Messages That Depict Us from Conception to Birth

            Enter card store; approach section that hosts anticipated arrivals, new births, and congratulatory wishes for the new family addition.  Immediately the eye is bombarded with shades of pinks and blues.  A few yellows and greens are thrown in to cover the unknowns.  No need to look further, it is made very easy for us to go to the correct section to pick out the correct card.  Or is it dictated as to which ones we should choose from?  There are no duplicate designs with just the color change each style card gives off a totally different message for each gender choice.  The neutral card choices offer very ordinary and limited messages, nothing specific just plain and simple.  I guess those infants are just left in the middle somewhere until they have a gender type, after all they need one of those don’t they?

            Scanning through the pink section all are directed to parents that are either expecting or have just been blessed with a “cute” little girl.  According to Jennifer Bourn, a marketing branding specialist, the color pink is “a delicate color that means sweet, nice, playful, cute, romantic, charming, feminine, and tenderness.” (Bourn, BournCreative, 2010) Is this the beginning of her destiny and who she is to become?  What must she live up to?  How difficult will it be for her when she wants to start to wear blue or better yet black?  The front of the cards are laced with pictures of hearts, flowers, baby animals, carriages that hold a baby dressed in… you guessed it, pink or the depiction of an angelic baby with a halo above her head.  Then we have the different adjectives that shine across the card in glitter and bows.  Descriptive words adorn the front of the card such as cute, marvel, love, beauty, treasure, darling and angel.  Must she live up to these words?  Is her fate sealed in the eyes of the parents because the card says so?  Will she start to disappoint her parents if she steps out of the descriptive titles that have been hailed upon her?

            Jump to the baby boy cards.  We see the color blue, different shades, and different depths.  Blue has been depicted to symbolize “strength, depth, trust, loyalty, sincerity, wisdom, confidence, stability, faith, heaven, and intelligence,” according to Bourn. (Bourn, BournCreative, 2011) The adjectives noted on these cards are Macho Baby, BOY = Brilliant, Obedient and Youthful, pride, wonder, adventures and exploring. What a different fate for this young child than that of the baby girl.  Wouldn’t everyone want to be getting a card from the blue section, it states so much more.

            When did the color coding of infants come into play?  According to Natalie Wolchover from Live Science, “It wasn't until after the Second World War that the modern convention (pink for girls, blue for boys) started to dominate, and even so, it didn't "gel" until the 1980s… Philip Cohen, a sociologist also at the University of Maryland, thinks they are, essentially, the outcome of a marketing ploy.” (Wolchover, 2012)   What a surprise this is.  Of course, what a brilliant idea, this way we can sell paint for bedrooms, crib and baby room decorations, and toys specific to gender by color depiction.  We can sell not just one brown teddy bear but now two, one pink and one blue. 

Before WWII infants were dressed quite similar we didn’t need the help of color coding to assist us in the knowledge that a baby human existed or to tell us what sex it was.  Were we smarter then?  After all they do have names and specific body parts which signify if they are male or female.  Children grow, change and we can see with our own eyes who they ultimately become; we don’t necessarily need a color or label to guide us.  After all aren't we all human first, our specific body parts signify us as to what sex we are but nothing should outline what gender we identify with.  There is no rule book on what a "male" is, does or should be, and in the same respect, nothing should outline what a "female" is, does or should be.  I'm a female who loves to get dressed up pretty and display my femininity.  I enjoy cooking, the ballet, theater, being a mother and having a clean house as well.  At the same time, I will dig in the dirt, go to a farm to pick up Alpaca poo for my garden, fix a leaky faucet, lift things, work hard, use tools, I'm intelligent, goal oriented, love a challenge and more.  I would say I'm human!  All of the other parts of me are just that, parts of who I am not because I'm a woman and not a man; it has nothing to do with that but everything to do with what I enjoy... Life and just being me, I don't need any color coding for that.

Works Cited

Bourn, J. (2010, November 10). BournCreative. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from The Bourn Creative Website: http://www.bourncreative.com/meaning-of-the-color-pink/

Bourn, J. (2011, January 15). BournCreative. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from The Bourn Creative Website: http://www.bourncreative.com/meaning-of-the-color-blue/

Wolchover, N. (2012, August 1). Live Science. Retrieved February 16, 2015, from The Live Science Website: http://www.livescience.com/22037-pink-girls-blue-boys.html

I Thought We Were Further Along… But I Have Faith We Are Going to Get There

            It is a quandary, if I had one message to leave behind for the women of future generations to contribute bringing true equality between men and women, it would be to support and uplift one another.  To release jealousies and instead embrace acceptance and belief in your fellow female counterparts.  It is only with a strong unified foundation that whatever is built stands throughout time.  The Great Wall of China is a perfect example.  It was built from very simple but strong materials and because those materials created a bond together it has stood for thousands of years.  If only mankind could mimic this simple formula.

May 4^th, it is the due date of this writing and a very important and emotional day for me.  This is the birthday of my mother who was born in 1920.  She has been gone for 13 years now and the time has flown by so quickly, I miss her and yet I still feel her presence with me.  My mother was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and during that time a horrific flu pandemic had broken out that had been brought back during WWI.  Thousands of people were dying, the bodies were piling up and they couldn’t even keep up with burying them.  It was the H1N1, but a strain of the flu that instead of attacking children and the elderly it attacked mostly young healthy adults. 

