Your Anachronisms Enrage Me

This week a woman came in to do some costume research for a Hollywood movie. The film is set in the 1860s and 70s, and she was trying to find pictures of women in pants because the director wanted the young female lead to be a rebellious “tomboy.” The researcher understood that women didn’t really wear pants then, but the director was adamant, so she was trying to find some exceptions that would work. Hours later I found myself still grumbling about this, and tried to figure out why it annoyed me so much.

In our 21^st century worldview we have certain ideas about what makes a person strong, interesting, or powerful. We also tend to have biased views about people in the past, particularly women who lived before various waves of feminism. We act as if historical men and women had all the same options and ideas available to them, but that only a few were wise enough to think like us. Certainly, there have always been progressive forward-thinking people, but the picture gets warped if we try to fit our worldview into the past. One example of this is our contemporary idea that corsets = oppression and pants = liberation. When a movie shows a historical woman shunning her corset or wearing pants (recent example—Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland), the message to the audience is that this character is different than all the air-headed women around her! This woman is liberated and thinks for herself! You go girl!

Gag. This line of thinking offends me on so many levels. First of all, it implies that nearly all our female predecessors were vapid conformists simply because they existed in their own time. How close-minded of them not to think like people from hundreds of years later! It also completely misunderstands the clothing conventions of the day. The director for this unnamed film wants the female lead to be a “tomboy.” He or she probably imagines that a woman wearing pants would ruffle a few feathers, but that ultimately her plucky personality and free-thinking nature will win over whatever other characters we are supposed to root for. But think about this: In the early 20^th century a woman could be arrested for indecency if she was wearing pants in public. As bizarre as it sounds now, pants on women weren’t just surprising, to most eyes they probably looked downright vulgar.

This might be painful, but imagine the most inappropriate outfit you have ever seen. Something that wasn’t just ugly, but really over the line of good taste. Now imagine that in 50 years, that kind of clothing is pretty much standard attire, perhaps even considered demure. Now setting aside your urge to rant about culture going down the toilet and kids these days, just resign yourself to this theoretical possibility. Now imagine that in 100 years, someone is planning a film set in 2010 with a rebellious, liberated female character. To show how modern this character is, the director really wants her to be wearing pasties. Like, in public. She wears them at work, with friends, and out at restaurants. The costume designer tries to explain that, while pasties did have a place in strip shows and events organized by MTV, no woman in 2010 would walk around in daily life with exposed breasts and decorative nipple covers. “But this woman isn’t like other women!” the director explains, “she is edgy and ahead of her time!”

You see what I am getting at. Maybe in 2110 every strong, confident woman will wear pasties in public, but that doesn’t mean that without pasties a woman can’t be assertive or powerful. We might still be living under the yoke of breast-covering oppression, but we aren’t all conformist robots. Yes, women in the 19^th century (and 18^th…and 17^th…) lived under restrictive conditions, but they still found ways to be strong and shape the world around them. And they did it all while wearing long skirts and corsets. Deal with it.