When little boys wore dresses ...

[insideontheoutside]

A friend of mine sent me this article :

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html

Good read that discusses that it's only been since around the 40's that the pink for girls, blue for boys thing took off ... that previously little boys and little girls wore the same things and how people didn't immediately have to know the gender of a child.

Some good quotes ...

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.

"One thing I can say now is that I'm not real keen on the gender binary—the idea that you have very masculine and very feminine things. The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about. And there is a growing demand for neutral clothing for babies and toddlers now, too."

[Janet_Girl]

Has to be my favorite picture.  So cute.



And that cute little children became President of the United States


Franklin Delano Roosevelt

[NightWing]

Wow.  That is absolutely crazy about FDR.  I had no idea :0.  I'll read the article in the original post when I have time, but just...wow.  Nobody even talks about that ever.

[insideontheoutside]

I've seen family pics of my grandfathers in similar outfits to old FDR there. And pics of my dad in these tiny little shorts and frilly "blouses" as a very small child.

This is something I keep coming back to and going over comparing it to present day. It wasn't all that long ago in the grand scheme of history that little boys could not be discerned from little girls (and the reason why FDR had long hair in that pic was because they often did not cut boys hair until about the age of 6), yet they grew up to be fine men. This is an interesting point because so many of us here were put in dresses as babies and small children - and have grown up to be fine men as well. It's also interesting to note that this kind of blows a hole in that psychological theory that dressing in "feminine" or "male" clothing as a child dictates sexual preference.