This Strikes Me as Odd

As we know, yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I noticed that Google recognized the anniversary:


A screenshot of Google's homepage yesterday, with an acknowledgement of the 19th Amendment ("90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment") beside a pink-ribbon check mark beneath the search box.


What struck me about this page is not only that Google elected not to create a celebratory Google Doodle (which they are known for doing in honor of everything from Dilbert to Pi Day to Vivaldi's birthday), but that the graphic they did choose was a pink ribbon. True, it is in a check-mark shape instead of looped around like a breast-cancer-awareness ribbon, but it is a pink ribbon nonetheless.

I have seen the lack of a 19th Amendment Google Doodle described as "slightly odd" elsewhere. The choice of the pink ribbon in combination with no doodle could suggest, if not a lack of interest, a lack of ideas about how to represent women graphically. There has been a Google Doodle celebrating International Women's Day that used a "female symbol" in place of one of the "o"s. (I do not know where this doodle ran; I just found it in a gallery.) And this year Google Russia marked International Women's day with pink and pretty flowers. So those ideas are used up. Are "circle-and-cross" "pink flowers", "pink ribbon", and "hour-glass-shaped red dress" all the visual rhetoric we've got to represent women?

One discussion board to which I won't link suggested that Google should have made the "oo"s into boobs and the "l" into an ironing board. Perhaps it isn't just that we have a sparse visual rhetoric for women, but that we have a sparse visual rhetoric for women that is not demeaning.

Sure, it's a little thing, and I don't have any answers here; I just thought y'all might like to a place to discuss this small thing, and the larger concept of the visual rhetoric(s) we use to represent femininity and women.