GREEN: LOST IN UNDERGROWTH

April 17, 2018April 17, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

[CLICK TITLES TO READ THE ENTIRE POSTS] During my Junior year at the University of Washington, I took Elementary Botany in order to fulfill the distribution requirement for natural sciences. Most of my friends recommended Astronomy or Geology, but I chose plants for that last required class outside my major. Two months later I was ready to change majors, and though I ultimately stayed in the School of Art, I never looked at green in quite the same way again. There were weekly labs and lectures about various aspects of plant growth, use, and biology. We took field trips to look at a hydroponic tomato greenhouse. We dissected leaves and flowers under the microscope. We grew coleus plants from a single leaf and discussed alternative to clear cutting forests. One of our textbooks was notable for simplicity, many photographs, and the green leaf on the cover. I still have it on my shelf. During a lab, we dissolved chlorophyll, which makes leaves green, into alcohol. Light shining through through the liquid was transparent red like the ruby glass in a cathedral window. In pigment, green is opposite on the color wheel and thus the compliment of red. It is created through combination of the two other primary colors: yellow and blue. In optics, green is just to the left of middle.

Less than two percent of people in the world have green eyes. More than half the people in the world have brown eyes and so do most dogs, cows, horses, and many other mammals, but green eyes are typical in domestic cats. Cats’ eye color comes from more than pigment in the lens, the result of the two layers combining to give the appearance of green—the underlying layer is most often gold to brown and the clear layer refracts blue—like a pale translucent blue marble placed over a rippled and gilded surface. This is how some albino cats have violet eyes—the pink is overlaid with blue refraction making pale violet. This is also why all kittens are born with blue eyes—the color of the iris has not yet produced the gold to brown pigment found in most adult cats, and which we see overlaid with blue, creating green. Oddly, green frogs appear that color as a result of two layers in their skin, one blue and the other yellow.

The green-eyed monster is not a cat, but a jealous person, and the term probably originated with Shakespeare’s: How all the other passions fleet to air, / As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair, / And shuddering fear, and green-eyed jealousy!” from Portia of The Merchant of Venice in 1596 and from Iago: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on.” from Othello a few years later. The color represents a long history of paradox.

U.S. paper money is green on one side, but real value has always been in the land where we live and where the green grows. Scarlett O’Hara’s crazy dad was on to something when he warned her that “land is the only thing that matters, the only thing that lasts.” Now, with global warming, we understand it may not last forever, as that Irishman once thought. But on a human scale, it is green that keeps us alive.

Eat your leafy greens, we are advised, and yet people may choose a vegan diet and gain weight because they fail to follow that sage advice by eating too much of everything but their green vegetables. Green leaves are, and likely always have been, a critical staple in the human diet. I know people who defensively claim to be “carnivorous” when vegetarians show up at the table. They are not carnivorous, they simply like eating meat. Protein is an essential part of any human diet, too, but most of the nutrients we need to survive and thrive come from plant sources.

A quick survey of our biology proves that humans are omnivorous—like bears we can and will eat almost anything. Our teeth are more suited to grinding than to tearing flesh. Our gut is long enough to digest grain, though not complex enough to digest raw grass. The enzymes in our mouth a gut are suited better for fruits and vegetables than anything else.

In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, journalist Michael Pollan regards the irony that humans seem to thrive on most any diet except the one Americans eat. He is mostly right, but recent genetic testing reveals that populations surviving on a genuinely carnivorous diet, such as the Inuit, have a genetic adaptation that allows them to thrive on an all-meat and high fat diet. Most humans cannot eat their diet and remain healthy. That’s because the chances are slim that people whose ancestors evolved outside the Arctic Circle possess necessary genetic adaptations allowing us to digest omega-3s and other fatty acids as efficiently as the Inuit in Greenland. The Inuit’s adaptations have likely been around for thousands of years, allowing humans to live in the far north. In exchange for these particular adaptations, Danish researchers found the Inuit are uniquely healthy, living on a very high fat and animal protein diet, are leaner and shorter, and almost never suffer from heart disease. It seems those fad diets that tailor diet to body type may have been on to something.

Still, for most of humanity, Pollan’s opening advice is solid: “Eat Food. Mostly vegetables. Not too much.” Eat your leafy greens, just like Mrs. Michelle taught me in seventh grade Home Ec.

