Reuters Pictures
“Sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” is how Hillary Clinton put it. And with those simple words, the peculiar misery haunting a certain slice of my entire professional life flashed before my eyes.
First let me set the scene: I got to Denver late after getting up at four in the morning to catch the plane here. My hotel is, as it turns out, not actually in Denver, but in the next suburb over. This means I have to take a shuttle bus and light rail or else a $70 cab ride, while the driver tries to figure out which roads into town haven’t been blocked off. Once at the convention center, you still have to stand in line for an hour or so to get through perimeter security, and then you walk for miles and miles on the indoor-outdoor concrete surfaces with which all of Denver is seemingly paved.
What I mean is, that if you’ve worn the wrong shoes you don’t just pop back to your room to change. And if you’ve worn long pants and a snappy little power jacket with a silk lining that is slicked to your skin in the blistering heat, you don’t dare take it off, because you’re middle-aged and a little worried about bra straps.
So this is the kind of stuff rattling through my brain when Hillary Clinton spoke those fateful words. I looked at her well-constructed peach pantsuit and the pantsuits of the thousands of her well-heeled contributors on the floor, and thought: the night before, Michele Obama had worn a simple, single-layer sheath dress, appropriate for this weather, and a pair of low-heeled shoes. Elegant, confident and literally cooler. This thought, this contrast, made me stop my busy blogging about unity and the future and women as astronauts. I unbuttoned my jacket, kicked off my shoes underneath the press table. Whew, I said to myself. Hillary Clinton and I are trapped in the clothes of our generation.
I suppose there’s nothing like an election to turn the mind to fashion statements. And now that the party is at least nominally united, allow me this digression upon the little-observed semiotics of what hell it has been for a woman of a certain age to dress for success. To some extent it’s not exclusively woman’s issue–the citizenry is often disposed to deciphering candidates’ positions on serious issues, ranging from the war to the economy, from the esoterica of what they wear. Cowboy-boot politics. Italian-twill twee. Plaid-shirt populism. Lapel-pin patriotism.
This season, however, we have been much consumed with the matter of shoulder-pad feminism, as it was so ungraciously dubbed by pundits. The very term made me cringe, harkening back as it does to my first days out of law school some thirty-odd years ago, when as a result of brand-new affirmative action policies, women entered professional life in something like numbers that mattered.
Its hard to remember how flummoxed everyone was at the prospect of women in boardrooms, women in courtrooms, women in…. power. Garden hats, tea dresses and little white gloves simply weren’t up to the task. And what a task it was. Pervasive skepticism at our presence in male geographies had to be countered with the trappings of authority, the semaphores of serious intent, the packaging of no-nonsense. Proving that we were as good as the guys thus ushered in an ugly and exaggerated anti-romanticism: no lace, no flounces, no ruffles, no pleats. No hankies, as though in expectation of copious tears. No loud colors that made you sparkle or shine. No lockets, no heart-shaped objects dangling from delicate silver threads. No heaving bosoms, no bursting bras–indeed, no obvious breasts. Just a uniformly square-cut suit in industrial tones, perhaps a robust rope of heavy gold for a wristwatch. We looked as though Charlotte Gilman’s housewife had stepped out of her yellow-wallpapered prison of sentimental virtue and bellied up to the bar.
So. The number-one thing that makes me wince when I look at old photos of myself is the Power Suit. The power suit was the de rigueur uniform for professional women during the 1980s. It had over-compensatory shoulder pads, whose width exceeded those of your average quarterback.
It is no accident that this was also the era of Big Hair–one absolutely had to have a helmet of expansively frazzled locks just to proportionalize those shoulders. “You looked like Mark Maguire,” says my son as he flips through the family album, then wisely adds, “but prettier.” His confusion is forgivable. In those days, women always looked steroidally bloated, pumped up to the point of near-explosion.
One of Wikipedia’s definitions of “power suit” is “a powered exoskeleton,” to wit, a machine covering the body to “assist and protect soldiers” or to “aid the survival of people in dangerous situations.” That captures exactly my experience in the realm of pin-striped grey and navy blue serge.
The second most despicable item of clothing from that era was the so-called Dressed for Success Bow at the Throat. This was a time, you must recall, when women and men still existed in very separate conceptual realms. In order to transgress the boundary between “women’s work” and “men’s work,” one of the most common recommendations was that women “pass” by trading in the pearls for a tie. Not for a manly-man’s tie, God forbid, but rather for a huge, flouncy, floppy, thoroughly “effeminate,” and not at all “feminist,” version of a bow tie. Said bow was always in red silk, like an Edwardian Christmas caroler, the better to go with the navy blue of the suit. It was like a bad gender-bending joke–us bravely-liberated big-haired shoulder-pad feminists yoked at the throat with the mark of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Does it come as any surprise that such an ensemble might require a crisply starched Peter Pan collar?
