Pretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the color, yet it is pervasive in our young girls' lives. It is not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls' identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year-olds, between girls as not only innocent but as evidence of innocence. Looking around, I despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls' lives and interests。
穿粉红色好看：成年女性记不起对于颜色的困惑了，然而，年轻女孩普遍有这个问题。不是粉红本来不好，但是它是彩虹的一小份而已。虽然从某个程度上来说有助于烘托女孩，但它也会不断融化女孩们的特征。那么它不但能在天真的女孩之间而且还能在天真的证据事实前提供那种连接，甚至两岁的孩子。四周看看，我绝望的看到对于女孩生活和兴趣格外缺乏想象力。
Girls' attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies, it is not. Children were not colour-coded at all until the early 20th century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What's more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine colour, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children's marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem inherently attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years。
女孩喜欢粉色似乎不可避免，似乎DNA编码就是这样，但根据Jo Paoletti，美国马里兰大学美国研究副教授的说法，情况不是这样的。20世纪初期前的孩子们原来根本不分颜色:在家用洗衣机问世之前的时代里,所有的婴儿都穿白色,因为要让衣服干净的唯一方法是煮沸衣服. 还有, 那时的男孩女孩都穿中性的衣服。当托儿所色彩引入后，粉红色当时被认为是更有男性特征的颜色，红色的清淡版和力量相关。蓝色象征着女性，代表圣母玛利亚，坚贞与忠诚。到了80年代中期，年龄增大和两性差别成为幼儿用品市场的主要销售战略时，粉色变得很受女孩们的喜欢，成为定义女性特征的一部分，至少在起初的那几个关键年份女孩们都这样。
I had not realized how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts developed after years of research into children's behavior: wrong. Turns out, according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularized as a marketing trick by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s。
我原来没有意识到市场营销趋势对我们观念的巨大影响，比如什么是孩子的天性，包括他们的心理发展这种核心信念。带上你的小孩儿。我认为这个短语至少是博士级别的专家对幼儿行为几年的研究才发明的语言：错啦。根据幼儿消费历史学家Daniel Cook的说法，这个短语是三十年代流行起来的，是制衣商进行市场营销的花招。
Trade publications counseled department stores that, in order to increase sales, they should create a "third stepping stone" between infant wear and older kids' clothes. It was only after "toddler" became a common shoppers' term that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. Splitting kids, or adults, into ever-tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences – or invent them where they did not previously exist。
贸易出版物给百货大楼提议，要增加销售，应该在婴儿服装和儿童服装之间创造"第三过渡阶段"服装，这个词成为"蹒跚学步者"之后的常见销售术语，后来演变为人们广泛接受的孩子发展阶段。把孩子，或者成年人分类成更小的种类已经证实是条必定成功的方法来扩大利润。对市场进行细分的最简单的方法就是扩大性别差异---或者创造出一些原来就没有的差异。