My friend paying me this compliment led to a discussion about our fashion choices as women in philosophy. My friend and I, both women, both feminist philosophers, both now tenured professors, admit to purposefully neglecting personal style while in grad school and during the prove-yourself-pre-tenure phases of our careers. Lots of black. Plain clothes. Nothing too flashy or feminine. But I recall being pretty damn funky and fashion free as an undergraduate and I miss those days (for many reasons, of course). Tenure is freeing me up a bit, and thankfully not only in terms of dress code! But how limited are fashion choices in the academy? And how gendered are those limits?
Tim Gunn bemoans the academy’s “frump and circumstance” and seems to think fashion is an issue for virtually all academics regardless of gender. Some women in philosophy admit to dressing towards a stereotypically masculine ideal in order to be taken seriously as philosophers (i.e., as opposed to choosing such style as a free expression of their fashion sense).This recent post at Inside Higher Ed (thanks, b!) suggests that professional women shouldn’t dress down to the casual norm. When we do, we do so at our own peril. There is also the wonderful Hypatia article by Karen Hanson on philosophy’s contempt for fashion in which she maintains that philosophers’ disdain for fashion comes from fears and insecurities about change, the transient, the ephemeral. She thinks feminist philosophy can help traditional philosophy overcome these fears and embrace the human-all-too-human pleasures of fashion.
Do you think the pressure on women in philosophy (or the academy more generally) to shun fashion is real or imagined? Are the dress codes gendered or are all academics expected to be more concerned with high ideas than high fashion? Is fashion frivolous and trivial, “beneath” the proper concern of academics? In the words of Tim Gunn, how should philosophers “make it work”?
Ridiculous. Before getting tenure I was under constant pressure to dress up. And it was explicit. A senior colleague for example called me into his office to advise me and among other things told me to emulate a woman in another department who had gotten a comment on a course evaluation saying “she takes off her watch in an arousing manner.” He explained that she had an especially graceful way of putting her watch on the desk at the beginning of classes and suggested that I look to her as a model for comporting myself and improving my wardrobe.
I am amazed by the assumption that attending to fashion is something that most or many women would ceteris paribus want, and would do if there weren’t social pressure (in academia) not to do it. I can imagine that some women might have that preference but it seems a crazy, masochistic one. Dressing up, dealing with clothes, is time-consuming, stressful and most of all physically uncomfortable. When I’m dressed up I’m so uptight that I can’t teach properly. I dress up the first day of classes to intimidate students, and when I get home I’m exhausted, just from wearing the clothes.
Again, these claims seem completely ass-backward and ridiculous. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to want to deal with clothes. There is no pressure whatsover to shun fashion and still plenty of old-fashioned pressure to groom and dress and take care of one’s appearance.
Now that I’m tenured I do the minimum I can get away with. Jeans every day. That’s it.
The author of the original post, and the first commenter, clearly have very different sartorial inclinations, and it seems that both have been pressured (either explicitly or implicitly) to change the way that they dress and look in order to fit different standards. From what I know, the specific standard of dress to which women in philosophy are held varies from place to place. I’ve found from talking to fellow graduate students that women (and perhaps men as well) are expected to dress more formally in european departments than in american ones, and again dress is generally more formal in departments in large cities than in other departments. This may just reflect the standards of dress in those areas. Depending on where you are, there may also be different standards for men and women (women must dress down compared to men in order to be taken more seriously, or vice versa). To say that there is one standard, throughout all of philosophy, to which women are pressured to conform is kind of silly.
However, it seems clear that whatever the “accepted” standard is, women tend to feel more obligated to conform to it, and this isn’t an accident. Women do seem to run into more non-verbal and verbal evaluations of their wardrobe than men do, and are more likely to have people explicitly tell them that they either approve of their appearance, or disapprove of it. This, in addition to gendered standards for what counts as appropriate dress in the first place, seems to me to be the real problem.
On a personal note, where I am I seem to have two choices: dress nicely and be taken a bit more seriously, but also attract some unwanted attention, or dress less nicely, avoid unwanted attention, but be taken much less seriously, especially by my students.
