The twentieth century reversal of pink-blue gender coding: a scientific urban legend?

摘要

In the scientific literature on gender, it is usually taken for granted that a remarkable cultural shift took place in the United States during the first halfof the twentieth century. In the span of a single generation, gender-color associations underwent a sudden reversal: pink-a stereotypically masculine color until the 1920s-had by the 1950s become associated with girls and femininity while blue had switched from feminine to masculine. The discovery of this "pink-blue reversal" (henceforth PBR) is usually attributed to Paoletti (1987,1997,2012). Here are some typical scholarly accounts of the PBR: