Femininity (12 page)

History is enlivened by a number of women of ambition and talent who chose to masquerade
in men’s clothes, or who
wore some essential part of the forbidden costume in order to work in comfort. Whether
it was to take up arms and fight for her country, like Joan of Arc, to lead escaped
slaves through Southern swamps to freedom, like Harriet Tubman, or to carouse at night
in raffish cafes for research and adventure, like George Sand, a bonnet and skirt
would have imposed a ridiculous bar. They are a mixed bunch, these purposeful cross-dressers,
these illustrious women in serious drag, having little in common besides a profound
need for self-realization and unstoppable courage. The list includes Rosa Bonheur,
who received official permission from the Paris police to dress in men’s clothes when
she went to sketch horses at the slaughterhouse, Calamity Jane, who drove a stagecoach
in the American West, and the eminent landscape designer Gertrude Jekyl, who wore
army boots and a workman’s apron to supervise the planting on England’s great estates.

No woman was more stubborn in her refusal to bow to the conventions of feminine dress
than Joan of Arc, and no woman in history paid a higher price. In the glorious days
of her triumph the Maid had exchanged her peasant’s red skirt for a page’s costume
of gray and black; her pride was a suit of shining white armor for leading her troops
in battle. After her capture Joan was beseeched by her jailors to put on a gown, but
she would not comply. Her Voices had not told her that her mission was over, and besides,
it was safer to dress as a soldier in a prison administered by men. Joan’s inquisitors
pondered obsessively on her masculine attire. Receiving the sacrament while dressed
like a man was one of the crimes with which she was charged. A woman’s gown was brought
to her cell after she broke down and made her sworn confession. Joan put it on, then
took it off. God’s soldier could not bear the humiliation. Her relapse into masculine
clothing sealed her fate, for this was proof that her mind had not submitted. Joan
was taken to the stake and burned in a skirt and bodice, an additional triumph for
her captors.

Spinsters, lesbians, bisexuals, women of ambiguous, androgynous sexual persuasion?
Decadent showoffs and publicity hounds? Artists and actresses playing with roles?
The Divine Sarah Bernhardt posed in a jacket, foulard and trousers when
she announced her intention to give up the stage to devote her life to sculpture.
What did it signify when the rebellious actress and writer Fanny Kemble, opposed to
“tight stays, tight garters, tight shoes, tight waistbands, tight armholes and tight
bodices,” put on a vest and breeches to spend the afternoon with a woman friend? When
Colette grinned rakishly for the camera in a stylish man’s suit, a cigarette burning
between her fingers, was this not the time between husbands when she was conducting
her outrageous affair with the very mannish Missy? We know from her diary that Vita
Sackville-West disguised herself as a boy, running and jumping and vaulting over gates
“in the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters,” when she was madly in love
with the seductive Violet.

When celebrated achievement or dazzling beauty can be added to the visual effect,
the world smiles more kindly on women who dress in men’s clothes. Even within Natalie
Barney’s lesbian circle in Paris between the wars, the stylish grace of actress Renee
Vivien and Romaine Brooks, the artist, when they dressed in high drag, set them apart
from friends who were less physically blessed and less notably accomplished—Una, Lady
Troubridge, in her monocle and cravat, and Radclyffe Hall with her ill-fitting suits
and labored writing. Deborah Sampson Gannett, who dressed as a boy and soldiered in
the American Revolution, would be a more acceptable role model if she had saved a
platoon or captured a city. Dame Ethel Smyth, the British composer and champion of
suffrage, might have worn her swallowtale coat to better effect if her figure were
less stocky, and her music more tuneful. And to bring matters up to date, the “Annie
Hall look” that Diane Keaton created for the movie of the same name proved not so
easy to pull off when women less winsome than Keaton affected a slouch hat, vest and
baggy pants.