About regional issues: in some places (on the US Eastern seaboard) there’s a class issue: dark, tailored clothes are markers of upper middle class status; bright colors, big earings, etc. are prima facie “trashy.” I think part of what’s going on is pressure to maintain the status of the institution: this is a place for the elite, preparing to get elite jobs where people dress conservatively.
Also, this thing about women feeling pressured not to dress too femininely, and now a New Feminism asserting their right to do so has the same feel as those articles about opt-out mommies. All these years, the story goes, old, frumpy, puritanical feminists have pressed women to get out in the labor force and behave like men. Now the New Feminism supports women’s right to opt out, breast feed for 3 years, engage in “attachment parenting” and earth motherism.
Yeah, I see the point: women shouldnt be forced to behave like guys. And I agree: there should be more flexibility for both men and women. But different people have different interests and preferences. And what I look to feminism for is the option of living exactly like a traditional male. Period. If I were taller I’d have had a sex change operation.
Actually you have already missed out on a few years of 50s-style fashion which is more female friendly than the fashion of the 1980s and 1990s, and it does not really go out of style. It is also easy to find comfortable clothes, This current fashion season has loose fitting clothes and for the well-paid there are quirky shoes like Prada oxfords with platforms soles which means that academics can tower over students and male faculty while basically wearing flat shoes. My most admired dresses are made of fleece, jersey or denim and none of my clothes are made to be tight-fitting.
Harriet Baber:
Would you give me permission to put together an anthology of your comments on this blog?
We could call it the Harriet Baber Reader. The Best of Baber doesn’t sound serious enough.
We’ll split the profits, 50-50.
HB– I don’t think the original poster is *assuming* that women can have fun with fashion. She’s reporting her own experience. And you’re reporting yours. I don’t think reporting one’s own experience needs to or should involve deriding the experience of others as implausible or ridiculous.
I don’t think anecdotal evidence is worth much here, but for whatever it is worth, I’ve never felt pressure from anyone in philosophy to dress differently than I do. Which is pretty noticeable/bright/somewhat unusually. I’ve found this discussion somewhat not true to my experience observing women who are successful in philosophy either–I can easily name many professional philosophers who are women and have pretty strong personal style. (That is, I don’t know whether they have been pressured not to do so. All I find not true is that women in philosophy in fact have very toned-down style.) I think there is a lot of discussion of the appearance of women in my department, but almost all of it is by women talking to women, and I’ve never once heard it be anything but positive. (However: I personally don’t enjoy this. I don’t like feeling like just because I dress in a somewhat unusual/very feminine way I then am part of some crowd of women who spend time making small talk about clothes instead of talking about philosophy. It feels really gendered to me in a way that kind of grosses me out. So I can see how, if someone wanted to avoid having women in philosophy pay them compliments on their appearance, she might want to look as neutral and non-noticeable as possible. And I can see why people want to avoid this. Sometimes it drives me nuts. But it doesn’t feel like the kind of pressure we are meant to be discussing here–instead it feels like something different. The only times it has even really bothered me is when it has come from male faculty, and none of those times has it felt sexualized or anything–but it just can sometimes make an alarm bell go off in my mind: really? This is what this person has to make small talk about with me? Doesn’t he think I am capable of more? Why was he just talking to that other grad student about philosophy, and then when he moved on to me he said something about my appearance?) I don’t think fashion is frivolous and trivial, but I think there is a real risk with talking about it in professional settings a lot because it tends to be such a gendered thing, and runs the risk of making people feel like they are undervalued in other respects (I hate getting compliments on my clothing from professional philosophers for just this reason. Compliment me on philosophy if you like something I did/said/wrote! I think it’s kind of unprofessional (for both women and men) to discuss peoples’ appearances so much. And for what another anecdote is worth, I was just talking yesterday with another woman in my department who said that she wears boring clothes intentionally not because she feels any sort of pressure to, but because she just doesn’t like people noting things about her appearance, even if they are exclusively positive and non-sexualized. This seems at the least like a different sort of pressure, though, than what you all are discussing.
Bring back academical dress on a daily basis. Who’s with me?
