Dress reform
Glosswitch writes about school uniforms and stereotype threat and the trousers of power.
There’s a group in the UK, Trousers for All, that campaigns to allow girls to wear trousers as part of their school uniform.
As is the case with so many seemingly trivial points of differentiation between men and women, what matters is not the thing in itself, but what it signifies. If the right to wear trousers had no broader meaning, women would not have had to fight for it, but fight for it they have. Trousers are associated with male privilege and dominance (hence the question “who wears the trousers?”). Female politicians were not permitted to wear them on the US Senate floor until 1993. It was 2013 before an (ultimately rarely used) bylaw requiring women in Paris to ask permission from city authorities before “dressing as men” was finally revoked. Women in Malawi were not permitted to wear trousers at all between 1965 and 1994 and still face threats and attacks for doing so.
And Sudan. Women in Sudan are arrested and flogged for wearing trousers.
This is not about style or gender as play, but power, and it remains the case even if we are discussing something as seemingly minor and mundane as school uniform.
I actually don’t think it is minor. I was born too soon to have been allowed to wear trousers to school, and I badly wanted to. I wore them whenever I could, and school made a huge chunk of time when I couldn’t. I always found skirts dreadfully inhibiting, and I still do. Women in skirts still don’t move as freely and carelessly as people in trousers do. Skirts, like high heels, are a way of tamping down women’s activity and freedom.
Glossy cites another good reason though.
Numerous studies have shown that stereotype threat – a situation in which people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes pertaining to their social group – matters a great deal when considering gender and education. Simply being reminded that one is the social construct “boy” or “girl”, as opposed to just “a pupil”, can affect an individual’s perception of his or her own ability and response to particular subject areas (eg “girls are no good at maths”, “boys don’t read books” etc). A school should be the last place where gendered codes which have already been broken down elsewhere are suddenly reintroduced. For a girl to have to wear a skirt in the classroom when she can wear trousers elsewhere sends a very particular message to her. She is not simply a learner; she is a girl-learner, confined by unspoken rules which limit her individual potential and constrain her social interactions.
She’s in that group that’s not allowed to run around freely.
But then what about the other direction? What about letting boys wear skirts? Since I hate skirts my reaction tends to be “why would anyone want to?” But that doesn’t dig deep enough.
What really bothers me, though, is the one-sidedness of the approach. Why just trousers? Why not skirts, too? Why is it that, yet again, whatever the boys are doing is seen as the default thing, to which the girls should necessarily aspire? Why not campaign for no differentiation whatsoever in school uniform requirements?
I think we all know the answer to this. We don’t want to see boys in skirts or dresses, demeaning themselves, being “girly”. Indeed, were we to see a boy in a dress, we’d probably assume he wasn’t a boy at all. The more we broaden our understanding of what it means to be a woman or a girl, the more rigid and entrenched our understanding of boyhood and manhood becomes (even in David Walliams’ The Boy In The Dress, the main character’s continued inclusion in the category “male” seems to be justified by the fact that, dress or no dress, he’s still brilliant at football. Thank God for that!).
I’m all for trousers for all, but let’s have skirts and dresses for all, too. This seems to me far more revolutionary, given that the “no skirts for boys” rule applies far beyond the school gates, and the only reason for its existence seems to be to assuage male anxiety about being a “proper” man. As a fully paid-up member of Team Skirt, I say let’s deal with this nonsense once and for all.
Throw caution to the wind! Relish the freedom of having no superfluous fabric between your thighs! Come on, men. You have nothing to lose but your Corby trouser presses.
Dress your lower half however you want to! Choose the two tubes with the pelvic connector, or choose the bag with a waistband – and soar with the eagles!
When I started high school in the late 70’s our school uniform was very restrictive for both boys and girls. There were even change over dates for summer/winter uniforms and tough shit if the weather either side of those dates didn’t suit. Two years later they markedly relaxed the rules. Both boys and girls were able to choose between a variety of short or long sleeved shirts/blouses or polo shirts. Girls could wear trousers and you could wear whichever uniform suited the day. Quite a large number of girls chose to wear trousers and boys style shirts rather than blouses, although many still opted for blouses with trousers or the conventional girls uniform.
It felt like a lot of freedom, even though we were restricted still. Looking at the school website now the uniform still allows girls trousers, although they are now a specific ‘girls’ trouser. The range of colour is also now more restricted, but that applies regardless of gender. A photo on the website of a group of pupils shows only one girl wearing the trousers, then again it was summer.
There is no rational reason to forbid the wearing of skirts or trousers. I defy anyone to walk up to a Scotsman wearing a kilt and call him a sissy.
Funny you should mention that.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/male-servers-at-union-local-613-don-miniskirts-and-high-heels
Oh, duh. I’ve always wondered why we girls were allowed to wear shorts in the summer, but never allowed to wear trousers. (Trousers at school, for me, began in 8th grade; jeans at school began in 9th.)
