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signatories on waterfall monument depicting the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments
Women’s Rights National Historical
Park, Seneca Falls, New York
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Let us beware of this, of separating or looking upon ourselves to be
more holy, than in deed and in truth we are. . .Away with these whimsical,
narrow imaginations, and let the spirit of God which he hath given us, lead us
and guide us; and let us stand fast in that liberty wherewith Christ hath made
us free. . .This narrowness and strictness is entering in, that many cannot
tell what to do, or not to do. Poor Friends is mangled in their minds, that
they know not what to do; for one Friend says one way, and another, another.
But Christ Jesus saith, that we must take no thought what we shall eat, or what
we shall drink, or what we shall put on; but bids us consider the lilies how
they grow in more royalty than Solomon. But contrary to this, they say we must
look at no colours, nor make anything that is changeable colours as the hills
are, nor sell them nor wear them. But we must be all in one dress, and one
colour. This is a silly poor Gospel. It is more fit for us to be covered with
God's eternal spirit, and clothed with his eternal Light, which leads us and
guides us into righteousness and to live righteously and justly and holily in
this present evil world. —Margaret Fox, Epistle against Uniform Quaker
costume, 1700
Failure.... black and
blue is the new black. I was thinking more of failure than of fashion while
sitting in the wheelchair waiting for an x-ray after falling off a ladder in
the garden on October 28. The fact that I was wearing grungy yoga pants and the
shirt I had used the previous summer while painting our daughter’s room —not to
mention the reality that I was covered with dirt and scratches from rose bushes
and blackberry prickles— was the farthest from my mind. I was just glad that
the pruning clippers hadn’t hit me in the face when I went down. When I asked
the neighbor who took me to the emergency ward to retrieve my tablet computer
for me, I did not bother requesting a change of clothes. I didn’t know if I
could easily get out of what I was wearing and into something else —or at least
that was the story I told the people at the hospital.
In the end, I missed
as much work time due to the computer problem that arose the next morning as I
did from the accident. Even the computer was fixed in a day. But that still
raised the issue of how to look professional while walking on crutches. More to
the point, can one look both Quakerly and professional while hobbling around a
classroom on crutches?
Friends have always
had an awkward relationship to fashion. This has been true throughout our
history, for people of all ages, genders, and orientations. Margaret Fox, in
making a stand for personal privacy in dress against the nascent tide of the dull-colored
Quaker “uniform” worn among most members of our Religious Society between the
late seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, was swimming against
a powerful riptide. She might as well have been sporting a bikini in the age of
the bloomers —and even the bloomers were radical for their era. Likewise,
Elizabeth Fry’s husband Joseph loved the opera, another activity verboten among
Friends of his day; he kept a set of non-Quaker street clothes in order to
indulge his passion incognito. All in all, in the first two hundred years of
Quaker history, Friends anticipated the late twentieth century dictum “the personal is
political:” if not gender neutral, Quaker attire had equally severe
restrictions on both men and women. It was designed with the testimony of
equality in mind, although Friendly lore has it that there was substantial
inequality in the cut and quality of fabrics. Traditional Friends’ attire also
aimed at discouraging the use of clothing as a means of sexual attraction.
Finally, utilizing fashion as a tool in boycotts was popular among some sectors
of our Religious Society in the time of Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), who
advocated the refusal to consume all products made
with slave labor, whether sugar or fabric dye. (The dark
gray that became ubiquitous among Friends in this period was in fact
related slave labor and harsh chemicals used to produce the dye.)
To ratchet up the
level of discomfort even further (are we wearing girdles or tightly fitting
neckties yet, Friends?), in the present era Quaker testimonies on equality are
related not only to ideas about competition for romantic partners but anxieties
about winning and losing in sports; these anxieties are in turn related for
many people to what physical condition they are in and what they look like. I doubt
I am the only Friend to have received a “mercy pass” in high school physical
education (no exaggeration: we were permitted to take PE modules as often as we
wanted, and I passed badminton on three occasions without ever making
legitimate contact with the shuttlecock more than ten per cent of the time). Likewise,
I doubt that I am the only one to treat it as a badge of honor.
As a convinced Friend,
I seem to have gone in cycles when it comes to simplicity in dress. When I
became interested in Quakerism as a teenager, I emulated the peasant look of
the “back to the landers” ten or fifteen years my senior, without, however,
acquiring their hard-earned skills in gardening —a fact I was to rue as I fell
from the ladder that morning years later. I became so good at copying that
trend that I had my own bottle of lighter fluid to get bicycle chain grease out
of my long dresses. My parents refused to let me own torn or patched jeans but
otherwise despaired until I made an abrupt volte-face just before I sent in my
applications for my undergraduate years. My mother claimed later on, “I tried
to get you to take a healthy interest in your attire, but nothing changed until
you met those rich bitches at (that university).”
I was in a protracted
downward cycle in regard to fashion, though, in the morning of the ladder
episode. The glory days of ending last in a 10-k. foot race were sufficiently
far in the past that I had decided that going to the gym was yet another
activity at which I could not succeed. Admittedly, I had learned that wearing
contact lenses allowed me to whack a squash ball a modest percentage of the
time, but that raised my “mercy pass” from the days of doing battle with the
high school shuttlecock to maybe a C- if I was generous with myself. There were
other illnesses and setbacks. The only area in which I had absolutely refused
to capitulate was at the hairdresser, where I laid down the rule of no gray,
Quaker or otherwise. For my pains I earned at least 123 comments —I hereby
confess to having stopped reading at that number— on the Facebook page of the
Association of Bad Friends (an ostensibly humorous place where some Quakers
openly indulge in being good Friends) when I posted from the hairdresser about
restoring my original hair color.
And then, there I was,
on the ground, faced with the choice of signing an armistice with the local ER
physician, physiotherapist, gym owner, and athletic trainer or else risk never
walking properly again. I also had to look presentable at work in all of this
—and truth be told, the situation once I opened the doors of the closet in the
master bedroom was not what I would have liked, using any metric at my
disposal. I signed the armistice.
On the other hand, at
least I could take comfort in one fashion trend: perhaps as a response to the
Scottish referendum, I found plaids in style. I had collected a few among my
scarves over the years, and maybe I could acquire some others if they weren’t
too expensive. The tartan representing my maternal grandmother’s family name
might also make a good choice of scarf if I could order one in, and in the
interim, I could buy a red shirt and echo the days I had almost forgotten, when
I had the habit of wearing a red Stuart kilt to a Friends Meeting in England, earning
a partially tongue-and-cheek eldering from the clerk about the colour.
Whatever was going to
happen, I was sick of black. Gray looked good only to balance something more vivid.
On the other hand, some of those trendy leggings I kept eyeing at the mall,
when paired with the shorter skirts long ago tucked away at the back of the
closet, might keep my clothes from getting tangled up in the crutches. (I look
dismal in slacks, in case the reader is wondering why they are not part of my
workday attire, and I have only just gotten to the point of being able to put
on hose.) I would manage the problem of shoes. If the only footwear that could
handle my swollen foot with any degree of panache was more than I had ever paid
for shoes or boots, I would just have to “deal with it.”
I am tired of wearing black.
I don’t care whether The Law of Black Clothing was approved by the Friends
World Committee on Consultation or Anna Wintour of Vogue. And, if the august members of the Association of Bad Friends
want to come and get me, here I am: I have once again engaged in my monthly
ritual at the hairdresser, and my stylist (who happens not to be a Quaker) has
not yet used William Penn’s sword to cut my hair or stir the dye.
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| Note the Quaker attire
on some of the figures, and read here on the Quaker influence of the early women’s rights movement |