Not everything that is green is healthy for your body. Tobacco was green leaves once. Marijuana, too. Oregon has recently legalized the possession and sale of recreational marijuana. The stores are everywhere. Now we are seeing enormous increase in demands for electricity to grow this newly legal crop in a climate that does not really suit it. In warmer nations like Pakistan, the drug is truly a weed, something farmers yanked from their fields like dandelions. Green.

The Green Revolution was the first great attempt in modern history to end famine. In the 1940s, Dr. Norman Borlaug, a biologist, developed a strain of disease-resistant wheat producing high yields. His goal was to end starvation by allowing crop yields to catch up with population growth, and he did this not through current practices of genetic manipulation but through old-fashioned selection, rushing evolution—breeding the best of the best of the best, backcrossing hybrids to set traits, and developing shorter and stronger stems to hold a larger ear of wheat. Beginning his work in Mexico, it would be the 60s before his improved wheat became a staple crop around the world. He would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his efforts and was honored many times before his death.

When I heard of Borlaug’s work in high school, I thought he had permanently resolved the problem of population outstripping food production. Dr. Borlaug was not so naïve. Wheat yields have quadrupled in developing nations since 1950, but populations have grown faster to eat them. In his Nobel speech, Borlaug warned: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster . . . ” He saw clearly into our future and one of his goals was to increase yields on the best agricultural land in order to avoid further deforestation. Ironically, his work has been criticized for increasing dependence on artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Yes, what matters is the land and what we can grow on that land, but the greatest threat to green on this earth is us and our growing need for food. What matters is not just the green before us, but allowing the green to continue. Something else I learned in school is that population growth will always be always limited. It can be limited through deaths from war, disease, and starvation, or it can be limited by choice. One reason I am a vegetarian is that my food leans a little lighter on the environment. But when the kale goes bad in the crisper, as mine did and had to be tossed yesterday, then I become part of the problem. Some 40% of food in America is thrown away. We are fat in America, fat and wealthy enough that we can afford to throw food away.

What we value impacts the ways we use language. People who have lived in tropical forests all their lives see many greens and can name each one. People who expect to see a shape and color together will, when faced with a mismatch, first see the color and assume the shape, rather than the other way around. The green circle repeated makes the next green thing appear round even when it is a square. Color is prime. Leaves are green. Shown a dozen leaves that are yellow and red and purple, we are still certain that all leaves are green.

The word for green in English derives from the German, to grow. Other languages show similar associations between the words describing green and notions of growth, meadow, grass and to flourish. Yet, like other colors, the color green has different associations in different parts of the world. Japanese and ancient Egyptian cultures associate green with eternal life, and among Muslims it is a sacred color associated with the Prophet Mohammed. In the Renaissance, green was a color commoners were allowed to wear, but it was a sacred color of plumes worn by Aztec priests. Jade is a precious stone, as is the emerald, and both are valued above colorless diamonds. Green is a Sunday color among Catholics and the color of the Roman goddess of love, Venus.

The ocean I watch every day is most often green. It is green just now, that shade called celadon in Chinese porcelain from the first century. Burning heat turns some metals toward their opposite on the spectrum. The celadon glaze is translucent, pale gray-green and comes from a chemical reaction in firing the glaze with tiny amounts of iron oxide. Rust. Like iron, copper also turns green in some firings, but can also produce russet-redbrowns. Natural contamination of sand used to make Coke bottles is responsible for the green color. That is the green I see outside my window, and the colors most often in sea glass from my beach.

“Going green” requires us to tread lightly in the world, and green is also a color of mould and decay, the tint of white skin after death, a hue of disease but also of crops and food. Rare, treasured, dangerous obsession and envy, the color of money and heartache, the rich satisfaction of appetite and lush landscape. Green is a color we distrust and consume, both love and avoid. The study of plants and consumption, life and survival.

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WHITE

April 10, 2018May 3, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Skim milk and new snow, American’s teeth, the inside of most apples, stratus clouds, locker room towels, fleet trucks, bathtubs, coconut flesh, porcelain, chalk, sugar, bleached flour, drawing paper, Jockey shorts, daisy petals—loves me or loves me not?—, picket fences, the whites of their eyes, the fog line beside the highway, and the sign that warns “Do Not Pass.”

