Feminisms by Lucy Delap

Author:Lucy Delap [Delap, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141985992
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

A tweed hat, a long green cloth coat, which I purchased for 8s. 6d., a woollen scarf and woollen gloves, a white silk neck-kerchief, a pair of pince-nez spectacles, a purse, a net-bag to contain some of my papers.22

In this outfit, she was given a sentence of hard labour and, without medical inspection, was force-fed eight times. The heart condition was genuine, and Lytton suffered a heart attack from which she never fully recovered. The power of clothes to shore up class inequities in Edwardian Britain was clearly demonstrated and understood by suffragists. But the women’s suffrage movement remained in many ways unwilling to challenge the conventionalities of dress. Later generations were much more iconoclastic, though issues of class continued to pervade the question of what feminists should wear.

In the late twentieth century, as women’s liberation and lesbian groups developed characteristic looks, social class gave clothes cultures very different meanings to different women. Australian feminist Lekkie Hopkins recalled wearing blue and khaki overalls, which for her had strong connotations of physical autonomy: ‘We had commandeered the working man’s garb, indicating that our bodies were our own, to be used for our own pleasures, not for sale nor for plunder.’23 But this may not have been so different from the earlier insensitive dressing up by privileged suffragists. The different class backgrounds of women made the class politics of the ‘feminist look’ painful for some. One activist in the North American feminist bookstore movement, Nett Hart, noted, ‘Not all have the economic options to say “no” when faced with coercive gendered dress codes.’ Hart argued that feminist efforts to look different in ‘denims and flannels’ could mean simply that ‘middle- and upper-class women dressed the way that working and poor women have always dressed.’24 For Sue Katz, the experiments with collective ownership of clothing in her Boston collective proved problematic. Coming from an impoverished background, Katz noted that working-class and black women might have a very different relationship to clothes that made collective ownership difficult:

Many working-class white and black kids had been strictly brought up to be clean and neat and ironed – in lieu of being expensive and trendy and cosseted. Some of us had precious pieces of clothing we had saved for or splurged to buy and didn’t really want to share …

I never wanted to share clothes. As a child growing up, virtually all my clothes were hand-me-downs … People who had nice new stuff all their childhoods surely didn’t have the same relationship to clothes. They were cavalier about stuff knowing mommy and daddy would buy them more. The piles in the middle of the room seemed like a fun grab-bag to them.25

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