It’s common knowledge that little girls want everything pink. American girls, that is. Recently a friend brought his 5-year-old daughter to my house. She arrived wearing her pink tutu and tiara from a ballet recital earlier in the day. “It’s hard to get a 5-year-old girl to change out of a pink tutu,” her father explained. This reminded me of another little girl I know whose austerely tailored mother complains that she’s “going through her pink and frilly phase.”
But not the little girls I’d met in Afghanistan, who seem immune to the cult of pink. In Italy and France and Germany, I hadn’t noticed any fetishization of pink except for in infant clothes. In fact, pink was not particularly associated with little girls until the 1920s, before which it was considered a good color for little boys. An American newspaper in 1914 advised mothers, “If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”
This cloying choice is today, oddly, a mark of our freedom: We only feel the need to reinforce gender coding because it’s become relatively weak in the U.S. In most other places, gender roles are stronger—or even, in the more traditional countries, taken for granted. Our society has decided that we don’t want to take sex roles for granted or close off most avenues of endeavor to our daughters, but in the process we’ve lost a positive idea of womanhood.
I’m talking about the lofty Victorian sense of female character that underlies the novels of writers as various and as separated in era as Jane Austen, Dickens, and Henry James. Women were men’s “better halves,” the “angels” in the house, the upholders of the Christian >> virtues of sobriety, charity, and prudence. Even in the cynical James, where a woman is as complex and surprising a character as a man, there is an almost unthinking reverence for conventional feminine virtue—for self-sacrifice, meekness, and modesty.
However antiquated we now find the implied prescriptions for women in these novels (and many of more ephemeral worth), they at least were instructions for the way women were expected to behave, rather than how they should look. Incidentally, the same can be said of the Victorian preoccupation we find least admirable, the obsession with chastity. In fact, there is almost nothing in the great Victorian novels about characters’ looks, and when they are harped upon, as sometimes happens in Dickens, it’s where they are taken to reveal character traits such as innocence, harshness, or guile.
There are many reasons for the disappearance of the links between femininity and certain virtues, but one is certainly the dismantling of a several-thousand-year-old system of patriarchy. Along with much good, the weakening of traditional sex roles has lead to a great deal of anxiety. In a consumer society like ours, we treat anxiety by buying things. In the absence of any better idea, we think that being feminine is about buying lots of clothing and makeup and grooming products. For little girls, it’s about buying pink. For bigger girls it may be buying PINK, the house brand at Victoria’s Secret, which happens to be one of the few places I can buy the black cotton string bikini underpants I like to wear beneath my sweatpants for tennis and lifting weights.
On a recent visit to one of their stores, I almost walked out twice in the ten minutes it took to complete my transaction, so annoying was the signage proclaiming this or that article “VERY SEXY” amid the omnipresence of pink. Victoria’s Secret: You can buy feminine sexual power, and it consists of wearing as much pink as you can. It makes me miss the inexpensive mass market lingerie stores of Italy, which are not pink, or stocked with pink items, and where both secretaries and bankers will go for everyday underwear. On my last trip to Italy I bought an orange cotton bikini at Intimissimi—orange, a color unknown to Victoria’s Secret.
The PINK of Victoria’s Secret is of course not the only vision of the feminine we can buy. At a much higher price point, pink fades away. Taking advantage of after-holiday sales—I can’t afford much of the merchandise at full price—I went to Bergdorf Goodman, a self-consciously old-line 57th Street department store. In the lingerie department, the hues were cool whites, pale lemons, sherbet shades of plum and apricot. Drifting down from lingerie to the many floors of elegant women’s clothes, I noticed something else. Although the environment was genteel and even old-fashioned, it was not “feminine” in the coding we now recognize. The décor was in light neutrals, similar to traditional good hotels.
Not all the clothes were sexy in my view, much less in the way of Victoria’s Secret. Some of them were positively unflattering. But most of them would cloak the woman who wore them in the power of upper class taste. The woman Bergdorf’s targets is not just richer than the Victoria’s Secret woman, but she is buying a different vision of femininity, as well—more nuanced and subtle, in which social position is what is VERY SEXY.
The message of Bergdorf’s and similar stores is that you can buy class position and the confidence it provides. This has always been possible in one way or another—in fact, it probably became more concrete in the Victorian era, when successful manufacturers were rewarded with knighthoods in England and political clout in the U.S. But this vision, with its safe patina of refinement, has no more to do with character than the fetish for pink does. Today, being rich and well-connected just means you can get a head start on having your own handbag line—without any greater obligations. While the Victorians invested social position and wealth with an almost religious aura, they came with obligations. Rich women were supposed to do good works, train their servants to live moral lives, and set an example for the poor. The ancestress of today’s Park Avenue princess would have taken provisions around to unfortunate locals, visited old widows to make sure they had enough food and firewood, tried to find a job for an unemployed worker, perhaps even nursed the sick and visited new mothers to see that they and their babies were in good health. Her behavior and dress would have been of the strictest propriety, as she was meant to set an example to young women of lower class.
It all sounds a great deal less fun than borrowing a designer gown and jewels and showing up at a benefit to write a check, and doubtless it was. But it also gave dignity to privilege and to charity, and was probably a more efficient way of encouraging good behavior (thrift, sanitation, education, sobriety) in the very poor than today’s impersonal welfare system. And as for the lucky women at the top of the heap, many had the self-respect that comes from meeting high expectations and the knowledge that their existence had meaning.
Today, the constellation of virtues assumed by this system—honor, modesty, duty—are nearly dead, and I believe we are poorer for it. Don’t get me wrong: There is no way back, and no lost paradise to reclaim. Victorian culture imposed one model on everyone, and one set of virtues. The freedom women enjoy in our society, even if it is freedom to behave like a fool or a whore,is worth defending at any cost. And pink tutus (and pink thongs) are harmless in and of themselves. But I worry that the little girls now growing up in “princess culture” and growing into PINK culture aren’t given any sense that becoming a woman means developing character as well as breasts. The real and fictional princesses Disney markets to young girls, from Pocohontas to Cinderella to Snow White, all showed some of what used to be called virtues. But princess play nowadays is only about surfaces. It may be hard to get a little girl out of a pink tutu, but it’s much harder to teach her how an honorable person behaves. And it is here that we are much poorer than the Victorians.
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