“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.
This seemingly self-indulgent examination of my shoes isn’t as inane as it appears. A recent chapter from my current novel, Certain Liberties, begins with a dive into the women’s fashion reform movement in the 1800 s by the aforementioned Gerritt Smith. The research I did into the topic was far more extensive than I’d originally planned, opening up a can of voracious worms all making the point that both women and men have vested interests in perpetuating myths about the relationships of the opposite sexes to each other and themselves.
I remember frustration rising like heartburn as I read of women fighting against each other to preserve the image of inhuman proportions supported by whale-bone corsets and long skirts sweeping rats and bugs into city houses along with the ladies who wore them. Admittedly, I spent more time on this than my novel required for its narrative authenticity, because I was shocked and enlightened by descriptions of women’s ribcages permanently altered in the vicelike grip of corsets, and also by the weight these relatively small women had to carry around on their shoulders (from 30 up to 60 pounds at all times). But my biggest surprise came in the form of the scathing condemnation in the Press of the times from women threatened by change. My novel’s heroine, Emily Alden, is no strident delegate blinded by the adrenalin of battle, but she knows an unhealthy practice when she sees one and calls a rule unfair when it is.
So where are today’s feminine leaders who’ll take up the cause to remove the Christian Louboutin promoters of ‘disabilities and degradation’? And is this strictly female foolishness and vanity, a mirror of false self-image, or do some of the men (and women) in our lives today have a vested interest in suggesting Woman still needs to appear to play a subservient role ‘symbolized and perpetuated by her dress’? I understand the interests of the shoe designers and the commercial empires dependent on their success. But what of the spirit we’ve all, men and women alike, exhibited over the past century in bringing the sexes and humanity to a greater equality, where each personal freedom benefits everyone else in the end?
Where was my head when I put those heels on the other night, bowing to a reflection of myself from over a half century ago? I briefly considered putting on flats, and then thought the women I was meeting would prefer that I come in heels, somehow assuring I belonged to the club of femininity. As the orthopedic surgeon said while reviewing my options for an active tomorrow, which I thank heaven I can look forward to, “When it comes to the shoes you wear in the future, you can be fashionably at risk or you can be healthy, strong and secure. Your choice.” My female protagonist in Certain Liberties chose to ‘elevate woman’ with the latter alternative. I’ll follow her lead in the future as I elevate my broken foot in the present.