Harriet Baber: I’ve reread the post carefully, and I’m afraid I’m unable to detect any sign of the “assumption that attending to fashion is something that most or many women would ceteris paribus want.” The choice to write the post does suggest that the author thinks there might be a significant number of women, perhaps a minority, for whom pressure to dress in a nondescript or masculine fashion might be an issue (though she herself raises the possibility that the pressure is imagined). And it seems to me that your n of 1 provides scant grounds for denying this. Indeed, you say that you yourself experienced pressure to conform your dress to an uncomfortable standard (though the standard is not the one the OP describes, perhaps due to a generational difference).
You say, “[W]hat I look to feminism for is the option of living exactly like a traditional male.” That’s interesting. What many of us look to feminism for is the option of being respected professionally, and receiving full credit for the high quality of our work, *without* having to live exactly like a traditional male. If you’re not interested in this issue, then perhaps you should let us discuss it amongst ourselves rather than savaging someone who raises it, as though it couldn’t possibly be of any interest to anyone since it isn’t of interest to you.
I definitely think there is pressure to dress in a comparatively nondescript fashion in philosophy circles, but I’m not sure what its source is. I had an aha moment about this at a conference a couple of years ago, when a keynote speaker who had been invited from another discipline took the podium with long straight hair, makeup, a pencil skirt and high heels. She also spoke in a feminine register. As she was giving her talk, which was excellent, I was struck by the fact that I had never before, at a philosophy conference, seen a woman present herself in such a feminine style. I found it refreshing. That was when I realized that I had felt implicit pressure to tone down, and to some extent masculinize, my self-presentation. This didn’t mean not dressing up, but it meant that dressing up would involve darkly colored, non-attention-grabbing garments, like charcoal pants suits.
Since then I’ve taken to expressing my personal style more through dress, both because I enjoy it and because I hope that some of my students, especially women, might have the same aha experience of realizing that being a philosopher doesn’t have to involve being nondescript or caring only about the mind to the exclusion of the body, as Karen Hanson discusses in the excellent article the OP mentions. This doesn’t, of course, mean that I am expressing disapproval of others who don’t care much about style of dress or prefer to wear jeans. That approach is amply modeled by others in the discipline, so I try to model an approach that is seen less often.
Julie makes great observations in her comment above about how women feel disproportionately obligated to conform to whatever standard is in place, because it is disproportionately enforced on them. The keynote speaker I described earlier was treated with great condescension (entirely unwarranted by the content of her talk) by two male members of the audience during the question period, and I can’t help wondering if her feminine self-presentation, which was atypical in that context, helped to motivate their behavior. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure in a particular case. But it’s not hard to see how one might internalize a standard if one repeatedly saw women with more nondescript and less feminine styles of dress being treated with greater respect, even if no one ever mentioned the issue.
Of course it could have been her voice…
I was thinking about this during my travels to the Central APA, because it was clear to me, in looking at all my fellow humans in airports, that there’s a difference between style and conformity, between “a fashion sense” and being attentive to fashion for other-pleasing and silly reasons. I’m very happy with my pre- and post- philosophy life of rejecting most of what passes for “conform or be shamed.” I like having a critical bone in my body and interests in authenticity, and self-awareness enough to ask myself if I *want* to wear boots in summer, five-inch-heels, or whatever other quirky thing comes along. But I also like being me, rather than blending into the wallpaper or the philosophers around me.
I think the post elicits a variety of reactions because we’re trying to think and talk about many different things here. Are we talking about any self-presentation or dress considered feminine?, which overlaps with but is not the same thing as currently fashionable? Does philosophy encourage masculine appearance — I’d argue predominantly a middle-class geek version of masculinity which men in my home neighborhood wouldn’t embrace as their ideal of masculinity at all — or is it an appearance-denigrating cultural norm, which again overlaps with a variety of masculine presentation but isn’t the same by any stretch? A lot of the women in philosophy I know are more like the nuns I grew up around than they are like the men in my profession. Some who are drawn to philosophy, I think, wish to be seen as a certain kind of substance-over-style sort.
Lots to think about.
I’m not sure if this is just a twist on the “clothing can be distracting” charge, but sometimes fashion choices in the academy are constrained because they (literally) interfere with the message. Consider the sartorial laments at my university, which, because of the visual nature of our teaching language (American Sign Language), means that one must wear solid color clothing with sufficient contrast to one’s skin tone. Trust me — watching someone sign against a backdrop of stripes during a three hour seminar is incredibly fatiguing. Even pinstripes.
