“Be careful Victoria, you don’t want her to grow up ‘butch’.”
That was the sting in the tail to my mum’s innocuous interest in my daughter. A light and breezy chat about whether Florence liked dolls and teddies suddenly turned into a snippy sermon on gender alignment.
You see, mum had recently sent me a list of books she wanted to buy Florence. Like all good liberal (high) minded mothers I didn’t mind what she bought as long as she avoided dullard wastrels in pretty dresses i.e. princesses (I didn’t want my daughter lusting after a windowless tower and a 100 metre pony tail before she could string a sentence together).
The conversation with my mum ended with me rubbishing her antiquated notions of femininity and her telling me she needed to go and weed the geraniums – her favourite euphemism for ‘you’re getting up my nose and I can’t be bothered to talk to you’.
My affronted feminist self took immediate refuge in the Pinkstinks website. Pinkstinks is a movement that challenges the ‘pinkification’ of young girls. Gender stereotyping (particularly in relation to girls) comes under fire from their feisty activists. Anyone who manufacturers toys, books and even grocery items that propagate the idea girls are merely pretty and vacuous is called to account. I thought it was a fine call to arms for anyone concerned about how girls are defined and a welcome damning of pink’s unrelenting grip on girlhood.
I was about to email the Pinkstinks link to mum when my daughter toddled by with baby Bubba. Bubba is a heavenly confection of pink and blonde plastic. Bubba is nurtured to within an inch of her tiny life. Florence LOVES her very pink Bubba.
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I have one girl who, despite all my best efforts, is a pink girl. My washing line is a swathe of pink, pink, pink. I say 'try mixing it with another colour?' 'No thanks Mummy, just pink please'.
I have another daughter who will quite happily wear pink, or whatever colour I ask of her, but her real super duper favourite colour is red.
Try buying red stuff for girls? Downright hard.
Both girls play with dolls, nurture their babies, cook with me, dig in the garden with their daddy, kick footballs, jump rope, climb trees and playground equipment, dress as princesses, and save Rapunzel in her castle.
They are what they are. They like what they like. I just try and offer them lots of different stuff to choose from, and let it go from there. Best I can do.
When I was little I had a black baby doll named 'Coco'.
And I was born in 1988.
I can't tell if that's PC or not.....