDs dressed in pink, because they want 'their girls to look like girls'. This has lead to otherwise sensible friends of mine dressing their DDs almost exclusively in pink or lilac and having their hair long, no matter how impractical that is. I was a CM for a while, and the number of little girls who would come to me in the morning dressed in frou-frou dresses and pretty sandals amazed me. How can a girl be expected to play and explore if they can't get their clothes dirty? Or maybe that's the point. Society and some fathers in particular want their little girls to be decorative and sedentary?

For the record, I had a supply of more suitable playing clothes which I changed them into, and then changed them back before going home time. It is difficult and somewhat dangerous for anyone to attempt to climb on a climbing frame in a long dress.

Ah that's interesting Freya, so when my Dad taught me that there was nothing a man could do that I couldn't and encouraged me to learn about cars and football, he wasn't really being a feminist, he was turning me into the boy he really wanted (don't think that true at all I witnessed him go absolutely ballistic at a friend who suggested boy babies were more celebrated than girl babies only a few weeks ago). It is true I was never given an opportunity to be "feminine" mum would have considered anything fancy a waste of money and dad really wouldn't have seen the point. I never felt I'd missed out though, like you did.

So are those father doing the shopping for their little girls Chaos?

I don't feel I missed out; I felt in many ways I benefited from a more gender neutral childhood and have tried to reproduce it in many ways with my own children. I just felt there might be a benefit from tinkering with their approach so that DD didn't experience the discomfort I did as a teenager.

I don't think your dad was making out masculine things were superior at all; I think he was just teaching you a wide range of useful skills, as my parents did. But there are people who look down on things associated with girls purely because girls do them; dance vs. football, carpentry vs. knitting etc.

To a large extent, yes great, and even if they aren't actually going into the shop themselves, there seems to be an amount influence exerted toward girls being decorative.

Ok chaos, not sure i agree but accept my experience with my dad was different to most, but what changed?

Girls weren't all sparkly in the 70s but presumably their fathers still had influence over their daughters and their mothers, probably more so with more sham and fewer single parents?

I think the way retailing has changed has a big part to play in this though. When I was little (the 70's) shopping was something to be got through. We went to my nearest city when clothes were needed (after a growth spurt) or when there was spare money (absent father had ponied up with some maintenance or DSD had won on the horses).

The idea of taking your children to a mall as some sort of family activity wasn't even part of our consciousness. Add the explosion of supermarkets who now all sell clothes (unheard of), cheap imports, fashion and media, celebrity culture etc etc. You can't examine this simply within a lens of what parents do, imo. It's very much part of a bigger change towards how we shop.

My DM was very 70's feminine in her clothes - she's always loved clothes - and I suspect she'd like to have dressed me more 'girly' but the choice just wasn't there.

I also think, if the 60's saw the invention of the teenager, the 70's and 80's saw the invention of the tween, and that filtered down.

good stuff - if people realised that shopping is for buying things when you need them there would be so much less waste. And probably a lot less obesity too.

we need a cultural change so that going shopping as a leisure activity is seen as tragically boring. Which it is!