You're the victim of misinformation.

In the past there were no hard associations between sexes and gender and it was possible to find boys wearing some pink clothing, but it was never the case that people associated pink with boys and blue with girls.

There are some limited examples that contribute to the misunderstanding. For example blue is often associated with the Virgin Mary and red (not pink) was considered a manly color often worn by warriors (e.g. the British, the Romans, etc).

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This is essentially the way reporting works. If you write an article showing that in the past it wouldn't have been bizarre for boys to wear pink you don't get much traction. But if you write how pink was actually worn by boys and it was considered shocking for girls to wear it, then people find that very surprising and you get a lot of views (truth be damned).

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ternaryoperator a day ago | parent [-]

It’s easy to confirm that what you’re saying is not so. Ask AI and you'll get specific citations of pink being recommended for boys in the early 20th century: “in the early 1900s, publication guides and trade journals—such as the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants' Department—recommended pink for boys and blue for girls.”

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kleiba2 a day ago | parent [-]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unraveling-the-colorf...

	▲	abanana 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for that link, which confirms xdennis's post above is correct. A few lines from that article, emphasis mine: > blue’s connection with boys and pink’s with girls wasn’t solidified until the mid-20th century... the gendered nature of the colors was either reversed or at best inconsistent (Paoletti’s original argument, which has since been misconstrued as a total reversal). > ...5 million books published in the U.S. between 1880 and 1980, he found many examples of the standard “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” association, but virtually none for the reverse... “remarkable consistency in gender coding over time” rather than a sharp shift around the 1940s, leading him to conclude that the magazine excerpts often cited as proof of the reversal were anomalies. > ...follow-up analysis... published between 1881 and 1930... recorded 34 instances of the standard color coding and 28 instances of the reverse... “Pink-blue gender coding showed a certain degree of inconsistency (though not a reversal)... “However, the true extent of that inconsistency is still unclear, as different kinds of sources return dramatically different pictures.” @ternaryoperator: perhaps that's a good example of AI not being real-world-helpful, if you did ask it for "specific citations of pink being recommended for boys", because that sounds like it was asked to cherry-pick, and did.