Vor einiger Zeit las ich im Smithonian Mag einen Artikel von Jeanne Maglaty.

Er trug den Titel "When did girls start wearing pink?" und beschäftigte sich mit der Historie der Farbe Pink als geschlechtliche Zuordnung.

Ein nahezu unerschöpfliches Thema, vorzüglich geeignet für die Bühne. So entwickelte ich den ACT YOURSELF Workshop: "When did girls start wearing pink?"

Wir erfinden und erzählen Geschichten zum Thema Wann haben Mädchen denn nun angefangen rosa/pink zu tragen? War rosa doch bis vor ca. 100 Jahren noch den Babyboys vorbehalten. Was verbinden wir mit dieser Farbe, welchen Einfluß hat solche Zuordnung auf uns, was denken wir darüber... aus diesen und Fragen die ihr selbst zum Workshop mitbringt, können wunderbare Improvisationen, Etüden und kleine Stücke entstehen.

Samstag lernen wir einander kennen. Mit Mitteln aus dem klassischen Schauspieltraining, wie Körperarbeit, Etüden & Improvisation.

Sonntag werden wir in Kleingruppen eigene Geschichten entwickeln und bearbeiten, die wir einander am Ende vorstellen.

Bringt alles Rosa mit, dessen ihr habhaft werden könnt. Ich tue das auch... so bekommen wir einen schönen Fundus zusammen, aus dem wir uns für unsere Geschichten bedienen können.

Offen für alle mit Spielfreude bis Spielwut!

mindestteilnehmer*innen: 8

schauspielcoach: anaximander

info & anmeldung: kontakt oder actyourselfberlin@gmail.com

Hier zum Artikel im Netz:

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

Every generation brings a new definition of masculinity and femininity that manifests itself in children’s dress

Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, to be published later this year. Thus we see, for example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

So the baby boomers were raised in gender-specific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers, girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and tomboy play clothes were acceptable.

When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, with its anti-feminine, anti-fashion message, the unisex look became the rage—but completely reversed from the time of young Franklin Roosevelt. Now young girls were dressing in masculine—or at least unfeminine—styles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing for two years.

“One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,” says Paoletti. “ ‘If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls . . . they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.’ ”