I am granted the option, but I do not decline to acknowledge my race on the forms. I check the box Non-Hispanic Surname Caucasian, though All of the Above is closer to truth. My great grandmother on one side was from Mexico, and on the other was perhaps Blackfoot. I was never made to suffer for their color or languages. I am white. My relatives spoke English before I was born. My mother’s skin was pinkish, her eyes were blue, her hair was pale. All my dolls had pinkish skin and blue eyes and blond curly hair. They did not resemble me in any detail. I dismantled them, pulled apart their arms and legs and removed their heads, studied their soft plastic joints, reassembled them in different order, used nail polish remover to wipe away their red lips and their dimpled pink cheeks, filled their bodies with dirt, left them out in the backyard rain. My childhood fury is what I conjure to remind myself what it means to stand before the master narrative and find myself excluded. No President has been a woman. It is not true that the masculine implies the feminine, as I was taught in school.

The White House, white nights, doves, frosting, feathers, pinprick stars, white chocolate, white out.

In the Western world, white is the color of innocence and brides, and what we name white diamonds in her ring is a colorless stone, clear like the raw white of a fresh egg. In the East, white is the mourning hue, not unblemished but the unadorned and empty void. In most Asian nations, brides traditionally wear saffron or red.

In light, white is all colors, in pigment it is the absence of color. White is a matter of perspective. White opals are valued for the color sparking their interior. A white paper is the concise and authoritative guide to solving a problem. Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year—the day retail goes solidly into the black and makes a profit. White imperialism, black power. Black heart, white swan. How we are named and what we are called.

Sun-bleached shells are white. In death, barnacles leave behind a white anchor and sand dollars I find on the shore are never white until they have passed dying and been thoroughly scoured by sea and light. The perched bald eagle I stood below this morning on my walk has white feathers on her head and also on her tail, but her heart and wings are clothed in brown.

Colors show on white. The pale page reveals the dark text, like the stripes make the zebra. It is the words that register, not the paper.

The leader of a workshop on teaching about race assured her audience that race did not exist. Scientifically, we accepted she was correct, but she was speaking to public school teachers. She compared distinguishing between black and white to believing Asian people could be recognized by country of origin. She said that Japanese and Korean and Chinese people looked alike. You know she was white. I told her: You grew up in the Dakotas; I grew up in Seattle. It would be unwise to tell a Korean American she looks Japanese. Not being able to see the difference between Italian and Swedish or Indian and Chinese heritage shows you have not been paying attention. Physical anthropology aside, telling my students that race does not exist is unhelpful. Race exists in my country. It is a social and political reality. Yes, we invented it, but it will not go away because we pretend it does not exist. Race and gender are the first things we notice about a person. That is my country. This is where I live.

Dress shirts, bleached cotton, froth on the leading edge of every wave, white supremacists, white lies, fresh bandages.

I do not decline to answer because that seems a shameful way of pretending that, all things being equal (they never are), being white is something or anything other than an advantage in my country. I am fortunate, I am privileged, I cannot deny this. I am white.

Most pearls are not true white, but tinged cream or pink. The most valuable pearls are those with color, the South Sea pearls in aubergine, amber, and smokey gray. My mother’s skin was not white and neither is mine. We are white but not white. The white ermine turns to a brown stoat in response to longer hours of daylight. A white elephant is the gift you have no use for. Polar bears show yellow shadows, a white Russian is only white on top, a great white shark is only white underneath, white lies are what we tell to avoid getting into trouble, and white water is the dangerous but thrilling stretch of rough river where we want to almost drown. White names are the ones discarded by slaves when they took back their freedom to identify themselves. That is not my people, they are my people. On white nights the sun never goes down. In a white out, your life is at risk from cold and confusion.

Race stands between people, makes us suspicious of motive and genuine affection. It should not matter, but it does. Race matters. Sometimes the racial fog between people bars friendship because the advantaged (me) and the other (them) cannot see past. White means I might be asked where I am from, and I can respond with the names of countries people have learned about in school, not a continent or region they cannot identify on a map. White means I glow in the dark. If I were a white male, white people would assume I earned my job and forget that my father might have friends, HR was hiring someone who looked like him, or I work for bigots. If I were a black woman, I would not be allowed to speak at all.

Hospital sheets are not all white anymore. White chicken meat is not white and the dark is not so very dark. Pork is the other white meat and it is not white either. White is bleached, white is dead, white is blinding bright. Some Arabian horses are born dark chestnut or black and silver with age to gray and sometimes appear pure white, but these horses all have black skin underneath.

All skin is colored except pink albino skin that reveals the blood flowing inside us all.