Let me pass on to the cruelty of shoes. Heel and toe. Power and pain. There is still no such thing as a women’s shoe that conveys comfort and signals power simultaneously. A serious power shoe must lend height. Height means the sadomasochistic punishment of, say, four-inch bootlets in butter-soft suede from Bloomingdales. Despite the hard-won graduate degrees qualifying one as a professional woman of immense rationality, one nevertheless may be seduced by the ability to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with any man who challenges your word. It is vanity that will ensure a nightmarish escarpment of physical regret. For many moons after taking them off–and assuredly by the time you turn 50–you will hobble about at a dangerously forward-pitched slant.
What makes work “back-breaking” for many professional women is not the traditional swinging of shovel and axe but the isometric bewilderment of balancing heavy hair, padded shoulders and overloaded tote-bag against the angled physics of stiletto heels.
And yet I confess: I love stilettos irrationally. They make me think of Andy Warhol’s lovely sketches back in the days when he was an illustrator for B. Altman and I. Miller. I associate them with his beautifully inked blotted-line pictures of ice cream cones and pink layer cakes. Stilettos are so feminine yet strong, professional yet sexy, dangerous but in control, cruel but competent. Such good lawyer garb. Such good weapons with which to crack glass ceilings.
Indeed, according to Jack Green’s discussion in his fascinating little volume, The Physics Factbook, a stiletto high heel exerts more than fifteen times the pressure exerted by an elephant’s foot:
Pressure is defined as force over area. Pressure is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to area. This inverse relationship is an important concept when it concerns the immensity of pressure. The significance of the high heel comes into play because it has such a minute area. Due to this fact, the pressure under that high heel is extremely large. If one were to solve the aforementioned problem, the solution is deduced as follows:
This is approximately 40 atmospheric pressures.
If only all this rogue elephantine female power could have found its expression in an aggressively adorned tea hat or a ferociously iron-fisted velvet glove. Instead it had to be the shoe, so relentlessly jack-hammering its liberatory tattoo upwards, into the spine.
And there is no perfect antidote to such suffering. Yes, there’s always the frequent if furtive resort to snub-nosed, little-girl flats. Alice-in-Wonderland shoes. Ballerina slippers. Aerosoles with bouncy, innocent, rubber-ball bottoms. Such honest footgear may be gloriously, eye-rollingly more comfortable, but flats do diminish not matter how hard they try. They make you shorter to start with–even if “shorter” means “your actual height.” In this, Michele Obama, at nearly six feet, enjoys a distinct avantage. Flats make me, however, feel sedate as a nun, even when they come in leopard print.
Some of this is probably because I associate flat, round-toed shoes with the boring old blood-colored Oxfords and wool knee socks I had to wear from kindergarten through middle school. School shoes. Sensible shoes–back in the day when Twiggy was iconic, an alluringly un-sensible dandelion puff in a Peter Max miniskirt. Twiggy wore Cuban heels! and patent-leather go-go boots! My mother, the breeziest of upbeat matriarchs, dismissed my complaints summarily: “Lace them up. No ones going to remember your shoes a hundred years from now.”
How wrong she was. I would be a different, happier, more charitable human being if I had not had to wear those ugly red Oxfords with their unforgiving arch supports. Perhaps today I wouldnt be so easily smitten by shoes with not just elegant spindles for heels but sharply tapered triangles for toes. Power points. I’ve heard that some women actually have plastic surgery to shorten their toes so as be able to squeeze into a set of narrow-nosed Manolo Blahniks. The pathetic thing is, when I walk into a meeting wearing my kick-ass Jimmy Choos, I almost understand why. It’s worth the pain! My IQ, my courage, my logic are outstanding!
But still, I wish I’d never worn them.
After Hillary finished speaking, it took me two hours and forty-five minutes to get back to my hotel, polish my posting and file this. I walked miles hunting for a taxi but it was a zoo–a zoo with a shortage of cabs. I went back to the convention center, consulted a transportation guide, who directed me to take a forty-minute bus ride to the Red Lion Hotel and then get a cab from there. The Red Lion is where the Texas delegation is staying; so I rode with a lively group in gaudy cowboy hats sprinkled with red, white and blue glitter who kept eyeing me with friendly suspicion and asking: “You’re not from Texas, are you?” When I confessed that I was from New York, it was like one of those piquante sauce advertisements. “New York City!!” they said, and shook their heads.
I think it must have been my shoes.
)
Striver’s Row, updated….
Obama and the Black Elite
by Patricia J. Williams
August 21, 2009 | 8:22pm
Dmitry Kostyukov, AFP / Getty Images
As the first family departs for Martha’s Vineyard, Patricia Williams says the trip illuminates their delicate relationship with the black upper class—a clubby world of debutantes and BMWs.