Accessories cannot be “visually distracting” — that is, they shouldn’t move when you sign and shouldn’t chop up the visual space. Clothing design should not restrict one’s movement or produce visual distractions (e.g. fluttering fabric, ponchos that obscure arm movement, polka dots, bold patterns, full skirts that swing). Buttons, snaps, and plackets can be especially problematic if one is a vivacious signer with flying fingers, so it is best to avoid these.
On work days when I’m not teaching, I take risks with my earrings, which have been known to sway and shimmer, and if I’m really feeling daring, I add a flimsy scarf that moves when I sign. But they’re easily removed, should the need arise.
Given that so much of my work wardrobe satisfies signing-for-the-public constraints and the necessity of this in *my* workplace, I haven’t given much thought to my attire in the context of the mainstream academy. As a result, I don’t own much professional attire that isn’t visual-language friendly, and these requirements just happen to coincide with nondescript. The possibility of expanding my wardrobe choices at philosophy conferences (where I’m not signing to the public) is exciting. Pucci prints! Bias-cut stripes! Brooches! And maybe even my vintage 1960s Alfred Shaheen Hawaiian dresses…
Just a quick general reminder to respect others’ accounts of their own experiences, and not to be dismissive if they are different from one’s own.
Teresa, I’m so looking forward to seeing your vintage 1960s Alfred Shaheen Hawaiian dresses – bring ‘em on!!
I recently spoke to a young blond woman philosopher on the job market who had been advised to avoid dresses, dye her hair brown and wear fake glasses to look older and more serious. Is this actually necessary? Who knows? But the widespread belief that it is certainly creates pressure. And it’s also worth noting the pressures may vary depending on what you look like: if you need to work to avoid the “pretty dumb blonde” stereotype you’ll feel a very different kind of pressure than if you need to work to avoid the “man-hating feminist stereotype”.
I *love* dressing up. It’s super fun for me. However, I’m careful when I do it in the academy. I find that students may, if you go overboard, remember more about your dress than what you said. The same goes for academics. I once had a meeting with a very famous psychologist who interrupted my first question to compliment my outfit…which I assume was due to the fact that he took the dressing up to show that my primary interest was appearance, not serious thought (it flustered me quite a bit too, so it may also have been a subtle power trick). Philosophers have done similar things to me too.
Now I think that those who are already accepted as serious philosophers have more leeway to dress up or not as they want. Those of us who are lesser known do need to be more careful, and that goes for dressing down too, and it probably goes for men as well, although maybe more on the extreme dressing down side of things (or super quirky dressing up). After all, I think it is easier for David Chalmers to dress as he wants to than an unknown male grad student.
I love clothes & such & I find them so interesting on so many levels, I think I’ll just have to write a philosophy paper on it. :-)
I’ve experienced a bit of everything that’s been described here, and gone through many sartorial phases since I started philosophy in college (dress baggy, dress masculine, etc), all in the interests of diverting attention from my body and towards my mind. Eventually I realized that I was trying to conform to (what I perceived as) someone else’s ideas. I then started dressing as I wished (which is always just another type of conforming, whether we realize it or not). If people at a conference are distracted by it, well, they’ll just have to do some mental adjustment or risk absorbing the many fascinating things I have to say… I think Sherri is right that we bring certain expectations to these talks that are skewed in the masculine direction (Hi Sherri! Miss you! I know exactly the speaker you’re talking about.)
Some men feel the pressure or desire to conform to what they perceive as an intellectual look. I remember male friends in philosophy who either longed for or already proudly sported the corduroy jacket with elbow patches… Or a black turtleneck… And let’s not forget the brave ones with a pipe. I see various looks in my own department that seem clearly to express how these people want to be seen, male & female. I love the variety, but even more the fact that in academia, as opposed to the corporate world, it is permitted. And that we’ve reached the point when we can have a discussion such as this one.
There are no women in the Prof of Hobo quiz (http://individual.utoronto.ca/somody/quiz.html) – it is indeed difficult to imagine a female version. I know no female academics who could be mistaken for hobos. It’s easier for male academics to ignore dress code and dress however they like or feel most comfortable.
