This weekend, I went to 2 different retailers to return a couple of items. (Grandma Jane bought Baby Jane an Easter outfit that consisted of a frilly frilly dress and a delicate WHITE sweater. Now, Easter is not exactly a dress-wearing holiday in our household, and if Baby Jane wore either item to daycare, or even around the house for more than 30 seconds, the outfit would be toast.) Since I was there anyway, and since shopping trips ALONE are so rare these days, I decided to check out the baby departments and see if I could spend the store credit then and there.
My experience at each store could not have been more different.
The first stop was a national discount store. I won't name names, but it rhymes with "beep a fax". I go back to the baby department, and....whoa.
Now, I'm used to the extreme gender separation---the overwhelming pinkness and princess references on one side, the blue and ruggedness and "Daddy's Team" on the other side. Bleh. But this was just over the top. Every single girl's item was pink, and there were maybe two items that were *not* dresses. And no, I'm not exaggerating. I just kept thinking "This outfit would not last 10 seconds at daycare. Doesn't anyone else put their baby girls in daycare? What the hell?!" I couldn't even find anything in the boy's side that didn't make me want to lose my lunch. There were no gender neutral clothes at all. I found a couple of things that weren't dresses and weren't frilly and that Baby Jane could actually, you know, play in, and got the hell out of there.
The second store was much better. Again, I'm not naming names, but this one rhymes with "moles". There were still the dresses and the "Daddy's Team" and such, but there was also a greater variety of colors and styles and things that kids could actually *play* in! I ended up buying a pair of boy's pants (why oh why don't they make sturdy, non-capri pants for baby girls in neutral colors?). I will definitely shop at this place again. This store just seemed to get the fact that kids run around and get messy and don't need to be wearing fussy clothes, and mostly stocked that stuff. What a concept.
I've often been frustrated with the pervasiveness of gender profiling, and how early it starts. This weekend's shopping experience really brought that home to me again. Even if you want to do the right thing, let your kid to grow up being whomever he or she wants to be, and not go the "pink or blue" route, it's so hard to do so consistently. It's hard to find gender-neutral clothing. It's a pain in the butt dealing with strangers who assume your kid is a boy if she's not wearing head-to-toe pink. It's worse dealing with that stuff from people you know and love. It's everywhere, it's insidious, and I'm already sick of it!
(But don't get me started on the prevalence of hoochy-mama clothing for BABY GIRLS! Do infants and toddlers really need to be baring their bellies or wearing skirts no bigger than a band-aid? Yeesh.)
Comments
We got through babyhood in baby OshKosh overalls (and shortalls), mostly purchased at garage sales. Pretty darned durable, and what baby doesn't look good in denim?
Posted by: Dr. Free-Ride | March 30, 2008 11:01 PM
What professor doesn't look good in denim?
Posted by: PhysioProf | March 30, 2008 11:21 PM
Yep. Same experience for my two boys.
Backpack for a 3 year old? Your choice from among eight varieties of camouflage, football, camouflage footballs, or tanks (yes, tanks, for a three year old), or eleven choices of pink frilly princess, pink frilly fairy, pink frilly princess fairy, pink frilly unicorns, or, pink frilly princess on a unicorn.
Oh, and boys do not use umbrellas. Ever. All pink, all princess, all frills.
Posted by: Kevin | March 30, 2008 11:50 PM
Oshkosh. With snaps along the leg inside for quick diaper changes. She can start wearing the frilly stuff when she is old enough to want to wear clothes that irritate Mom. And the hoochy stuff should really wait until it is a personal choice of the child to rebel against the clothing tastes of the parents.
In Europe we have a label called FinnKid (that apparently for some reason does not have a web site). They have gender-neutral, practical (and I mean really, really made-by-real-parents-practical) clothes. I have given their baby coat so many times now. It is a soft hat and some wide arms with a big piece of soft cloth that you just swaddle the baby in and fasten with a velcro patch. The baby can kick all it wants, you get the coat on in no time flat, and it is warm. The Finns understand the concept of dressing against the cold.
Be aware that one can also play with trains and cars wearing a princess dress. My youngest niece does this, hope she ends up being an engineer some day!
Posted by: WiseWoman | March 31, 2008 5:06 AM
We lost the battle of the pink when clothes arrived from our families in the weeks following Minnow's birth. Now her wardrobe is some cute tops with more purple than pink, balanced with lots of jeans, cords, and khakis. No princesses, no fairies, no hoochies. Some dogs, dinos, trains, and trucks from the boys side of the aisle. It seems like the clothing selection got a little little better when Minnow moved into the 9-12 month and up sizes. (What size is baby Jane?) Zutanos has some really good (but somewhat pricey) stuff. I've also had reasonable luck at the ubiquitous red-and-white retailer.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | March 31, 2008 8:21 AM
One trend my wife and I noticed is that the cheapest brands and stores seem to be the most gender/color segregated. You want a gender-neural shirt in colors like green or yellow? You'll probably need to find a more up-scale brand. Zutanos is definitely one of the more neural brands and the price shows. I've wondered why this is. Do poorer people buy into the pink vs. blue more or do stores see this as a way to force poor people to buy multiple sets of clothing?
Posted by: bsci | March 31, 2008 9:33 AM
I couldn't agree more! I bet it's even worse for boys, since it's more socially acceptable for a girl to wear boyish clothes than for a boy to look even a little feminine.
FWIW, my neice has dressed like a boy from approximately age 4 until now, age 11. She has just recently started showing some interest in girl clothes. So if you let them choose what they want once they are old enough, they will.
