A former teacher and current employee of my public school system in the Indianapolis area recently asked me to write a column detailing my opinion on school dress codes and uniforms. She is a staunch feminist and hardly feels comfortable telling women what they can and cannot wear to school but simultaneously wants to defend her own right to walk down the hallway without seeing way too much of her students’ skin.
How, she asked, can she professionally and sensitively reconcile these two perspectives?
School dress codes merit a feminist’s attention because they are often the first time women encounter institutionalized fear of their bodies.
When a young female child is instructed to wear skirts and dresses that meet a certain length requirement as early as first grade, she is receiving an explicit burden of responsibility for how her clothes make others feel before she has even fully developed an understanding of herself.
This initial attitude toward how women present themselves to the world prepares that young first-grader to more readily accept the slut shaming and victim blaming in her future because she has already been conditioned to understand her clothing as a statement that functions to either please or threaten those around her.
If you tell a child not to wear skirts that are too short from the beginning of her socialization in school, she won’t wonder why she’s being asked about her skirt length in the hospital or police station when she reports sexual harassment.
But standards about dressing for one’s purpose and environment so clearly exist for a reason. How do we teach all children that certain outfits are appropriate for a summer play date at a friend’s house and some are appropriate for more formal contexts like school or church, and later the workplace?
The key to removing damaging gender bias from school dress codes is to treat men and women exactly the same. For every rule made about how female students are permitted to clothe themselves, the same rule should exist for male ?students.
In fact, eliminating gendered language entirely from handbook delineations of clothing expectations would put public schools on the fast track to deconstructing those problematic imbalances that they currently ingrain?so early.
An aspect of this issue that is almost never considered is the many ways in which gendered dress codes hurt male students as well. They’re deeply heteronormative in their assumptions that only girls could potentially wear skirts and dresses that are too short or tight leggings that leave too little to the imagination.
If school-aged boys would prefer to don items traditionally expected for girls, their wishes are immediately invalidated by an institution that refuses to acknowledge even their potential for existence, let alone the?credibility thereof. And good luck finding a space in this world of dress-policing for the non-genderconforming pupils who live beyond the narrow binaries considered in most public school ?handbooks. Thankfully, I have yet to encounter a school dress code that prohibits one gender to sport an outfit “reserved” for another, but the exclusive language makes those implicit attitudes cringingly explicit for all non-cis-male students.
Ultimately, the responsibility falls to schools to cease perpetuating damaging gender expectations through rhetorically problematic dress codes and to create spaces for everyone to be — and express — themselves however they see fit. Personal discomfort does not grant license to police.
sbkissel@indiana.edu
