Modest Preschoolers (or, My Daughter Wears Jeggings)

It's almost summer, and the issue of what toddler/preschooler girls should wear in the summer has been popping up all over my social media.  I'm having one of those moments where I feel like I was raised by (inappropriately dressed) wolves, and I have no idea what these rules are that other people are talking about.  It's like when I found out that a significant segment of society feel that babies should never appear in public wearing only a onesie, because it's like an adult walking around in her underwear.

These are the rules I have heard:

-No tight clothes
-No short shorts
-No big arm holes
-No faux-sexy styling
-No bikinis

LB is breaking a few of these rules right now: tight stretch shorts, with a tucked-in tank-top with big arm holes (worn backwards to maximize exposure).  And I have some questions:

Do people really think it's wrong for a preschooler to wear bike shorts as shorts?  I had no idea.  I feel like there should be a compendium of these rules just so I can know when my daughter's sartorial choices are offending the world.

LB's outfit of choice: Elmo and jeggings and to make it even better, her pants always ride down

LB used to wear such cute clothes: cotton rompers, bonnets, handmade sweaters.  Hanna dresses from Grammy.  And then she learned how to undress herself.  Now any clothing considered too soft, to scratchy, too big, or just NO is immediately ripped off.

The last outfit I ever forced LB to wear-doesn't she look happy (and I'm still not sure how the school picture company came up with such a glamour shot)

What I want LB to wear:

I'm still holding out hope for next fall!

She will never wear this before she outgrows it

And LB's choice:

She styles this shirt (I'm pretty sure this is the exact big-arm-hold shirt that the other mom returned) with tight pink stretch shorts.  Shirt tucked into shorts. Shorts pulled up high.  Socks pulled up high, with sneakers.  I call this her "Fire Island called and wants 1985 back" Collection.

As I write this post, Motherlode has published the post, "Whose Dress Code Is It and Why?"  This column gets at some of what I'm feeling.  If people look at LB and judge me because she's not modest enough, I will judge them to be prudish jerks.  If they judge me for dressing my daughter in pants that slide down her butt whenever she engages in strenuous exercise, and wonder why people start training their children to participate in the horrors of the femininity industrial complex at such a young age-well, then I will just hang my head in shame because I agree.

But it's LB's body and it's the clothes that grandmas bought her.  I am a feminist mom.  I want to be a feminist mom, but I'm not sure that means I need to be an authoritarian feminist mom.

In the Motherlode piece, KJ Dell'Antonia reminds readers that dress codes aren't simply about sexuality, they are also about learning a variety of other social rules that may serve us well in life.  The word that she doesn't mention specifically is class.  And that's where I get even more uncomfortable with the rules and hierarchies of clothing.

My parents were passing into the middle class as I grew up in the 1970s-not so much by money, but by practice.  That meant that while other kids wore new clothes from KMart, I wore second-hand smocked dresses and fair isle sweaters. Classy.

I loved polyester and bright colors and plastic headbands and shiny shoes.  One day when I was eight my dad brought home a pair of Timberland boots for me (way before they became Tims) and I cried and hid them in the back of the closet.

As a teenager in the '80s, I was one of those girls putting together outfits in thrift shops and trying to make t-shirts into skirts like they showed in Sassy Magazine.

Now I wear a deliberately boring and hopefully clean, mix and match, business very casual.  I like people who wear outfits.  I want LB to have the joy of expressing herself through clothing.  I never want to see her in short shorts with writing on the butt, but I don't want her to judge girls in short shorts with writing on the butt to be cheap whores, and I certainly don't want her to think that clothes make her person-for better or worse.

Dear LB, It's the content of your character not the clothes on your back.  And if you want to be a peacock, if you want your pants to sag, if your skirts too short, I will love you for it.  And I will also replace songs on your ipod with lectures on feminist theory.

"In her kiss I taste the Revolution"

This is the only back-in-the-day photo I can find (weirdly cropped to protect the innocent).  The year was likely 1997, I remember buying this dress at the Salvation Army-at least I treated it as a dress.  It was like a tiny lampshade, and my friend put a tuck in the back for me so it would fit.  I was into wearing white fishnets, and if you could see my shoes they would be super chunky.

B and I recently watched the documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna and Riot Grrrl.  I really enjoyed all the performance footage, which definitely makes it worth watching.  As usual, I'm annoyed that a film that spends some time reflecting on the problem of stars within social movements would choose to feature random quasi-celebrities who had nothing to do with Riot Grrrl reflecting on Riot Grrrl, rather than some of the rank-and-file.  I also don't like it when RG retrospectives present the '90s as a vast wasteland for young feminists.  RG was something new and exciting, but existed within and alongside a variety of other feminist politics (in my humble opinion).

B's critique of the film was that the filmmakers could have make a much more explicit connection between "trashing" and other negative forms of internal policing within feminist groups in the 1970s and disputes about stars and media coverage within RG. B wrote her senior thesis in college on RG, and she wrote this paper about the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, which you should read.  And then you should listen to the CWLRB singing "Papa Don't Lay that Shit on Me" here.

After we watched The Punk Singer, B and I were inspired to bust out some of our old records, and reminisce.  It was really fun.  I am eight years older than B, which is at least a generation in music time.  B grew up in the Pacific Northwest listening to gansta rap, while I grew up in the Northeast listening to punk.

B listened to Dr Dre, Ice Cube, and The Coup, and then branched out to Ani DiFranco and Elliott Smith.  The first album I ever bought was Roxanne by The Police and the first show I ever went to was  The Ramones (at the UNH student union).