My Pépère decided to sell as much as possible and left the rest.  He moved the family from Cambridge to Ware, Massachusetts to try to escape it and keep his family safe.  At the time, “Ware was home to three major manufacturers: Otis, Stevens and the Gilbert companies, who were noted for their production of textiles, clothing and shoes. Their demand for labor brought numerous immigrant families, primarily French, Irish and Polish, to this rich job market. By the early 20th century the Ware mills employed almost 6,000 people.  The Great Depression era nearly signaled the demise of the mills. But, the citizens of Ware banded together to buy shares in the struggling companies. The purchase was the first employee buy-out of a major manufacturer in America.  Ware Industries was born, preserving the livelihood for hundreds of families. Ware's then-Chief of Police Bartholomew Buckley coined a new phrase for Ware, calling it “The Town that can’t be licked!” Life Magazine heralded the event in their May 23, 1938 issue,” (Town of Ware, Not Listed) my mother was 18 years old at this time and would marry in two years.  The “…article entitled Life Goes to a Party: Ware, Mass. Celebrates Comeback.” (Ibid)  As you enter the town today the sign still greets you at the entrance of the town boundary at the Palmer/Ware town line, “Welcome to Ware, The Town That Can’t Be Licked!”  However, when I was growing up most of the kids didn’t even know the background of the phrase or the actual strength for what it stood for; but I did, my mother told me the story.  It was of course turned into a sexual connotation.  Go to a rival football game as a cheerleader and the comments flew.  “Here come the Ware girls the town gets its name because the girls know how to lick.”  I hated it, how demoralizing.  I knew the statements made me feel uncomfortable but I was so naïve and didn’t even understand what was meant; I just knew it felt bad.  Much later during a time period when my mother had to go to work, she worked at those very mills, I still hold onto some of her needles that she used to correct the imperfections in the reams of fabric manufactured there. 

Returning back to an earlier time, imagine these Cambridge women, my Memere and my mother’s two sisters, my Mom was too young, in that they kept their fur coats to remind them of where they had come from, to now living and working on a farm.  The work involved collecting eggs, slaughtering chickens, milking cows and more. My mother grew up on this farm surviving not only through the flu pandemic, but the hurricane of 1938 bringing floods to the town and through the depression as well. It was a hard life and as a little girl I used to love listening to her stories.  They epitomized strength, courage, perseverance and tenacity.  These stories represented my own personal superhero.  She would tell of the gypsies that lived down the road, finding hobos in the barn staring at her through the hay, to a runaway horse carriage and outhouses in the freezing winters.  This was only one generation away from mine.   I have been so lucky to have lived an easier life, but the strength I was able to assimilate resonates within me.  Just one generation.

While reading Laura Esquivel’s passage, At the Hearth, in her book “Between Two Fires,” I felt very connected as it paralleled the stories that I listened to which would also get passed down.  It is in this retelling that we learn of our ancestry, our family’s survival, and the strength we share as women across all continents, nationalities, and throughout the passages of time.   The essence of equality has been a struggle for such a long period in which women have been trying to grasp their share of.  However, throughout history there is also so many women that have stood out which have moved us forward.  So why then do we seem to slip back after we have achieved and gained steps in this Shakespearean folly?  Could it be that part of it we do to ourselves.  Do we as women have some responsibility for our own steps backwards?  I believe we do.

Immense strength, suffrage, and objectification can be found in women throughout history and throughout the Bible.  To name just a few game changers there is Pharoah’s daughter who plucked a babe from the waters which changed history, the very wise Queen of Sheba using her intellect to gain an important ally, and Queen Vashti who had great courage in standing up to her husband, the King, for her own dignity.  All of these women had great wisdom and perseverance in common and in one of the proverbs it states “God blesses everyone who has wisdom and common sense.  Wisdom is worth more than silver. It makes you much richer than gold. Wisdom is more valuable than precious jewels; nothing you want compares with her.” (Poverbs 3:13-15)  Ironic that in this proverb from the Bible Wisdom equals her; so perhaps it is our wisdom we must past down, enriching and nurturing the upcoming generations.  This can be accomplished by retelling stories, stories from our ancestors inclusive of our own stories.  We must encourage our fellow females to uplift one another always for that is what will bond our strength; it is only showing weakness when we tear each other down and that only crumbles good foundations which have been placed before us.

There is a difference between wisdom and intelligence and with much investigation this comparison I feel honored the words best, “intelligence is the ability to 'go in depth' by 'reading inside' the facts so to extracting their real (and often hidden) meaning… a wise person is not someone that knows a lot of things, but someone that completely assimilates experiences and is able to give them back in a unique way, making his(her) unique soul to be evident. Thus to be wise is much more than to be intelligent...” (Johnson, 2013)

For us as women of today it is so important to support each other in all aspects of our lives, the work place, friendships and family dynamics.  There is a saying that women can be catty to one another and I’m sure we all can say we have experienced it at least once if not more in our lifetime, so I ask why?  If we utilize our wisdom and pass along the intelligence of a more supportive behavior towards one another, I believe that would lead us to the kind of powerful female force we search for in order to construct our unified success for a future graced with equality we so richly deserve.

Works Cited

Johnson, B. (2013, September 9). Research Gate. Retrieved May 1, 2015, from The Research Gate Website: http://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_difference_between_intelligence_and_wisdom2

Town of Ware. (Not Listed). Retrieved May 1, 2015, from Town of Ware Website: http://www.townofware.com/pages/warema_webdocs/townhist