I spent this past weekend sorting hand-me-down baby clothes. My sister gave me all her baby girl and baby boy clothes together, so it was my job to separate the boy clothes for future use. For some pieces of clothing, I found myself having to look really really carefully to distinguish the girl stuff from the boy stuff. For example, a purple shirt, if completely unmarked, could be used for either gender; however, if the shirt had ruffles in the sleeves, you knew it was a girl’s apparel. It was taking me forever when the difference was subtle, so the one thing that really helped me tell the clothes apart was the presence of certain symbols associated with girls and boys in our gender-discriminating culture; for instance, flowers for girls and cars, trucks or sports themes for boys.
Now, I’m the first person to reject sexism in any way, shape or form, like why would girls not wear the baseball shirt? No reason, right? However, I probably wouldn’t put a shirt with pink flowers on my baby boy (unless it was before laundry day). Why not? Well, I don’t know… babies look so much alike when they’re young, that I guess I’d like to celebrate his boyhood… all these thoughts, and I don’t consider myself a sexist (although after this post, you might have a different opinion 😉 ). So, anyways, I began to appreciate little baby jeans and little baby shorts that had a little car or little football on them: it made my sorting job much easier! No guess work!
It did make me wonder, though… am I locking my child into a gender role by not exposing him to alternate types of clothing? Maybe. However, I don’t think that clothes make the man (or woman), never mind that they will pick their own clothes down the line regardless of what kind of onesie I chose for the first 3 months of their lives. What I really think is that by creating an environment where my kids will be respectful of all human beings (regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, religious belief), I’ll influence the way they see the world and expect them to see all people as equals. Isn’t that what really matters in the long run?
Maybe our culture uses little cars to symbolize “boy” and little pink flowers to symbolize “girls” just like we use a fork and a knife to symbolize “restaurant” or a red hexagon to symbolize “STOP.” This may imply that girls don’t drive cars or that boys don’t enjoy flowers, which is an untrue generalization, but in the grand scheme of things I think our culture has far more difficult issues in terms of discrimination to tackle. How’s about equal pay for women who perform the same job as men? Or something as simple as stop making a big deal when a woman takes positions of power? It’s time we taught our children that we are all the same.
Ok, this became a political statement all of the sudden 🙂 I just wanted to point out the complexity of the issues that come with the simple act of sorting baby clothes.
ina
Photo Credit: http://www.etsy.com/listing/66175127/football-baby-boy-or-girl-beanie-in