Lives matter. I do not need to say that. Black lives matter. That needs to be said aloud.

My President was not white. He is a person of color, the child of a broken home but also fortunate to have grandparents who paid for private schools. His culture is mainstream not ghetto, not poor. He did not wait on the porch on paydays for groceries to enter his kitchen. He did not walk to school in flip-flops because he had no other shoes. Advantage is a relative thing. When they were in high school my sons walked into shopping mall stores and they were not automatically followed by Security, but I would bet money both Barack and Michelle Obama had that experience as a teenagers.

The steady hum of white noise puts us to sleep.

I do not decline to answer. I am answerable. I have no answers, I listen. Times change but not fast enough. We are a nation of many skin colors.

We are all shades of human.

NOTE: This essay was originally published in an anthology about race. The editors of that collection failed to provide the copies they were contractually obligated to provide to authors (or any other renumeration).

LITTLE BLACK DRESS

April 3, 2018April 14, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Black skin and black eyes, black noses and black fur, black hair, and the darkness inside tunnels. Darkness playing against light, the strength of contrast, of deepest intensity.

The little black dress is all about reliability, the safe but shapely and dependable dress that will always looks right for an occasion. When I was young and weighed considerably less than I do now and wore what today would be a size 0, but was then labeled a size 8, Sizes have changed. It is all about numbers, When I was a girl, I thought I was too fat and too white for black. I wore short tent dresses in sherbet shades of pink and orange and worried about my hairy arms and whether I had shaved under them recently enough. I could, in those days, fit into vintage dresses from the 1920s and 30s, beautiful narrow gowns in pleated silk with a pattern of black on rust and ruby velvet with black jet beads. I had a pair of black kid leather boots from the previous century, but when I wore a slender black wool crêpe, my mother declared it “too old” for me and I worried it made my skin look like the underside of a fish. My white skin carries an olive undertone that was unfashionable without a tan. My friends lay for hours in the sun. I hid in shadows.

A few decades pass and today most of my wardrobe is black. Looking down the line of my closet there are rare slices of deep coral and olive green, brown and purple and gray. Mostly, though, there is black hanging in my closet. Black jeans are my favorites. Black t-shirts and tank tops hang beside black cardigans in wool and linen. I have patterned leggings purchased one fall in the spirit of fun with turquoise zigzags and red hearts, but more often I wore the four black pairs. Black socks fill one drawer and black underwear another, two pair of black boots and black shoes line the floor. I had a red pair, but wore them out and failed to replace them. Hanging on the taller side of the closet that mostly belongs to my husband, there are four long black dresses. I save the smokey purple velvet one for winter weddings, but my best dress, the long lean, black jersey dress is good for occasions in any season. It is a petite large, mid-calf sleeveless, rayon jersey Eileen Fisher basic. When I have lost weight I belt it, and when I have gained I wear it loose with a light cardigan to conceal my waist. I do not worry that the dark color makes me look too pale, I hope it makes me look thinner. Like many women in America, I worry about my weight but do nothing about it other than casting illusions with my wardrobe. None of my black dresses is little. Though I wore little dresses that rode my thighs in many shades other than black when I was young, in my sixties the dresses in my closet hang well past my knees. A dark disguise.

Black is hard to see. Black is the lack of seeing, the absence of light reflected from a surface—when we see black, in fact, we are seeing nothing, the absence of light. Black clarifies the outline of objects in silhouette, but obscures what comes between its edges. The object is perceived as smaller than it is—hence the mystique of the little black dress.

I first became aware of this shrinking invisibility in real life rather than theory at a dog show. I had driven north and slightly east of Seattle in order to look at Afghan Hounds at the Puyallup Kennel Club show held indoors in a fairground stadium. The lighting was poor, and the black dogs being shown appeared nearly invisible, obscure blobs moving around the ring. When I later went looking for a dog, I knew I wanted one that looked like Barberryhill Dolly, a red Afghan in a photo from the 1930s. In a reversal of Henry Ford, I did not care what color so long as the color was not black. I flew to Arizona and came home with Oranje Anisette, a year old black bitch named for the anise-flavored liquor. She had white chest locket the size of a quarter that rarely showed, a good outline, and I finished her championship in Canada, but I would return to that fairground three years later to win a major with her distant cousin, who was red.