While it’s true that there are no women in the ‘prof or hobo’ quiz, I suspect that has more to do with the fact that the stereotypical ‘hobo’ is a male.
Whether men can ignore dress codes is an interesting question. There are some settings (interviews, on-campus visits, ‘dressier’ or ‘fancier’ conferences) where they probably can’t. In more everyday situations (teaching at a university with no official dress code, presenting at most conferences, etc.), I agree that they probably do have more leeway to ignore dress codes.
I have definitely felt pressure as a grad student to fit a certain look: casual enough to seem like I’m spending nearly all of my time focusing on philosophy instead of clothes, but not so casual that I look like I’m unaware of social norms about fashion. This pressure came in part from wanting to avoid standing out from those around me and in part from remarks made to myself and to (or about) other women when an outfit deviated from the norm. For a long time, my response to this pressure boiled down to developing a nondescript style: lots of neutral-colored sweaters and dark denim, no skirts or dresses or heels.
However, when a new pair of borderline-frumpy winter boots were met with a leer and a suspicious comment from a male colleague, I gave up. I realized that being nondescript made any deviation even more magnified, and I decided that it’d be better for my mental health and maybe for other women in my department if I tried to make some variety more visible. I wear things that are business-casual but that are more feminine (and more comfortable… a knee-length skirt with tights and boots beats jeans any day), and now no one that I encounter on a regular basis bats an eye when I do so. I don’t know if I’ve made the situation easier for anyone else yet, but I’m happier.
From a male perspective with zero insight into the troubles of dress among academics, I might argue that toning down personal expression via dress is a necessary thing, if only to allow those you’d like to listen to you to focus on your words, as opposed to your clothes.
IRT Matt Drabek: When I was on the job market a few years ago, my dissertation advisor suggested I dress less “fabulously” than I had planned at the APA because my apparent regard for fashion would cause me to be regarded as less serious, less intellectual and, in general less of a “good fit for our department” by interviewers. I am male. Her (my advisor’s) worry was my display of stereotypically feminine qualities would be penalized (though largely unconsciously).
I disregarded her advice my first year on the job market and stood out like a sore thumb in the sea of male job candidates wearing khaki pants, a navy blazer and a red tie. I don’t mean to suggest that any of this is evidence that men are oppressed by masculine fashion expectations; I definitely do not think that. In fact, I think my experience shows that there is a wider range of acceptable ways of presenting yourself, fashion-wise, if you are (perceived to be) male than if you are (perceived to be) female. It seems like a pretty obvious case of a double-bind for women to me.
Philosophical point: there are really 2 issues that are being conflated in this discussion:
(1) For Dressers: is there pressure to conform to a dress code that prevents women who enjoy fashion from satisfying their preferences, from sartorial self-expression?
(2) For Slobs: is there pressure to take care of one’s appearance and grooming that impacts women more than men?
I am a slob and, I believe, a female candidate for the hobo-or-philosopher quiz. To me dressing isn’t a form of self-expression but something along the lines of doing income taxes or going to the dentist. Note the difference between (1) and (2): I don’t object that the academic dress code for women, such as it is, stifles self-expression or because I worry that if I’m too into fashion, or too “feminine,” I won’t be taken seriously professionally. I object because I can’t stand taking any care of my appearance at all.
Now please realize, this isn’t a matter of principle. I can imagine being interested in clothes, and finding fashion enjoyable, a matter of self-expression. And I’m not suggesting that there’s any problem with this: it’s a taste. I just can’t stand taking care of my body: dressing, grooming–even brushing my teeth is something that takes willpower for me. I hate shopping. I am a slob, and on vacation I don’t even shower very often.
I just wish people would recognize this rather than assuming that I’m trying to “make a statement” by my slovenliness, or that I’m putting down people who don’t mind taking care of their bodies and enjoy clothes.
Historical aside: Von Neumann’s dissertation began with Hilbert asking for the name of his tailor. Not that I’m insinuating that the distress of being forced into outdated fashion styles is due to the inherently stifling nature of the philosophical field, which is perhaps not relevant to such a hip and classy discipline as mathematics! It would be unfair to say that such an attitude reflects the general carelessness and lack of attention to detail that characterizes philosophy! I would in no way condone the assertion that it is the inevitable product of sloppy minds!
