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Boys in Pink and Girls with Trucks
The World is Getting Better
I was born in the 1950s, when gender roles were rigidly enforced. If you were a girl, you wore a dress and played with dolls. Your color was pink. If you were a boy, you wore pants and played with trucks. Your color was blue.
If you resisted these ground rules, you were in for plenty of trouble.
Six decades later, I baby sit for a two-year-old boy who loves the color pink. Too young to know about its role as a gender marker, he’s just drawn to the color. He likes to wear pink clothing and to color with the pink crayon. We browse storybooks at the library, looking for what Dov calls “pink boys” — boys or men who happen to be wearing the color he loves.
There are very few “pink boys” in children’s literature, but Dov is always pleased to find one. Otherwise, he acts the way little boys are expected to act. He plays with trucks and blocks. He kicks soccer balls, emulates his older brother’s love of the Phillies and happily rough-houses with other little boys.
Dov is being raised in a religious Jewish home. It’s a way of life subject to countless rules that control every moment of ones life, including some fairly rigid expectations about gender.
