The Lost Art of Dress by Przybyszewski Linda

Author:Przybyszewski, Linda [Przybyszewski, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465080472
Publisher: Basic Books

5

Revolt

The Fall of the Dress Doctors

MAGAZINE WRITER HAZEL RAWSON CADES explained to her Girl Scout readers in 1927 that girls needed to choose the right handkerchief when dressing for the occasion: large squares for sports, and dainty ones for evening wear. Yes, they had rules for handkerchiefs. Dressing well meant more than choosing a dress; it required coming up with the right handkerchief, hat, shoes, hose, gloves, purse, jewelry, umbrella, underwear, plus a coat or cape. No wonder young people rebelled.1

Of course, the Dress Doctors had seen youthful revolts before. As Alpha Latzke and her Kansas State colleague noted in 1935, “youth is the age when mankind tends to rebel against all customs, clothing customs included.” The Dress Doctors from the Cleveland schools wrote a year later that they sometimes had to reason with “young people” who thought that their parents and teachers just made up “manners and conventions” in order to keep them quiet or to create snobby class distinctions. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The 1960s were different because the enormous wave of Baby Boomers coincided with several movements against injustice, which threw into doubt all customs and distinctions among people. Manners and conventions looked more and more like oppression in disguise.2

The hardships of the Great Depression and World War II had kept down birthrates. Afterward, when prosperity returned, American women produced an unprecedented crop of children: 75 million of them born between 1946 and 1964, which marked a doubling of the birthrate. The country had never seen such a crowd of young people, and their clamor was deafening. As one newspaperman put it in 1966, millions of Baby Boomers had come to believe that being young was an accomplishment in itself.3

And this bumper crop of young people coincided with the rise of several mass movements that encouraged the questioning of all authority. Objections to the second-class status of black Americans had long simmered under the surface. World War II brought the hypocrisies of the United States into sharp focus for African Americans—it was a war waged against racist Nazis by American fighting men who were segregated by race. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) focused its legal strategy against segregation in education first. After a series of victories targeting colleges, the NAACP persuaded the United States Supreme Court to rule segregation in the public schools unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. Local campaigns, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1957, and the national effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exposed ugly, racist opposition among white Americans.

Alongside racist violence were the more casual acts of discrimination that permeated society, including dress textbooks and fashion magazines peopled entirely by white girls and women. Excluding black women became increasingly indefensible.

By challenging long-held beliefs about the distinct and inferior nature of black Americans, the civil rights movement also caused many to question the assumption that women were distinctly domestic creatures. The President’s Commission on the Status of Women, created by John F.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.