Style counsel

One of the recent 1970 General Conference talks I read had - as kind of a throwaway - an admonition to never intentionally look less than your best. I'm sure it was a reaction to more casual clothing, but it felt like a lot of pressure.

It stuck out more because I had just read this quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the first time she saw a woman wearing bloomers, occurring when she visited a cousin:

To see my cousin with a lamp in one hand and a baby in the other, walk upstairs, with ease and grace while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the question, readily convinced me that there was sore need of a reform in woman's dress and I promptly donned a similar costume. 

I immediately grasped how revolutionary it must have been. It's not even automatically a skirt versus pants issue, because there are dresses that can be less encumbering than mid-nineteenth century woman's fashions. Still, choosing clothing for comfort and ease of movement would be amazing, as well as discovering how much of fashion wasted time and hampered movement.

It is also not a matter of skimpy attire; bloomers went down to the ankles. I believe bloomers were still considered immodest, possibly closer to the original meaning of the word in that it could be seen as drawing attention, and facilitated actions that might draw attention, like running. It certainly removed all mystery about whether women had legs, and how many. (That sounds like a joke, but men LOVE finding women mysterious. Then understanding them is unnecessary.)

The modesty issue does lead me to something else I saw recently, about 15th century woman Agnès Sorel, who had her gowns specially designed to expose her favorite breast. 

This immediately made me feel a little insecure; she has a favorite breast? Is that a thing? Am I missing some aspect of womanhood thinking mine are basically the same? Okay, that is partially facetious, but I spent some effort on getting in touch with my body, and now I can't help wondering what I missed.

Regardless, I mention it because the portrait was shown with a quote, "Women in the past were modest and had more respect for themselves."

Well, her style did get some criticism. It also got some imitation.

My last post was about conservatism as a way of resisting change and adhering to the past. Often that ignores real problems in the present and past. Furthermore, those perceptions are often built on lies. 

Hidden Figures (2016) shows us Black women working as "computers" at NASA, when that work was done by humans instead of machines. I have seen The Right Stuff (1983) and Apollo 13 (1995) and they showed NASA and lots of calculations, but they were all being done by white men. There was also a department full of white women. Many of the people who were there have died since then - Katherine Johnson just recently - but their accounts and the employment records still exist. They were there, and they were great at math, but then in 1983 you would have people telling you that girls just naturally had a harder time with math.

We invite people into the church telling them to keep the good they have and get more. That's fine, but are we accurately assessing what is good, inside and out?