The Rules of Womanhood

Rule 1: you are not your own keeper; Daisy investigates.

Trigger warning: violence against women, honour killings

It is with an immovably heavy heart that women around the globe have watched the last year play out.

With protests in Iran showing no sign of resolution after the brutal murder of Jina Mahsa Amini; with new dress codes and laws reintroduced in Afghanistan under Taliban rule; with the overturning of Roe v. Wade plunging the US into a terrifying battleground over female bodies; we bear witness as our sisters around the world are forced back in time and exposed to terrifying violence.

The desperate frustration at external forces exerting control of the female body, mind and spirit simmers down to a universal problem, not individual political issues or national discriminations. The basic universal issue that we return to time and time again is that women around the globe are not considered or treated as valued, autonomous human beings. Be it where women have been forbidden to attend university or travel alone, or where that women are victim-blamed for their own clothing, there may be a sliding scale of severity and violence but the core issue is the same: we are not our own keepers, we exist at the whim of men.

Being a fashion writer, I of course see the world through a sartorial lens. Whilst laws around clothing are suppressive, they are by no means the most threatening or highest priority issue facing women today. But to me, the prolific enforcement of something so basic as the fabrics we clothe ourselves in, across the world and throughout history, just illuminates how petty and all-consuming the need to control women really is.

“... we are not our own keepers, we exist at the whim of men.”

If we are not even allowed to dress how we please without fear of judgement, expulsion, assault or even murder in response, what are our chances of being able to access education, drive, reach positions of power or ever truly feeling free? If you want to control a woman, of course dastardly rules about what she can or cannot do would assert that control — sufficiently, you would think. And yet, in examples such as the Taliban stripping away women’s rights to education, these laws over female autonomy almost always extend to controlling our clothing too in a thinly-veiled attempt to crush our spirit and right to express ourselves.

The uprisings in Iran — a product of the cumulative rage within women, men, even school children screaming “women, life, freedom” — speak volumes to the significance of women reclaiming their appearance. The most provocative, scroll-stopping symbols of these protests have been the shedding and burning of the compulsory hijab, and the demonstrative cutting of women’s long hair. After all, these protests started because Amini, a young woman was first arrested then murdered by Iran’s Morality Police simply because her hair was visible in public. Although she was accused of violating laws that forbid women from revealing their hair in public, what many external commentators have failed to understand is that Iranian women aren’t protesting the hijab itself; they’re protesting their lack of choice, of freedom, of having such basic rights as to pick for themselves — in all areas of their lives.

The women and girls of Iran have been fighting their compulsory dress codes and violent enforcement for decades since they were reintroduced in 1983 when all women, regardless of faith or nationality, were ordered to conceal their hair and to wear loose-fitting trousers under their coats.

In society, dress regulation holds such power because it is such an immediately visible form of control and source of discrimination. In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners wore forced into uniforms and branded with symbols to indicate that they were ‘other’ and therefore needed to be oppressed — the yellow star, the pink triangle… while their very lives were already being controlled, fascist leaders still felt it important that they were visually marked and singled out too.

That was 80 years ago and yet, governments and religious institutions still use the same strategy to broadly target women across the world today: in Saudi Arabia, strict laws about women's ability to go out alone or be unaccompanied by a man are supplemented by mandatory wearing of the niquab or abaya at all times. And in Bhutan, women must forcibly wear the kira (a form of kimono) at all times when out in public. But dress regulation doesn’t just exist to force women to wear certain things; they also exist to ban them.

“dress regulation holds such power because it is such an immediately visible form of control...”

In Uganda, women can be arrested for wearing anything that sits above the knee. In North Korea and Sudan, women are subject to nasty punishment if they dare to wear trousers. In France, since 2011, women have been banned from wearing the burqa, niqab or any other full-face coverings. In fact, even though the Muslim women concerned have made it clear they are wearing these garments by choice, France has also banned the burkini from public pools, and banned female footballers from wearing their hijabs on the pitch.

Whether banning or enforcing dress, the involvement of government in something as personal and ultimately insignificant to the wider world (save for the wearer’s values, personal expression and freedom) never fails to make my blood boil. And upholding laws such as these simply give men yet another excuse to enact violence against women if they are deemed to be dressed ‘immorally’ or breaking some rule or other.

Here in the UK, where we are frequently reminded of our so-called gender equality, we too are still shaking off a long history of sumptuary laws around women’s clothing; laws that also went a long way to enforce classism thereby disallowing anyone from rising through ranks or escaping economic discrimination which disproportionately affected women as a result.

In the Elizabethan era, there were laws about what fabrics women could use and how much they could spend on their clothing per year. Throughout the Middle Ages, women in Europe were subject to very strict and specific rules about what to wear in mourning, and how long to wear it, with codes of course getting stricter and more dramatic for widows because God forbid they stray out from under the thumb of their husband, even after his death. By the Victorian era, these practices were more of an etiquette than a law but were still strictly obeyed and judged accordingly by society.

Fast forward to present day, we see women fighting in court for justice and protection after sexual assault have their clothing choices meticulously torn apart, with examples as recent as the 2018 rape trial in Ireland during which the underwear worn by the teenage victim was held up in court as proof that she was the guilty party. The 17-year-old later killed herself because her decision to wear cute pants with a lace front that fateful day led to the acquittal of her rapist.

When Sarah Everard was murdered in London last year, the nation erupted because “she did everything right”, “she was wearing bright recognizable colours”, “she wasn’t dressed provocatively” perfectly demonstrating how British women still have to abide by certain unspoken dress codes that override their agency and dictate their value in the court of public opinion. Even when adhering to these illogical rules still won’t protect us from violence. Even when members of the queer community who break gender norms around what should be worn by cis-women are so frequently assaulted for their modest clothing choices that it could be considered a pandemic.

Having to factor in how the clothes against your own body will make strangers react to you or treat you, having to don fabrics styled to meet the demands of others every day is ludicrous. The feeling of lost identity, sexuality, personality and autonomy is gut-wrenching.

“... her decision to wear cute pants with a lace front that fateful day led to the acquittal of her rapist.”

But it’s still about so much more than just clothes. Controlling what we choose to wear is the final frontier: the outermost layer of ourselves that demonstrates just how much control is being exerted over our inner layers too — our physical bodies, our reproductive health, our educations, our perspectives, our rights.

This isn’t about the hijab or the burkini, trousers or underwear — it's about us, as people. And if we can’t see that we are truly all fighting for exactly the same basic thing — equality, autonomy and the right to choose — then there really is very little hope of success. However, if we can see that we are all allies, and unite to fight tooth and nail for each other’s liberation, then there might just be a light at the end of the clothing-draped tunnel.

credits

words — daisy riley

design — karina so.