Posted by: ecogeofemme | March 31, 2008 9:40 PM
I have no children but I have a whole bunch of godchildren and I feel like you... is it me or have things degraded in that domain over the past 10-15 years? Same things for toys, actually.
Posted by: stepwise girl | April 1, 2008 10:34 AM
We're dog people, and we can't ever find anything with dogs on it that isn't navy blue. It's so aggravating. Apparently dogs are for boys, bunnies are for girls.
Posted by: ScienceMama | April 1, 2008 5:39 PM
ecogeofemme, I just want to warn you against thinking that it's necessarily "choosing what she wants" per se. I was just about eleven the first time I remember someone saying something 'helpful' about my clothes - I don't even remember what it was, but I do remember packing away that tie-dye shirt and never taking it out again. The next time I wore a brightly-colored tie-dye shirt, I was 21.
The effect of peer pressure and societal pressure in the teen years (and later for many, and even earlier for some) is not to be underestimated.
This is not to say that there's something wrong with her deciding to try on some new clothes and maybe a new persona. We've all seen someone else wearing something cool and decided to try something like it ourselves. But it does mean that it's still important to make sure she knows there's another way - even if all the other girls in school are wearing pink.
Posted by: Lisa | April 3, 2008 3:07 AM
For the six word meme, tag you're it. See here:
http://mommyscientist.blogspot.com/2008/04/6-word-meme.html
Posted by: Jessica Winter | April 3, 2008 4:14 PM
Lisa, I agree. I've cringed a few times when I've seen her watching my sisters and me doing really feminine things. For example, they came to visit me for a weekend and we actually did each others' hair. Socialization in action! But my sisters and I are a result of *our* socialization and I don't want us to pretend us to be something we're not either. I think the best we can do is accept my neice however she wants to be and support whatever (healthy) choices she makes.
Posted by: ecogeofemme | April 3, 2008 8:45 PM
Kevin--ick! I don't know what scares me more, the boy backpacks or the girl backpacks.
WiseWoman, speaking as someone who played with Barbies and blocks in roughly equal ratios, I know that one can embrace one's inner princess and one's inner tomboy at the same time. :) I just wish society was more understanding and accepting of the range of interests---for both boys and girls.
ScienceWoman, the odd thing was that this cut across all sizes---I couldn't find anything that wasn't completely gendered in any size. Which made me wonder what people do when they're buying clothes for a baby of unknown gender....I guess they just don't shop at this particular store. But for the record, I was looking at 18 month sizes (Baby Jane is in 12 month sizes right now but growing quickly).
bsci and ScienceWoman, thanks for the Zutanos recommendation---I'll check it out.
Stepwise girl, don't get me started on toys! I almost threw a fit the last time I was in the toy store and saw a "baby's first purse". Targeted at the 9-12 month crowd. Ick!!!
ScienceMama, that's interesting---I've never noticed that before. Wonder why that is? Maybe because dogs get dirty and are rough-and-tumble creatures and girls aren't supposed to get dirty? Hmmm.
Posted by: Jane | April 3, 2008 10:48 PM
I work in a very small medical office (me and the doc). My boss is a woman in a male-dominated (67%) specialty. She's a single mom by choice, and has two little girls. One is now 6, the other 3. Her office is attached to her house, so I the kids all the time (which is a great perq of working there).
I've seen photos from when her older daughter was little. Back then, her mom dressed her in a fairly gender-neutral way. And mom's not at all frilly. When I first met the older daughter, she was almost 4, and totally addicted to princesses. Almost all of what this kid wears is pink. I never knew there were so many shades of pink! (Thankfully they are not all that powder-puff baby-girl pink.)
How much of this is peer pressure? How much of this is mom? How much of this is the nanny who paints the girls' fingernails all the time? I really don't know. It all amazes me.
I do know my boss was very grateful that this year, for the first time, she didn't take any princesses trick-or-treating.
Posted by: Stasa | April 4, 2008 6:07 PM
So, for women we have the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, and for baby girls we have the Princess/Hoochie Mama dichotomy. Sigh.
Posted by: Zuska | April 9, 2008 5:38 PM
as a former children's clothing manufacturer I can tell you that the gender/clothing issue has been around for a long time and is really really tough to overcome. I actually think that it's harder to dress boys than girls. As others point out it's ok for girls to wear "boys" clothes (although that's as far as it goes) but a boy's penis automatically falls off if you dress him in anything other than "little slugger" (gack) shirts.
If the first store you visited is the one I'm thinking of, one thing to keep in mind is that they sell what nobody else can. Obviously nobody else wanted pink frilly either.
You may want to look at Hanna Anderssen clothes, pricey but they last forever and the company is really good about replacing zippers. OshKosh is also really solid (I'm not sure where you actually buy OshKosh because all mine came from yard sales and hand me downs, including a winter jacket that just went full circle: the child who handed it down to my daughter had her first kid 20 years after she out grew the jacket. I've lost count but I think new baby will be the 8th or 9th child to wear the coat. The jacket is worn but entirely wearable.)
Posted by: brook | April 13, 2008 8:04 PM
Brook, thanks for your comments! that's a good point about Retailer #1; I didn't even think about that, but it makes sense. I love Hanna Anderssen, and they have pretty good sales too. (We have a lot of hand-me-downs and I've bought some things new too---super-cute stuff!)
Posted by: Jane | April 14, 2008 1:28 AM