Trains are For Boys and Dolls are For Girls

Editor's Note: This essay was written by 9to5 Los Angeles member, Caitlin Frazier for the Xenia Institute blog. The post-holiday period is a good time to ponder the gendering of toys/clothes for children.

For all intents and purposes, Christmas is over.  Whether you celebrate a cultural holiday (just one day),  a religious holiday (technically twelve days but rarely celebrated that way) or none at all, the thrill (or lack thereof) is past.  Gifts have been opened and exchanged.  Trees have come down.  Normal diets have been resumed.

My blog two weeks ago on the gendering of toys ("Trains are For Boys, Dolls are For Girls") received so much fascinating response, that I decided to write a follow up.  In addition, I hope you will share your own experience of the gifting and gender as it remains fresh in your mind.

To begin, I will share some of the responses I got from the piece when I posted it to my facebook.  First, a recap:  the blog I wrote last week is about how gendered toys are in our society.  Girls get dolls, boys get trains.  Gender bending these toy prescriptions is not encouraged and indeed frowned upon.  These scripted roles translate into adulthood, as more young men go into the engineering and math and young women are encouraged to either stay home and raise families or pursue careers in gender appropriate fields such as teaching or nursing.

The first response I got was a link to the Pink and Blue project.  This work is a cross-cultural project that shows one child with all of his/her possessions which are blue/pink.  This is much easier shown than described so see the pictures below.

The author of the Pink and Blue Project writes,

The differences between girls’ objects and boys’ objects are also divided and affect their thinking and behavioral patterns. Many toys and books for girls are pink, purple, or red, and are related to make up, dress up, cooking, and domestic affairs. However, most toys and books for boys are made from the different shades of blue and are related to robots, industry, science, dinosaurs, etc. This is a phenomenon as intense as the Barbie craze. Manufacturers produce anthropomorphic ponies that have the characteristics of young girls. They have barrettes, combs and accessories, and the girls adorn and make up the ponies. These kinds of divided guidelines for the two genders deeply affect children’s gender group identification and social learning.

Pink and blue, dolls and trains, why are these things so prescribed?  Color is a dramatic representation of the division of children’s toys.  One of the most interesting things about the Pink and Blue project is that it is not just based in the USA.  Our color appropriation is shared by other cultures, namely South Korea in these pictures.

Another response to my previous blog read,

As the parent of a little girl, I can’t tell you how mad our self-imposed rules for boys and girls makes me. [My daughter] has just as much blue/yellow clothing as pink/purple, but whenever I take her out in public dressed in blue/yellow I spend the entire time telling strangers she is a GIRL! One time she had a on a pink onesie underneath a pair of tan/green dinosaur overalls and people kept saying “What a cute little boy!” Unfortunately, it’s just easier to dress her in a pink shirt and avoid the gender confusion

It is true that gender is hard to decipher for young children.  Does the pink/blue divide primarily function as signaling to the world the gender of our child?  Why is it so important to us that it is obvious.  It seems like a child’s gender is not especially relevant until puberty and then it becomes much more evident as girls (generally) develop curvier figures and boys (generally) experience growth spurts and voice changes.

This blog is to serve mainly as an outlet for the previous response I had received but I am quite curious to hear more feedback.  What do you think about gendering of toys/clothes for children?