At some point our music histories intersect.  I bought the Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear album, I think, while I was living in Seattle in 1993.  I loved that album, but I don't think I realized that it was a thing?  I don't know, my memory is so bad.  I think I probably found out about RG by reading an article in the New York Times-clearly I had my finger on the pulse.  B started listening to RG bands and going to shows while in college in the late 1990s, and then got really into Sleater-Kinney (and couldn't tell me precisely how many times she saw them-because I fact check these posts like crazy).

I realize I don't know exactly what was so appealing about this music for B.  For me, it was years putting up with jackasses at shows, being expected to hold the coats, and the casual and not-so-casual misogyny of the punk/hardcore/ska scenes.  And it was also never seeing women on stage for those shows.  It was so great to see and hear women making loud, aggressive music.

 Videos I've watched while writing this post:

Hole's "Pretty on the Inside" on college radio late in 1991 blew me away when I heard it on college radio in 1991.  I had never heard a woman make music that so represented the roiling and seething that I felt on the inside (which is not to say anything about the people who made that album).

Lone Justice, "Ways to Be Wicked," I've always like country music, but I was embarrassed to admit it in the 80s.

I had roommate who was super into SubPop, and I liked this song by a band I'd never heard of called Nirvana.  Nirvana, "Negative Creep."

My other roommates were super into Throwing Muses, and I haven't heard this song in twenty and some years.  It bringing back some memory that I can't quite retrieve.

New School/Old School

Our house, as you can see in the pictures on this blog, is furnished almost exclusively in early century Ikea.  Sometimes it's fun to think that LB will look back at pictures from her childhood that are the stylistic equivalent of dark fake-wood paneling and avocado appliances.

One exception is the little rocking chair we call "the baby electric chair."  The chair was made by my great-grandfather in the 1920s for his children, one of whom is LB's great-grandmother.  My knowledge of hobbyist furniture building in the 1920s is confined to a single book I read in grad school. The little I gleaned from that book suggests that this rocker was part of the Colonial American revival style popularized in the 1920s.  My father and aunt remember playing with the chair as kids, putting it on its front to make a slide, resulting in several cracks in the wood that have been repaired.  Then it must have gone to my cousins, because I first saw it shortly before LB was born, when the rocker was gifted to our little family.

Rocker with Poang

Rocker with child

Side view with repairs

Back with repair

LB picked out this outfit her own self.  She picked pink pants from her pants bin, and then her beloved (hideous) pink Elmo shirt, and then she insisted on adding this pink mock-turtleneck onesie over the existing ensemble.  The ruching on the Elmo shirt gave her some unnaturally big shoulders, which combined with the onesie snapped OVER the pants gave her a 1970s space cowboy look, and she wore it well.

Gender Trouble: Toddler Cheerleaders

Yes, this is in fact an item of clothing that we own.  And yes, this cheerleading outfit includes matching pants that say Oregon State on the butt.  LB owns a total of three of these OSU cheerleading outfits.

There's a reason that this piece of clothing is shown on a hanger rather than on LB.  I would never post a picture of our girl wearing this for all the world to see.  I did put her in it once (with long pants) and take pictures for grammy, but that is as far as I'll go.  I had a scheme around Halloween that we could dress LB up as an anarchist cheerleader from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, or we could find two other kids and dress them all up as zombie cheerleaders, but I was all clever ideas and no action.

B and I are both Title IX babies, but I grew up in the earlier years, when the default in my little New England town was that little boys play football and little girls are cheerleaders (in high school girls could play field hockey, which was higher in the class hierarchy than cheering).  B is a very good athlete and played soccer and basketball, and probably lots of other sports, from a young age.  Why you would think that the daughter of your sporty daughter needs multiple cheer outfits, rather than a jersey or tracksuit, I'm not quite sure.

I am sure that my daughter will not be wearing anything like this, and certainly not any kind of pants with writing on the butt, until she is old enough to rebel and spend her own money on crap we hate.  And if that makes me not only a bitter lesbian feminist, but an authoritarian bitter lesbian feminist, well then, let me join Andrea Dworkin in a consensual embrace as we raise our fists against the patriarchy.

[Updated to add that I let LB pick her own clothes this morning and she chose and OSU "Beaver Fever" t-shirt.  Gayby in a beaver fever t-shirt = time to slink of my high horse.]

It's a gendered gendered world

And I guess I already knew that, so maybe the point of this story is how lucky we have been so far in mostly avoiding the princess industrial complex.  We do get plenty of pink clothes and dresses, but for the most part the girly stuff has been pretty under control (except for all those cheerleading outfits, but that is another story).

Last week, Ladybug's PT suggested getting her some more supportive shoes to see if that would help with her walking.  In our neighborhood you can buy baby soft shoes, but no other kind of kids shoes, and who knows where you can buy baby shoes in this city, so it was time for a trip to the mall.  One Zip Car later and we landed at Nordstrom's having misjudged the opening time of all the other stores.  We picked some inoffensive girly shoes and let LB try them out.  Then, avoiding all the pink monstrosities while we still can, we looked in the boys section and found some cute black and white sneakers.  I gave them to the salesperson and she became increasingly flummoxed, asking who we were getting the sneakers for and what size she should bring out.  When I told her that we would need a size 4, because we would also try these shoes on LB, she helpfully pointed back to the display of girls shoes, "But you didn't see anything you liked over there?"  I had a total 1970s flashback to the salesperson in the Buster Brown store telling my dad, "You know those are B-O-Y shoes," and my dad saying, "She can get whatever shoes she wants." I guess it never gets old.

Ladybug celebrating gender normativity.