Excuse me, I have to go get my red tuxedo from the dry cleaners. Don’t want to miss Introduction to Non-Standard Analysis!
I’ve spent probably an inordinate amount of time over the years thinking about this–inordinate in proportion to how much I care about such things on reflection/that I’d avow, and inordinate in terms of reasonably expected practical benefits of thinking about it. If one includes time since beginning graduate school, it’s been twenty years. My only stable considered view has become this: there are sexist norms in play here (and class, and social status, and heterosexist), and the biggest one is;” You can’t win. That’s how this game is set up. So, do what you want.”
Way longer version: Like others who have posted, I’ve been through phases. I didn’t have money growing up, and the extent to which that was true (all the way through college, which I worked full time to put myself through and took out outrageous loans) is that when I got to graduate school, spending *any* money on clothes was out of the question. I wore what I had gradually acquired through second-hand stores/hand-me-downs until it was threadbare. And what I had when I began grad school was all influenced by futile efforts to fit into my shifting college-mind, full of class-anxiety perceptions of what a “real Wellesley woman” ought to look like.
Stage one philosopher: The first time I got money to spend on new clothes was my last two years of grad school when I was on what was then a big fellowship (for me). I went full-on Allie Mcbeal. In my head, that’s what ‘professional’ women looked like, & the fact that I’m little in the way that Calista Flockheart is gave it a kind of personal appeal. Class anxieties, anxieties about feeling unattractive because little rather than voluptuous were definitely among the motivating factors (though I wouldn’t have been able to recognize that at the time if someone had told me so). Gradually, I got the message that this was not an ‘approved’ look for women academics, and women philosophers in particular. Four incidents I especially remember. (i) Lauren Berlant (high theory English department type) gives me the visual ‘up and down’, and queries– with particular reference to my mini-skirt, “So, are you making a political point with that outfit?” It’s funny now. It cut at the time. I thought I was dressing professionally; felt instantly again the country-rube trying to pass among the rich folks. (2) Berlant again, now standing at the door with famous feminist after a gathering for gender studies folks, and all the English department types are complimenting famous feminist on the manner in which the texture of famous feminist’s coat resembles the hair-texture of part of female anatomy. Various other such references are made to other outfits. Berlant smirks at me. Message received (even if it, as is likely, was not the one delivered)– ‘your clothes aren’t even unusual in a way that makes them interesting’. (3) First year on the job market, famous woman philosopher who I knew, know, and continue to respect a great deal (about a generation older than I) comes up to me and says, directly and simply, “Your skirt is too short, Katy”. (4) End of my first year teaching at Notre Dame (my first job), student evaluation questionaires include the following remark, “Professor Abramson should dress more professionally. She should wear jackets to class.”
The combination of these incidents at first led to a kind of reaction-formation. Screw them, I thought, and continued to dress as I had been. I remember saying clearly and with anger, for instance, about the student remark, “I’ll start wearing jackets to class when Fred Freddoso starts shaving his legs and wearing stockings and heels to class every day.” But over time, it did all sink in to my young mind, and I gradually moved into…
Stage two: the black pants suit. I thought, even during the years I did this, as I do now, that I look silly in these. Maybe if I had gobs of money, lived in a place where there were proper tailors, and had a different mental life (and, I suspect, were 6-8 inches taller) I’d feel sytlin’ and professional in these. I never did. I looked and felt like I’d raided my boyfriend/older brother’s wardrobe. And I don’t doubt that I carried myself in a way that reflected that that’s how I felt. Still, I carried on for a while. Then I needed to go on the market again (for several years)–only this time, I was going on the market as an out queer woman, partnered to another female academic, looking to coordinate jobs. I cannot even count the number of times someone expressed the view, in one way or another, that my manner of dress and the fact that I was partnered with a woman were somehow related. Sometimes it was subtle, sometimes not. The message was unmistakable, “oh, of course, woman partnered to other woman wears pants suits.” I had been trying to mark myself as “proper philosopher”. Instead, the received message was “queer”. I didn’t mind being marked the latter way, but I was frustrated at not finding a way to mark myself as “philosopher” and full of anxieties about the fact that I hadn’t managed to do that, and still (not entirely consciously) believed there was something I could do to mark my dress as “philosopher”. So, I entered…
