Dear Friends,

When our design editor Heyward Sims came up with the idea of making the cover of our first annual Women’s Issue pink, I was hesitant at first. I’m not much of a pink person. In fact, I haven’t worn the color much since I was pregnant and trying to will the universe to give me daughters – which, by the way, it did.

I was hesitant because, like all of us, I’ve been mercilessly exposed to the social construction that pink is for girls while blue is for boys, and through my day job as an adjunct instructor in sociology and gender studies at USC, I’ve learned all too well the ways in which the color-coding of gender can limit us as individuals. Just pay a visit to the toy department at a big box store, for example. Amidst the active and exciting toys of various colors that can build and go and create and destroy, there are always the Pepto Bismol pink aisles full of little pink brooms and stoves and sinks full of soon-to-be-dirty, little pink dishes – not to mention the little pink plastic dolls that can cry and crawl and pee and poop. Given the choice of playing at drudgery in pink or mastering the universe in blue, or black, or gunmetal gray, I’ll take the more muted colors anytime.

But then I remembered what I always tell my students – that we socially construct the world we live in the very same way earlier cultures decided that pink was for girls. Ironically, Americans dressed their girls in blue and their boys in pink until sometime around the First World War. Pink was thought to be better suited for boys because of its close relationship to the color red, a hue that symbolized bravery and valor. And girls were dressed in blue primarily because baby blue has historically been the color most associated with Christianity’s Virgin Mary. It’s been less than a century since the color-coding of genders reversed itself, yet most of us act as if baby girls are born preferring pink and all the freedoms and limitations socially constructed to go along with it.

So if it is our job to construct the world we live in, which I firmly believe it to be – I say, Let’s Reclaim Pink! Let’s make pink stand for the kind of hard work that our cover artist Susan Lenz puts in to her dedication to her art. Let’s have pink epitomize the passion and individuality we see in Centerfold Anastasia Chernoff’s personality and work; the sense of camaraderie exhibited by the five leading ladies of Columbia theatre that August Krickel writes about; the integrity and professionalism artist Bruce Nellsmith discovered in his story on six arts women in Columbia; and the mutual respect Kristine Hartvigsen found when she interviewed and wrote about visual artists Kirkland Smith, Bonnie Goldberg, and writer Cassie Premo Steele.

Pink can mean so much more than pretty and meek and mild. If pink exemplifies the more than three dozen women represented in this issue of Jasper, then pink means, strong, brave, goal-directed, compassionate, brilliant, innovative, whimsical, multi-talented, studious, creative, outrageous, devoted, rational, truth-seeking, and more. And pink means valiant – because there is nothing more courageous than taking a piece of oneself – one’s art – and presenting it to the world like these women, and all artists (male and female alike) do every day.

Pink means power – and here’s to the women in Jasper, and women and men everywhere who stand for art and the important role it plays in the culture we create. More power to us all!

Cheers,

Cindi