It’s the power thing. We can’t have GIRLS in TROUSERS. On terribly horribly cold days we were made to wear leggings, which were horrible heavy tweed trousers worn UNDER your skirt, and you had to stand at your locker and take them off before class.
It was all so WEIRD. Now I get it. It’s not propriety, or custom or to look “nice”, it’s power. I feel rather stupid. Why did I never get that?
Gary – that’s great!
There was a school in our town (Catholic school, of course) where the theatre teacher was having trouble casting the last role in the play. It was a male role, and there were no more males to play the role. She almost had to cancel the play because the school doesn’t allow “cross-dressing”. How horrible if teenage girls are allowed to dress like teenage boys. They might begin to think they are equal, right? They might begin to think they could be bishops – cardinals – the pope. Or they might have sex and take birth control, which would be even worse.
The Catholic church is aware I presume that in the middle ages (you know, the Churches home time) the norm was for all actors to be male so as to avoid the scandal of a woman acting on stage. Which meant, of course, that males dressed and performed as females…
My catholic grade school required the girl to wear a a skirt of jumper, boys dark blue pants with a light blue shirt. This was mid-eighties — not exactly the dark ages, but we’re talking about the catholic church here. Pants worn under the skirt in the winter months was okay, but I’m not exactly one to compromise so I joined the scouts whose uniform was allowed as an alternate. Inexplicably, they could wear pants. Around the same time an elderly priest called my mom concerned about my gender presentation, which is ludicrous since there wasn’t anything particularly subversive about the way I dressed save for the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money so i probably had a lot of hand-me-downs from older cousins or stuff salvaged from the Goodwill. (Apparently I didn’t dress “girl” enough outside of class, which was none of his business, and my mom promptly told him so.)
You might want to review that part of your sentence, and then you’ll realize the problem? ;-)
[Snort] fair comment Iknklast. :-)
In the late 1960’s in Ottawa my mother confronted the high school principal to make sure my older sisters could wear pants to school. The rule against women wearing pants was being enforced even on the coldest days.
I started out HS in Canada, and there was no school uniform, then I did 4th form in UK, in the mid-70s. The school uniform did not permit trousers for girls, but I wore them anyhow (in the prescribed colour). The headmistress said “you’re not in uniform”. I said “yes I am, it’s in the book” and that’s the last that was ever said bout it. I hope I started a tend… I also suspect the headmistress was sympathetic.
I went to a private Protestant school in the 90s and early 00s when I was a kid. We didn’t have a school uniform but the dress code was fairly strict. I remember being reprimanded a few times because my hair was getting too long even though I specifically grew it long in order to donate it. The girls were all pressured to dress very modestly. It was all a bunch of garbage in retrospect but I wasn’t very skeptical of authority when I was an adolescent.
I would love to be able to wear skirts and dresses, but I really don’t want to be assaulted. I hate being pushed into a box that I don’t feel I belong in, but the consequences of stepping out of that box is often violence. I frequently got bullied and assaulted as a kid and teen for not being manly enough and I would rather never face that again. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel at all like a man and would really prefer to never be thought of as one.
At my second son’s wedding in November, virtually everyone in the immediate family was in a skirt or dress. Despite what the Scots in my family say (“If it were a skirt, I’d be wearing something underneath it”), there is no way that a kilt is outside the category of skirts.
I was part of a school council at my secondary school, formed in 1970, while I was still in 1st form, which (after the age of majority was reduced to 18) first voted to allow all adult women at the school to wear trousers (even female members of staff had been restricted to skirts and dresses until then), and when the world didn’t come to an end with the 18-year-olds of the Upper Sixth in pants, eventually the option was extended to the rest of the school. But only, at that time, as part of the winter uniform. Of course, when the school became less white and Christian, it became even more absurd to restrict the uniform for anyone who didn’t have a religious exemption from having bare legs, and these days plain black trousers are a part of the school uniform.
Skirts/dresses are not inherently inhibiting, it depends on the cut and whether or not you (or your parents, teachers, bosses…) care about being ladylike and “decent”. I climbed trees as a kid wearing mini dresses – so what if people could see my underwear? When my 8 year old niece gets told off for turning cartwheels in a dress, it’s not the dress that’s inhibiting.
amrie:
That’s exactly what my wife said yesterday (I asked her this question after reading the present thread). She went so far as to add that she feels pity for me in the summer!
Skirts are not inhibiting? Er…did you disagree with the article about gender assumptions regarding learning taking hold on girls wearing skirts? There’s more than one kind of inhibition, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with whether boys see your underpants when you’re on the monkey bars.
