Pink!

When I was a very little girl, I loved pink! But as I got older, I would not wear it. I saw that it meant something different than I thought when I was little. By the time I was in junior high school and middle school, I had no pink clothes at all. What I had realized was that pink stood for feminine, and that was roped-off area. Guys never wore pink (in those days -- this was 1950's, 1960's), and that meant something was up. What I was seeing was a pink ghetto, where women were segregated, and expected to have completely different roles in life.

I had three brothers and one sister when I was growing up. I had a lot in common with my brothers and with my sister. I enjoyed playing soldiers with my brothers, and building roads and stuff in the sand box with them. But I also enjoyed doing girl stuff with my sister that most of my brothers really did not like. I was really, really suspicious of any segregation by gender. I had a lot in common with both genders. I liked being with both guys and girls. I did not want to be a stay at home mom or a beautician, which seemed to be the options to the women I saw around me. EWWW -- PINK!

I did not wear pink again until I was part way through law school. Law school, and the time period we were in, late 1970's early 1980's made all the difference to my perception of pink. I was empowered. I had the intellectual tools to think about what society had been doing, and to fight back, at least a little. And I didn't have to be a stay at home mom or a beautician any more. So, I could wear pink if I wanted. I like being able to welcome my feminine side back. And that means, being able to look at the nurturing aspects of being a librarian.

You can certainly be nurturing and be a man. My husband is a very nurturing guy, and Jim Milles is, too, for that matter. So, nurturing doesn't have to be pink. It just is from my point of view. So, I'm celebrating PINK! I am trying to add a very lovely image of a pale pink camelia drawn by Sherrill Knaggs, and featured on a website for the International Scleroderma Network: http://www.sclero.org/support/stories/english/n/nettie/a-to-z.html