This much can be said: Some women have worn men’s clothes to accomplish their work.
Some women have worn men’s clothes to indicate their temporary or permanent sexual
attraction to other women. Some women have worn men’s clothes to experience the power
and freedom of being a man. Some women have worn men’s clothes because they hated
their female bodies. Some women have worn men’s clothes because they looked so
adorable in them. Some women have worn men’s clothes because they sought an alternative
to the confining clothes they were expected to wear, and expected to delight in, as
women.
Orlando,
Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, may be read not as a witty story of a woman who undergoes
a change of sex, but as a metaphorical essay about a woman who undergoes a change
of clothes (the book is dedicated to V. Sackville-West).
*

In the 1930s and ’40s Hollywood accomplished what the earnest movements for dress
reform and the individualistic rebels had never been able to manage—an acceptable
image (one that men found sexy) of a glamorous, vulnerable, patently heterosexual,
sophisticated lady in slacks. As the glamorous ballroom dancer Irene Castle had feminized
and popularized short hair in the 1920s, the frail figure, plucked eyebrows, heavy
mascara, bright-red lipstick, platinum hair and high-heeled shoes of Marlene Dietrich
feminized and made palatable the threatening image of a woman in a man-tailored jacket
and trousers. Dietrich on screen, and Garbo, Hepburn and Bankhead offscreen, were
photographed repeatedly in pants, as was America’s first androgynous sex symbol, the
high-flying aviator Amelia Earhart. Ah, Amelia. Wearing a brown leather flight jacket
and grinning shyly from the cockpit of her airplane, she appears to soar high in androgynous
freedom. Of course Earhart would be an appealing heroine with her easy good looks
and mysterious death. Not like the dour, unstylish Susan B. Anthony, or the brilliant
George Eliot with her lace-trimmed blouse and her cockscrew curls preposterously framing
her homely, strong face.

But it is Dietrich’s image and not Earhart’s or Keaton’s that permits the fashionable
young woman of today to wear her fly-front trousers. As long as she gussies them up
with high heels,
painted fingernails, “done” hair, plenty of jewelry and makeup, her femininity will
not be challenged. Compensatory femininity extracts its due in the form of fancy embellishments
to modify the suspect masculine model. This is known in the trade as “the softening
effect”—an interesting phrase, since there is nothing soft about spiked heels and
long red fingernails, except that they reduce functionalism, hint at masochism and
alter the natural, normal motion of the sophisticated lady in pants. “Hetero-sexualizing
effect” would be a more accurate description, and what a sad commentary it makes on
the tenuous relationship between the sexes that a woman must resort to a string of
intricate deceptions in order to prove her heterosexual good will.

Winter and summer, touches of nudity are another proof of feminine expression. It
is chic to bare the skin, to play the tease, however unwittingly, between the concealed
and the exposed. A reluctance to show a thigh or reveal a midriff is construed as
prudish timidity, old-fashioned dullness and a lack of confidence, or else it is circumstantial
evidence of flaw: thick legs, flabby skin, a hideous, deforming scar. I am sympathetic
to the argument that a woman should be free to wear what she wants without moral judgment
or accusations of inviting assault (no study has ever shown that rapists seek out
those who are provocatively dressed), yet I am not unmindful that the argument usually
comes from very young women in the happy phase of exploring fashion with a pioneer
spirit, and who look ahead to new frontiers. Those who resent gratuitous nudity are
usually older, at an age where the flesh is less firm and the attitude less liberal.
Because older women are placed automatically on the losing side of the competition
to look sexually appealing, they are in possession of knowledge that escapes the young
and the physically blessed. Exposure of flesh is not a mere matter of style, insouciance
and modernity; it is a contest by which women are judged.

Was it inevitable that the movement for dress reform should have passed so blithely
from the battle against restrictive clothing to a glamorous rivalry over how much
nudity could be revealed? Erotic attire has often served as a smoke screen to deflect
female consciousness from a lasting understanding of the nature of
oppression. The décolleté ball gowns of the rich and the peekaboo costumes of whores
historically shocked the industrious, Godfearing poor with their prideful displays
of pampered flesh. Mrs. Grundy may have been a stereotype of conservative bourgeois
values, but she was created by men of the bourgeoisie who wished to escape their own
background. Her opposite number, the “liberated woman,” is assumed to be a
femme fatale
in scanty dress. It is not accidental that as soon as women were freed from tight
corsets and heavy, hampering clothes they were heartily encouraged to express the
feminine difference in terms of exposure, for exposure was always the issue as the
moralists saw it. Decency was thought to reside in the length of the hemline, or more
coyly in the lace hanky stuffed into the cleavage. So if Suzanne Lenglen made tennis
headlines in 1919 when she appeared on court in a mid-calf dress and long stockings,
and if Alice Marble shocked Wimbledon in 1933 by playing barelegged in shorts under
an unbuttoned tunic, there is logic of a sort in the hullaballoo in 1948 over the
famous lace panties of Gorgeous Gussie Moran. Gorgeous Gussie, I suspect, was only
trying to feminize a practical, and consequently sexless, costume—but no matter. The
right to move freely has always been a dangerously unfeminine issue; the right to
be titillating has greater appeal.

