In the 1960's, long before bra straps became a fashion statement,
we girls used to sew little tabs on the inside shoulder seams of our dresses to
keep bra straps out of sight. To hide our incipient cleavage we used a
dickey--a triangular piece of cloth that snapped into the center of a
too-revealing neckline. At prom time in our Catholic high school, we were
warned that if we showed up in a gown with spaghetti straps (or, God forbid,
strapless), we would be sent back home. Our bodies were Temples of the Holy
Ghost, but unless we were ever watchful, they could also be Occasions of Sin.
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| 1962 Senior Prom. Note the sin-avoiding straps on my dress. |
It was a difficult message for
our hormone-marinated brains to disentangle because those same bodies, as our
mothers, aunts, grandmothers and the entire culture never ceased to remind us,
were our passport to the main if not the only source of personal fulfillment
for women: marriage and motherhood.
Beauty and modesty were
supposed to coexist in an eternally precarious equilibrium. Neglect your looks
for a single day and you risked passing unnoticed by the Brylcreem-anointed boy
who might have been your ticket to happiness. Disregard modesty and who knew
what might happen? We certainly didn't, because it was never spelled
out--nobody said the words pregnancy, or venereal disease, or rape as they
might apply to us. But the consequences of immodesty were all the more alarming
for being unspoken.
It was drilled into us that we
had to make the most of whatever portion of beauty Providence had bestowed on
us. Hair was supremely important. It had to balloon off the scalp to give us
the wide-eyed, neotenic look that made us seem vulnerable and attractive. This
required nightly work with brush rollers--I used to sleep with twenty-seven of
them digging into my scalp--many cans of spray, and prayers for dry, windless
weather.
Our skin gave us fits, being
liable to erupt in pimples when we least wanted it to, despite copious
applications of Clearasil. But breasts constituted the ultimate dilemma. From
the movies--Sophia Loren! Marilyn Monroe! Jayne Mansfield!--we figured that
they were a major asset, a helpful tool in luring the father of our future
children. Yet because they also had the potential to provoke unbridled lust,
they needed to be completely covered, although they could be hinted at by the
artful positioning of darts in our bodices.
Legs were less of a liability,
though we worried that our nylons would develop runs, a disgrace comparable to
having our slip show. Until the blessed invention of pantyhose, stockings were
held up by garter belts, an item that has since acquired fetishistic status but
that I remember mostly as giving me severe pain in the lower back.
Sacred vessels on the one hand,
agents of disgrace on the other, our bodies came to feel like two-edged swords,
or UXBs that might go off unpredictably. It is a miracle that we managed to
learn anything in school, worried as we were that the "rats" might be
showing under the upper layers of our hair, or that the middle button on our
uniform blouse might have popped open.
And yet we did learn, despite
all the distractions, and ours became the first generation to aspire to having
both meaningful work and a guy. And when the pill, the
pantyhose, and the second wave of feminism burst simultaneously on the scene a
few years later, we put away our dickeys, our garter belts and sometimes even
our bras, and believed, at least for a while, that we could have it all.
