The NY Times has a long article titled “What’s wrong with Cinderella”, where the author bemoans the monoculture of princesses and pink things for girls. I found the article a bit hysterical, although I can sympathise with her point. It’s hard to find baby clothes that aren’t baby pink or baby blue. But I’m not going to worry about the whole princess thing yet – it’ll be a few years before Ingrid will have opinions about the colours she wears, or be able to demand princess toys. Right now she has no choice, ha ha!

One side note that I found really interesting, about girls and pink colour:

Girls’ obsession with that color may seem like something they’re born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain’t so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland – are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children’s marketing (recall the emergence of “ ’tween”), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years. That was also the time that the first of the generation raised during the unisex phase of feminism – ah, hither Marlo! – became parents.