Anisette was one of our sweetest dogs. Licorice can be sweet or salty, red or black. I took mine black and sweet, but black as a color has other associations in the west: funerals, witchy hats, cats crossing our path. Black is the color of funerals and ill fortune, evil hearts and cruel magic events. The type on our page is black, but the page itself is innocently white. In the West black is the color of mourning, but some eastern cultures have a wiser approach to sorrow. They mourn loss by wearing white, the absence of color, not the absence of its reflection.

Applied to objects in dyes and inks, black is a supersaturation of pigment, so much pigment that the fabric or signature appears black until time, sunlight, or bleach fade it to purple or rust. This can be used to advantage. During my practicum, at the time I was student teaching in a middle school, Lynn Gray found black corduroy pieces from several bolts to make a group project. Students did reverse tie dye—discharge—tying cut squares with string and rubber bands and twine, dipping briefing in a bleach solution and then in baths to neutralize the bleach and rinse it clear. We expected a pattern of white on the original black, but none of the squares bleached to gray, instead some showed smokey blue, others rust or green. We came to greet this variation with enthusiasm.

Black itself varies, fades, shows bleaching from the sun. water on black ink may float in waves of colors. We may choose to write in black or blue or any dark color at all, but legal documents generally require dark ink, blue-black or black. The blue-black ink in my father’s fountain pen was a throw-back to early European times when the gall-ink black was transparent when first applied and a blue dye was added to ensure the writing was visible. Over time the gall ink turned dark and black.

The earliest India inks were from China and colored with carbon from sources such as burnt bone and oil. The Romans also wrote in black ink made from soot, but a recipe for black tattoo ink includes iron sulfate, bronze ground with vinegar, pine bark, and gall from insect egg deposits. Europeans made black ink colored with black iron gall—iron salts and tannic acids, often from oak—beginning in the twelfth century, but this acidic pigment is destructive of cellulose paper. The ink of Bach’s original eighteenth century scores have faded to brown and threaten to destroy the paper on which they were written so that conservators wrestle with how to preserve them. The signatures on my undergraduate diplomas, from not forty years ago, have mostly faded to illegibility.

Newspapers today are printed with carbon pigment suspended in oils, which results in ink coming off on the hands of readers. In Wodehouse’s stories, the impeccable butler Jeeves irons the Times so that the ink will not rub off on Bertie Wooster’s hands. My regional newspaper, The Oregonian, began using “rub-free” ink in the 1980s, but no one reads print newspaper much anymore.

The word black itself is derived from Old English dark and earlier words meaning to burn, gleam, shine, or flash. That might refer to the night sky, which in the days before streetlights would indeed and gleamed and shone, bright with stars no city-dweller can see today. The earliest know art, such as the caves at Lascaux, were painted in the dark with ground charcoal and manganese—mostly black on the stone. The marks are guessed to be wishful thinking of hunts and plenty.

The Egyptians regarded black as fortunate in their rich black soil but also through Anubis, god of the underworld and protector of innocence. The Greeks created a more complicated relationship with black, using black in ornament and cosmetics, decorating red pottery with black and later red drawn on a black ground. Black was darkness and death in the afterworld, darkest for those deserving punishment. But the Romans reserved colors for those of rank and black became the clothing of commoners. Death itself was named the Black House. In the north, there was the goddess of the night, but soon enough the prejudice of black as evil robed the devil in black. This would change in the West as black became fashionable and associated with the rich and powerful. Colors such as scarlet and blue and purple were still reserved for the wealthy and those with standing in the church, but black became the color of government officials and later the emblematic color of the Reformation, a somber and serious morally upright color, a hue of humility before God.

Thus use of black often carries a moral message, from black cats and witches’ hats to religious austerity in cleric’s cassock and nun’s habit, from the ostentatious display of sable furs and silk magistrates’ robe to the wretched industrial revolution’s soiled cities, black tie to tail coats, butlers and the governess’s modest dress to the Grim Reaper.

Queen Victoria made a life-long ceremony of wearing black in mourning for her husband from 1861 until her own death forty years later. Convention mourning of her day required plain black to be worn for a year and a day after the death of a family member. Gradually black was relieved by touches of white and then a shift to muted colors such as gray and mauve over the next years. Not everyone could afford to wear their grief but others played it to their advantage. Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily who became one of the Prince of Wales’ mistresses and internationally famous beauty—Langry, Texas is named for her—entered society wearing a plain black silk mourning dress, which she secretly restyled each day for daytime and then evening wear. Without the money for jewelry or fashionable changes of clothing, her unadorned appearance ran against the highly decorative style of the day, and captured the public’s imagination.