Though having said that, there was the boss at a waitressing job who moved his desk under the stairs so he could look up our company-required skirts when we went up and down, and even told us that’s what he was doing, so I guess there were times when the inhibition had to do with a man who wanted to see my underwear. And there was the friend who lost a job when a manager reached under her skirt and grabbed her crotch and she whammed his head with the stack of box files she was carrying–he couldn’t have done that if she’d been wearing trousers. And the law librarian I know who was told that she must wear skirts and then, when she wore opaque tights, was told that wasn’t permitted, that she had to wear sheet pantyhose; she said privately to me that she hadn’t realized when she took the job that one of the requirements was that the lawyers (all of them male) got to look at her legs. And I could go on.
My point there is there is that when you and your peer group build up enough personal experience of that kind, then yes, wearing a skirt becomes inhibiting in a new way, even if it hadn’t been before.
I very much took the point about the inhibition of wearing skirts in school that comes from the skirts being a marker of second-class status, because I felt it myself growing up. Being made to wear skirts when the privileged class of people in the school got to wear trousers definitely can enforce a sense of being in the inferior class, and that itself is inhibiting. If you’re marked as being in the inferior class (at least in my experience) you have to make more of an effort to do simple things — from speaking in class to making a political opinion heard to all kinds of things. Wearing a skirt might as well have been, in my school, wearing a sign saying “I am insignificant”. If one race in our culture was prohibited from wearing something otherwise unloaded with cultural meaning (though what clothing is not?), it would quickly become associated with the division between the races and reinforce the distinction and the power disparity. If the white male pupils were required to black shoes and the black male pupils were prohibited from wearing black shoes, nonblack shoes become a marker that says “you are not of the privileged class”. Same thing with skirts. Nothing against skirts for those who like them–it’s the prohibition that’s the problem, and which can engender inhibition.
I also thought Matthew made his point about wanting to wear skirts very eloquently. It’s time the world chilled out over *all* of this. When I was young I thought we’d get there in a decade or two. Naïve…
I like dresses because fibromyalgia, asthma and sensory issues mean that some days, having a waistband on is very uncomfortable– with the right cut, it’s like wearing an oversized tank top or t-shirt all day and no one being able to say boo about it. I think men should have the same option. I can also understand the inhibitions, though.
It took time for me to get past expecting myself to be lady-like in a dress. As for guys trying to get away with bullcrap, of course the problem is their predatory behavior, not the dress, be we nevertheless feel obligated to try to discourage them.
mef:
I don’t disagree at all – what you’re talking about is not an inherent quality of skirts, it’s about gender assumptions as you say. So the solution is not to stop wearing skirts, but to make it OK for anyone to wear them, or not wear them, regardless of gender. Shoes with very high heels inhibit freedom of movement even without such assumptions.
I have a hard time not tying high heels and pocketless clothes with the underclass status of women. I know some women like things that way, but it just feels so exemplary of the societal constructs that try to hold women down.
I am Claire one of the founding members of Trousers for All (TfA ) and I have read the dress reform feature and the comments with interest.
Glosswitch and others have suggested that the TfA campaign is one sided and that we should be campaigning for skirts for all as well, however our group has a specific remit and that is to supports campaigns that are requesting schools to change their uniform policy so that girls are able to wear trousers as part of their school uniform. Many schools in the UK do allow this; most of these give girls a choice of trousers or skirts, and a few insist that all pupils, girls and boys wear trousers. Unfortunately some schools still insist that girls wear skirts. These include state schools, private schools, faith schools, primary schools, secondary schools.
We at TfA are in favour of choice for girls. We have no problem if the same choice is extended to boys, but that is not our focus and no one has come to us asking us for help with a campaign to allow boys to wear skirts. Having said that, recently Brighton College, a private school in the south of England, decided to change its uniform policy to give girls the option of wearing trousers and boys the option of wearing skirts. This change they said, was to address the needs of pupils who had transgender issues ( however all pupils could decide what they would wear, not just transgender pupils). Who knows what the future might hold.
Some critics have said that giving boys an option of wearing a skirt is not a true choice because the boys would just look and feel silly – well there is some truth in that because men and women are different shapes. Women’s trousers are cut differently from men’s, so it would not be unreasonable to expect men’s skirts to be cut differently from women’s. If a range of men’s skirts and dresses (call them what you will) were available in general department stores then perhaps the style would catch on. For example the majority of women did not start to wear trousers until they were available to buy in fashionable styles in a number of stores and at a reasonable price.
There are no rational reasons for refusing to allow girls to wear trousers – only prejudice and gender stereotyping. The power bit comes into play when those who have power to determine school uniform do so in a way that it reflects stereotypical views of women and despite what Amrie says, skirts for girls suggests a demeanor not required of boys. In many schools it is men who hold the power but many head teachers are female and they also insist that girls wear skirts. Women can reinforce gender stereotypes just as much as men.