Stage three: the long skirt/flowing scarf and (usually) boots. Living in the midwest during these years made this a relatively common style at home among female academics. But I wasn’t comfortable. I felt buried under mounds of clothes; I felt like I was trying to look like I felt comfortable in prairie-land when I didn’t; I felt like I was trying to ‘pass’ as someone who would go to church on Sundays with her husband and 2.5 kids, and then come home and cook them a nice dinner, do a politely small amount of grading/individual work to demonstrate my individuality, & return to her primary role as wife & support staff. All *entirely in my own head*, but I felt something like ‘Stepford wife meets Laura Ingalls’. And every time I left town for a conference or talk, I felt out of place–the rube from the country, and I so admired/envied the way some other women philosophers were dressing that resented the fact that I was dressing to ‘fit in’ at home. Internal conflict and confusion reigned, and over time produced…
Stage four: internal conflict now exhibited in closet. I had “at home” and “away” clothes, and the two never mixed. Away: black. jackets. skirts (some mini, some ‘approved knee length’). Groovy, but not too groovy, necklaces. Big necklaces. Heels, but politely shortish heels. Home: midwest Sunday school teacher/member of the PTA-meets-patchouli-laden-coffee house. Boots, but not too groovy. Then divorce, and significant professional issues involving heterosexism and sexism. None of that would I wish on my worst enemies. (well, maybe my worst enemies…) But big traumas such as that, imhe, both tend to put things in perspective, and provide liberating opportunities. At least these did for me. I realized that for all of my efforts to fit in, I was still getting sartorial comments on my student evaluations, random sexist comments on my outfits at conferences, and remarks ‘back home’ to the effect that I looked like I was from somewhere else.
Stage five: So, screw it. Only now, not ‘screw it’ in the sense of a reaction-formation; just ‘screw it’ in the sense of ‘screw these stupid impossible standards that cannot be satisfied.” I went back to the mini-skirts I’d always liked (and which fit me, literally & metaphorically). I like being taller, and have non-approved height heels that let me do that. I have boots, but they are a little too city & a little too groovy for lands-end Bloomington, and not quite sheik enough for Manhattan. There’s too much black in my wardrobe for this town; not enough to pass as native in Manhattan. My necklaces aren’t sweet and delicate enough to be PTA/small town approved, but they’re too small and not groovy enough to be city-approved. And so on. I still sometimes get snide sartorial remarks on my seqs, and sometimes from professional philosophers, and on occasion, the remarks get to me. But I like the way I dress, so *this is* what a philosopher looks like.
And that’s an incredibly long story and post. I finally decided to take the time to write it all out here, because I think sometimes we give our female graduate students bullet points on this that amount to ‘this is what worked for me’, and I suspect for some of them it might be helpful to really know that we who have come to a point of being fine with our choices here struggled too, and what some of those struggles looked like.
I’m still gaping at ‘[Famousish philosochick] comes up to me and says, directly and simply, “Your skirt is too short, Katy”’. Because, wth?? Christ. Did you reply, “Your mouth is too big?” Because damn. I mean, I say stupid stuff all the time, but it bears pointing out.
Katy, thanks for the whole comment, which resonates with me although our experiences do not track (know what I mean?). Some of this, of course, is our own unfolding and dynamic changes, in our own tastes too. I got sick of lack of color in my wardrobe. When I marvel at my inward and socially situated changes, I’m reminded of Anne Fausto-Sterling arguing that we are never stable bodies. It’s not just my circumstances and life, it’s me. I change with respect to what I want and what’s me.
Dang thing is that I like plain clothes, with lots of black (and navy, and neutral colors). Occasionally, for costume, I like dressing up. And my problem is that it’s hard to find anything affordable that’s classic enough to suit me (and that was a pun).
Hi Kate– thanks; I do know what you mean. (At least, I think I do!) As for the interaction with famous philosopher– I wish I’d had it together to say something like that. I didn’t. I think what I said was, “well, I like it”. I hope I’m getting less self-conscious about doing that calling people out than I was.
Katy, wonderfully helpful comment– and I had no idea you used to be at Notre Dame!
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