In the midst of all this Victorian mourning, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of a notorious financier’s wife in a tight, low cut black dress, reveals Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau’s precious skin glowing like opal against the darkness. The painting that became known as “Portrait of Madame X” suggested a new and delightfully wicked association for the color in clothing.

The Little Black Dress dates back to designers Coco Chanel and Jean Patou in the 1920s who were looking for understated chic. This sexy thing is available from every department store today—Nordstrom offers over seven hundred versions. Think of Audrey Hepburn with her long cigarette holder, her long black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Black shows the cat’s hair, but is a workhorse in the wardrobe, going everywhere and with everything. The use of black today conveys a message of elegant choice rather than judgement, punishment, or come-hither titillation. I only wear black in order to seem more slender than I am. A tiny visual lie. Surely not so dangerous a failing.

SHOCKING PINK

March 27, 2018June 5, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

I had been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in the bright pink paperback cover before my drawing class started at 7:30 in the morning. My instructor began screaming at me that the book had ruined his best friend’s marriage.

Somehow I knew, without knowing, that there had been some other reasons for the breakup. But I was young and small and female. I knew enough not to argue that day.

It was only my second term at the University of Washington, winter of 1971, when I arrived early for Art 111, the second in a studio drawing series required of all art majors. I had already been chewed out for humming and for missing a class due to snow (the busses did not run within two miles of my house and my ride went in late that day). I waited on a drawing bench, my large portfolio propped at the end and ready to go once class started. When my professor charged into the room, I stuck a bookmark in my book I had been reading and set it aside.

I was not quick enough.

He spotted the paperback book beside my hand and asked me, “Do you believe all that?” The pink cover was unmistakable.

“Yes, I do,” I said, well aware this was not the right answer.

“That book cost my best friend his marriage,” he said. He then reviewed details of his friend’s private life that I immediately forgot, his voice rising as he went along. It would not be the last time I would be yelled at by a man standing over me, insisting that men were being treated unfairly.

“One and a half million copies in print” my bright pink 1970 Dell paperback says on the cover. The dedication is to Friedan’s husband and children.

That book has been on my shelves ever since, and though the spine has sun-faded, the front cover is still shocking pink and that color was a statement in its day. Pink for girls—that pink inspired by an outsized diamond introduced on a perfume bottle in 1937 as “shocking pink” by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. We called that shocking color “hot pink” sometimes, bright, the vibrant pink of bougainvillea and drag racer Shirley Muldowney’s car, the color striped on my purple Cher-designed bell bottoms when I was fourteen, a color that could hurt your eyes if you stared too long. In some European languages such as German, the word pink is not pale red, the color called “rosa”, but this particular intense pink, this intense leaning-toward magenta shocking pink is the only “pink”.

Model Guinevere Van Seenus wears Schiaparelli’s shocking-pink dress (fall 1937) in the May issue of Vogue.

Shocking? Betty Friedan’s book, originally published in 1963, revealed what was happening to women in middle America after the Second World War, after Rosie the Riveter was sent home from factories to make room for returning veterans. As Americans moved into the suburbs, women went back to suburban and now isolated kitchens, married younger, had more babies, enjoyed the modern conveniences of automatic appliances, and yet they were not happy. The grocer, the baker, and even the candlestick maker were a car ride away and chances are, that wife didn’t have a car—only about 15% did by 1960 when my mother was responsible for two elementary-age children. Opportunities for women outside the home had actually deteriorated during the twentieth century. Schools for women still focused on the domestic arts, and women were warned that ambitions beyond their immediate family were a threat to peaceful society.

The cover of Friedan’s book was not just pink for girls, it was shocking pink, a color that warned it was starting something, a new look at women and their place in society, their need to find a place of meaning and purpose beyond marriage and parenting.

Friedan was among the first to utilize Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when she described how society was deliberately limiting women’s role to their sexuality. Gender alone as destiny.

Until the post-war period, pink was not even considered the color of little girls. In fact, earlier in the twentieth century, no one considered the gender of young children to be an issue at all. In England, if pink was deliberately chosen for a baby or young child, it was generally for a boy since red was the color of military uniforms and boys are pale versions of what they will become. Pink was not then a baby girl color; pale blue was not the color of little boys. Children were not thought to be sexual entities. Regardless of sexuality, the enforced split into girly pink and baby-boy blue does not seem to have been good for girls. (It hasn’t done the boys much good either.) Today entire toy departments are sometimes divided into the blue section with boy toys and the pink section confined to girls’ toys.

