The color pink has been used in advertising and popular culture since the 1940s. Drawing upon and reinforcing gender stereotypes, the subtlety and consistency of pink symbolism has adapted to different generations and contexts to shape popular understandings of what it means to be a woman in America.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, advertising created a feminine ideal packaged in pink. The color became an iconic symbol to convey a set of duplicitous traits, in which the feminine could be a source of assurance or alarm.

Pink girlhood was represented as soft, pure, impressionable, and pretty, but it was accompanied with trickery, mysteriousness, and volatility. In turn, pink womanhood was characterized in terms [Page 1105]of morality, emotionality, and nurturance, as well as seduction, manipulation, and ...