Veils are a worldwide symbol of mysterious feminine sexuality, presumably because
they conceal some frank aspect of a woman’s appearance. As popular wisdom has it,
the erotic life of the veil resides in the imagined beauty of the hidden face, yet
a person with any sense of history must know that even when the slot for the eyes
is richly embroidered, the veil is a shroud of silence, anonymity and restriction
that is used to keep women secluded from the active world of men. Efforts in Moslem
countries to throw off the veil meet with a frightening amount of resistance from
men who howl about the destruction of their traditional values. In Afghanistan the
proposed unveiling of women by a Marxist government was one threatening factor that
inspired the revolt of fundamentalist rebels. The return of women to the chador was
one of many disturbing aspects of Islamic nationalism promoted by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
regime in Iran. “Taking the veil” remains the customary expression in Christianity
to describe a woman’s act of renouncing the temporal world and a sexual life to enter
a convent. Whatever their religion, women in veils are a mummified caste whose sexuality
is hidden so it cannot threaten the social order of men.

By sentimental tradition, the act of unveiling the bride at the close of the wedding
ceremony announces the lawful permission to deflower the virgin within the sanctified
union of marriage. As the bride wears a veil of white, the widow once shrouded herself
in veils of black to signify, among other things, the passing of the active phase
of her sexual existence. Devised as a feminine cloak of moral virtue and protected
status, the veil could also impart a message of intrigue and illicit sex. Swathed
in heavy veiling in order to visit her clandestine lover, an adulterous woman in the
nineteenth century might view her disguise as a titillating prelude to the amorous
assignation, and so might her lover. The veil is perceived as erotic when sexual guilt
is perceived as erotic. Favored by milliners of the twentieth century to give a froufrou
touch to their original creations, the peekaboo veil on a fanciful hat became a glamorous
artifact of submission, ambiguously ladylike and provocative in its vestigial drape
of black net.

At this particular moment in history when the ratios of sexual preference seem to
have gone awry and vast numbers of homosexual men and straight single women are roaming
the range in search of love, sex and meaningful relations, it is obvious that these
two groups dress up to enhance their sexual attraction while lesbian women and heterosexual
men dress more carelessly or to conceal their bodies, having no urgent need to attract
the judgmental male eye. Intense concern for appearance in the gay male culture—working
out, keeping thin, looking young, wearing strategic, form-fitting clothes—may be evidence
of an esthetic sensibility, but the sensibility is an all-out effort to win the sexual
interest of other men. This circumstance lends credence to the point of view that
women do not dress for other women, except to show off their stuff competitively,
and furthermore, that “homosexual designers” cannot be blamed for the uncomfortable,
unrealistic fashions they “foist upon” women, for
the whole show is produced for the approval of heterosexual men.

Many gay men, as straight women often observe, are very attractive. There’s a lot
to be said for tight pants on a good body in excellent condition. However, the effort
is seldom made on our behalf, except by a handful of rock stars and movie actors who
absorb themselves in this colorful, sensuous manner—the word is narcissistic—because
appearance and audience play a crucial role in how they earn a living. Most straight
men do not need to rely on sexual plumage, either to earn a living or to entice a
woman, and masculine tradition of the last two centuries has taught that sexualized
clothing on a man is undignified and foppish. Men of action and power are colorless
by choice, it would seem, when their status is unchallenged and secure. Only those
most likely to be ignored or discounted, or who possess a special need to be noticed
(a broad category that might include women, blacks, gay men, short men, men on the
make and entertainers) are demonstrably more colorful and fashion-conscious.