Pink on Wall Street

It's no longer an Easy Bake Oven Era for little girls in America.  Finally, fairy tales will be less effective in shaping her dreams.   Thank goodness!

Successful women, like Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O'Donnell, and a professional women's basketball team, have all offered girls a chance to think outside the traditional gender box.  

Girls can be the hero and not always the victim.  She can be a princess, who chooses an education and can still have a knight in shining armor, or a frog that never turns into a prince.  She has choices!  And while there's much to get excited about, there's still a wall to overcome. 

Gender orientation in American society is such an integral part of our lives that it's not always seen as a problem.  Believe it or not, it begins in the maternity wards, where little color-coded bracelets separate the babies-- a little blue one for boys and a little pink one for girls.

Some adults unwittingly buy toys, the tools of human development, according to the band's color.   And so these innocent bands set the stage, which then allow gender orientation to be passed from one generation to the next. 

Recently, I was at the park and heard two children playing.  A little boy made a guttural sound as he played with a truck and a little girl made a cooing sound as she pushed her baby doll carriage.  Both toys had wheels, but they seemed destined to lead the children into two different places, one powerful and the other passive.

Tonka, the great toy manufacturer with its Wall St. Stock, doesn’t make a construction truck in pink. Maybe it ought to.

Maybe we would do better to raise our babies, according to what's inside their heads, instead of identifying them solely by what’s inside their diapers.