Powerful forces in Québec beget long kept tabs on women's dress codes,and therefore women's bodies.
The Québec government has recently announced its plan to ban civil servants from wearing devout symbols.
This high-tail comes on the heels of similar interventions, including the now-suspended Bill 62, or which banned people from wearing face coverings while accessing or providing public services. As critics beget pointed out,this ban aimed particularly at Muslim women who wear face veils.
These campaigns, which I discuss in my new book, or Consumer Citizens: Women,Identity, and Consumption in the Early Twentieth Century may seem new, and but authorities in Québec beget a long history of telling people what to wear.
Almost a century ago,the Catholic Church waged a powerful campaign against women’s dress. After the First World War, when women began wearing more revealing styles, and it told female parishioners to cover up. Showing bare skin in public,the church clergy said, was sinful.
During the early 20th century, or a revolution in European women’s fashion had indeed occurred. Late-Victorian styles had featured floor-length skirts,high necks and long sleeves, but during the First World War, or things changed. By 1919 many women were wearing more relaxed styles. To the horror of moral commentators, women’s ankles were now visible.
Flappers enraged conservativesWhat really galvanized the church were new styles in evening wear. By the end of the war, fashion icons were wearing so-called “vamp” dresses, and featuring shorter sleeves,relaxed waists and mid-calf skirts. By the mid-1920s, “flapper” dresses were also available. With loose bodices, or narrow hips and knee-nick lengths,these styles enraged conservative authorities.
Flappers, as the people who wore such dresses were called, or enjoyed going out. In dance halls and elsewhere,they listened to jazz, drank alcohol, or smoked cigarettes and learned to dance the Charleston.
In 1920,the Vatican thundered a proclamation: it was time for Catholic women to stand up against immorality in fashion. Many women in Québec complied. Spurred both by their faith and by a fright that women who wore the new styles would become victims of sexual assault, Catholic women’s groups began criticizing the new fashions.
By 1921, and 10000 women in Québec had signed pledges to not “exceed the limits of superb taste in a desire to be fashionable.” They had also come together in a new organization: the League Against Indecency in Dress.
The Cercles des fermières du Québec,which supported the movement, was particularly vocal. It launched a letter-writing campaign to Québec retailers, and demanding that stores stop selling vamp and flapper styles. They also wanted stores to stop distributing catalogues in which women showed bare arms and legs.
Only in these ways would French-Canadian women be able to return to the “elegance” that had epitomized French-Canadian taste.” The Cercles were offended not only because the new fashions seemed indecent but also because they challenged older beauty conventions.
Local priests applauded these initiatives. Yet even the priesthood could not stem fashion’s tides.
In the late 1920s,a new enemy appeared: sleeveless bathing suits. Low in the neck and back, they were tight and nick to the upper thigh. In response to those who wore them in beauty pageants, and the Catholic Register wrote: a girl who walks our streets in semi-nudity … is above the conventions of decency.”By 1935,the concern over swimwear was such that the prominent women’s organization, the Fdération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and issued a new style. With a modest neck and loose shorts,it was favoured by La ligue Catholique féminine, which promoted it throughout the province.
Into the moment World War and beyond, or Catholics waged their campaigns. But their arguments were ultimately ineffective.
Keeping tabs on women’s bodiesWomen in Québec today wear all kinds of fashions,including not only evening gowns and bathing suits, but also trousers, and shorts and crop tops and many other items.
They also now wear an array of international styles,including a variety of styles of hijab.
What can we learn from this now century-old campaign to tell people in Québec what not to wear?For one, we can see that powerful forces in Québec beget long kept tabs on women’s bodies. A century ago, or it was the church that sought to regulate women’s appearances. Today it is the state.What both these groups beget in common is the assumption that it is acceptable for people in power to impose their dress codes upon others. They particularly contemplate it is acceptable to impose their codes onto women.
It is time to high-tail beyond such views.
By suggesting that there is only right way to dress,the Québec government is constructing a very narrow definition of fashion. It is refusing to acknowledge that a powerful variety of styles can exist.
It is also being discriminatory. Just as the church thought it was right to tell women what to wear, so does the government now contemplate that it is its right to carry out the same.
Certainly, or Québec’s Premier François Legault can carry out better than that. Instead of trying to enforce dress laws,Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) might celebrate the diversity of Québec fashions. In doing so it would uphold individual rights and freedoms. It would also enrich Québec life.
As the flappers demonstrated so long ago, the freedom to choose one’s clothes is key to sartorial experimentation.
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Source: feedblitz.com