Sunday I spent some time sorting through the smallest of Sprout's little clothes & I was struck with how gendered a lot of it seemed. I tried to find gender-neutral clothes when Sprout was little, but looking at the collection from the perspective of putting it on a girl, it all looks so boy now. There were quite a few white diaper shirts & onesies, plus the neutral beige & yellow sleepers, but the range of colours was mainly in the blues & browns, with a little green & red. Patterns are stripes or plaid or solid. Design motifs included various types of animals, but also sporting equipment, the occasional truck & one shirt with 'Lock up your daughters' on it. Hm.
I found myself questioning whether I would dress a daughter in this stuff. Will I constantly be correcting people's assumptions of her gender if I dress her in blue, black & green all the time? Should this matter?
For those of you with girls AND boys, did you dress your daughters in their brother's clothes or your sons in their older sister's duds?
Follow Spokesmama here too:
I've kept several boxes of my favourites of outfits Callum has outgrown. It's too early to tell gender on #2 yet, but I have it in my head that it's a girl, and if so, I face the same issue. I plan to dress her in whatever doesn't say "BOY" on it, and see how we do. I like to think that I won't care about gender assumptions, but who knows.
ReplyDeleteI find myself thinking about how I can neutralize or feminize some of his clothes. For example, I've made a patch with a bike on it that's totally gender neutral to cover up a onesie that says, "Lock up your daughters". Though it would be funny to put a girl in that, I was a little iffy on the whole batch of assumptions that go with that phrase in the first place, so... :)
Delete