Nevertheless, the nearly two hundred year old American clothing manufacturer Brooks Brothers still offers thirty-three dress shirts in pink but only twenty-four in white and four in green, in addition to the most popular blue. Pink shirts are reputed to soften the impact of dark suits and sport coats in charcoal, navy, and black. The pale pink is tinted warm toward yellow or cool toward blue in order to complement skin tones.

Pink as a color name is nearly unique in that for many people it is a distinct color, not a tint or lighter version of red, but a color all on its own. Orange, green, purple, blue, and even yellow are described as light or dark, but add white to red, and it becomes another something not called light red, but pink.

The color illicits intense emotional responses. It is the color of the triangles labeling gay men during the Nazi era and today worn as a symbol of gay pride. It is currently one granddaughter’s favorite color. The older granddaughter likes blue, but before blue, she favored pink too. Before pink she loved yellow, and purple might be the approaching favorite. But for now, the younger granddaughter wears shocking pink whenever possible: pink pants, pinks dresses and nighties. She is not yet two.

In English, most people would have no hesitation calling anything from a dark navy to a light baby blue, blue. Even in the gem trade, all blue sapphires of any intensity, light or dark, are called blue. The same is not true for red sapphires.

My older granddaughter’s name is Ruby, the name of a gemstone that is always red. Rubies are corundum, the same gem as a blue sapphire, and both colors can sometimes be found in the same crystal, blue at one end, red at the other. Sapphires can be many colors other than blue, any color really—orange, yellow, green, violet. Only when sapphires are red are they called rubies, and when they are a pale red they are no longer rubies, they are pink sapphires in the United States. This is a relatively recent distinction. Where the gems are mined in Asia, all the reddish stones are rubies. The “riper” red ones most desirable, but the rich pink stones are favored in some nations. In some languages there are names for paler tints of blue, to distinguish them from saturations. There is even a more specific name for some sapphires. I would call the padparadscha sapphire a tropical fruit color, a rich orangey-red, but the name comes from the lotus flower. It is an especially desirable color.

Red and pink diamonds remain the rarest and command the highest prices for any gemstones. The highest price ever paid for a diamond was the vivid pink 5-carat stone sold for nearly eleven million dollars a few years ago, the inspiration for Schiaparelli’s shocking pink.

Pink today represents our tenderest emotions in English. The use of pink in clothing and decaration to denote specifically a girl child is a result of this recent prejudice. Wikipedia insists that the color name, pink, comes from a flower. The clove pinks (Dianthus caryophyllus) of my childhood were a low-growing plant with pale pink flowers standing above the foliage and having a distinctive and intense clove scent. It is worth noting that the name of the species, Dianthus, is derived from the words for “divine” and “love”. The stage name Pink refers to singer Alecia Beth Hart. Her professional name might be from her favorite color or a character in a movie (Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs), because she’s pink in private places—as we all are—or because she blushed a lot as a child. Does it matter? Pink can refer to sexuality and heat, but more often innocence.

There is safety in pink. Press a thumb on the gums of a person to observe how quickly the gum tissue returns to dark pink. A healthy vascular system replenishes color almost immediately. Pink is the color of health—though pink cheeks are never the pink found highlighting the cheeks of a porcelain doll, regardless of basic skin tone. Pink flushes the cheeks of every person, of any skin. It is also the color found in inflected eyes and the insides of shells, but blood stains wash out brown, not pink, and pink comes in many shades. What a confusion of color.

The cult classic, Pretty in Pink, concerns a girl trying hard to be something that others will admire. It is the color of newborns of many species regardless of adult fur, hair, feathers or skin color. Infancy to innocence in a single generation. By the 1950s, pale pink was the color most associated with fluffy sweaters and full skirts, with little girls and demur ladies with hands neatly folded in their laps.

By the second half of the last century, women grew tired of being always ladylike and supportive and silent. The watered-down tint that suited Maimie Eisenhauer no longer satisfied. According to a Life magazine blurb on the back cover of Friedan’s book: “Angry and thoroughly documented . . . it is going to provoke the daylights out of almost everyone.” Yes, pretty in pink, but also politically awake if we are told that passivity is the extent of our future.

It is never too late to become shocking with pink.

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