“Strive as you will to elevate woman, nevertheless the disabilities and degradation of her dress, together with that large group of false views of the uses of her being and of her relations to man, symbolized and perpetuated by her dress, will make your striving vain.”– Gerritt Smith c. 1860
To paraphrase Mr. Smith’s somewhat tortured prose, you can work on Woman’s emancipation all you like but until you free her from the constraints of fashion, it’s all for nothing.
Gerritt Smith was an abolitionist/philanthropist who took up the unlikely cause of women’s fashion reform as a part of his fight for freedom from slavery. He lived in upstate New York and traveled widely throughout the South before and during the Civil War, putting his money where his beliefs were. However, his battle for women’s fashion reform must have been a particularly mystifying cause for a lot of 19th Century men and women. Oh yes, the very women that healthier, more comfortable dressing was meant to ‘elevate’ were often the hardest to convince. That said a lot about women’s confidence, denial and self-image in the 1800 s, and it still does today. It also spoke volumes about the men who sought to ‘debilitate and degrade’ with ‘false views of the uses of her being’. And that, too, may not have changed as much as one might expect.
This diatribe hasn’t leapt into my blog out of the blue. It’s here because I broke my foot recently falling into a crater in the NYC pavement. I wasn’t pushed, hadn’t been drinking or using a controlled substance, and was more than familiar with the terrain underneath my feet. I was, however, wearing elevated, thin heeled shoes, a fashion known as ‘heels’ to most women today, as opposed to ‘flats’. That small curtsey of mine to women’s current shoe styles was undoubtedly enough to throw me forward into the concrete pit in front of Hunter College on Lexington Avenue. Don’t worry, Hunter, I’m not into law suits, thanks to a career-long exposure to litigators in my former real estate life. And especially because, as Gerritt Smith would say, I had a ‘disability’ in the form of my fashion statement shoes.
My friends’ reactions to the culpability of my ‘heels’ have been fascinating. Their advice ranges from “throw them all away forever”, to, “keep them all, but never wear them without the support of another person at your elbow”. I considered dumping just the guilty pair from the other night, but instantly saw the foolishness in that. The others in my closet might come to attack me like angry wasps in revenge for their associate’s demise. One might expect to hear from the middle ground next, but there really is none. Keeping those heels as ‘display only’ items in my shoe collection simply isn’t feasible, any more than foregoing my independence for the bondage of the full-time support of others is.