When President Barack Obama appointed Valerie Jarrett as his senior advisor and Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary, there was, among the mainstream media, a bit of muffled gasping about from where on earth such designer-clad doyennes might have emerged. In what hidden universe do black people exist who can actually distinguish a fish knife from a shoe horn? And are there more of them?
View Our Gallery of the Obamas on Vacation
AP Photos (2); Getty Images
The phenomenon of a black upper class has always been complicated, ambivalent. Often the descendents of “house slaves,” some significant percentage grew up imitating the manners, mores, and various condescensions of white plantation society—including setting up private clubs and exclusionary networks. More recently, the ranks of the black upper middle class have been increased with beneficiaries of the civil rights movement–with people such as Barack and Michelle Obama, who represent a generation able to take advantage of increased access to jobs and schools once off limits. This new mobility has not altogether erased some of the clubbishness and snob appeal of older black organizations, however. There are still fault lines and hidden hierarchies within black social life.
For those whose only exposure to upper class African American social organizations may be the black student organization on one’s college or grad school campus, well, brace yourselves: there’s a world of black debutantes out there, and they mean to do serious, social-climbing business, the wheels of their black BMWs and silver Mercedes Benzes sinking up to their plantinum hubcaps in the soft white sand of the beaches on Martha’s Vineyard, the North Fork of Long Island, and the islands off the coast of South Carolina.
Colson Whitehead’s novel, Sag Harbor, reveals a glimpse of this Cosby-inflected world of strivers, arrivistes and “black boys with summer houses.” These relatively well-off African Americans come largely from the ranks of what the novel’s narrator describes as “the magic seven”: doctors, dentists, lawyers, preachers, teachers, nurses, and undertakers. This is the world that those African Americans not part of such networks sometimes refer to, with a dismissive sad sigh, as “boogie, ” which is a class reference seemingly unknown to most white people. The New York Times, writing about Whitehead, spelled the word, with utter, and utterly cringe-worthy, uninitiated innocence: “bourgie.”
So, a little background for those terrified that the ship of state is about to be steered toward the shoals of Rush Limbaugh’s wildest fears : it may come as a surprise that the black middle class is just that, middle class. It is conformist, pleasantly centrist, relatively conservatively Christian, overweeningly upwardly mobile and generally better (if more anxiously) dressed than its white counterparts.
The media often speaks of “the black middle class” as though it were a solid singularity that includes any dark-skinned person with a job or an education—from bicycle messengers to Oprah Winfrey. Likewise, any black person without a permanent 9-5 job is tossed into “the underclass.” This is in stark contrast to the way “middle class” is applied to white citizens, where it connotes a specific income level lodged above the “temporarily unemployed” and the working class and just beneath the upper-middle class, with the wealthy and the super-rich above that. In other words, popular depictions frequently suppress the political presence of a large black working class, as well as a black upper-middle class, to say nothing of those wealthy African Americans who are bankers or industrialists or computer geeks rather than just movie stars or sports figures.
Hard as it might be to imagine if your head is filled with the Hollywood haze of Gone With the Wind, whatever Miss Scarlett yearned for, so did succeeding generations of her ex-slaves—who in real life were as resolute and deeply ambitious as she was. And so, after the Civil War, African Americans arranged themselves into all manner of self-help groups patterned upon the gilded hierarchies of Tara. Most Americans are at least aware of the role of the black church in this effort at uplift, as well as of the NAACP, of the Tuskegee Institute, and of the Urban League. Thanks to Spike Lee’s movie, School Daze, perhaps a few more are even aware of the contribution of historically black colleges—as well as the function of segregated Greek fraternities and sororities—in coalescing fairly conservative, life-long networking circles.
As with white fraternities, hazing rituals can be snobbish, or bullying. And as with white country clubs, exclusivity can have its ugly edge: some black social groups have the reputation of discriminating based on “connections” of ancestry or education or income, or, in the not-so-recent past, skin color (must be “lighter than a brown paper bag”) and texture of hair (a comb would have to move flowingly through smooth and therefore presumptively not-kinky hair). As for those debutante cotillions…well, what can I say?
Today, some of the largest of these organizations were set up to provide dating opportunities for the children of suburban black professionals—that is, teens living in nearly all-white neighborhoods and attending nearly all-white schools, environments that unconsciously or otherwise exclude them from social events or coming-of-age rituals. But most of these groups—Jack and Jill, The Links, The Girl Friends, The Coalition of a Hundred Black Women—are also philanthropic; they raise money for scholarships, public relief efforts, mentoring, and health care. Like Hadassah or the Junior League, the most vibrant and visible of them are matriarchies, serviced by well-educated, mostly married women whose husbands are well-to-do enough to allow them to engage in charitable work.
There are lots of men’s organizations too, of course, but they have historically been somewhat more secretive, with more rituals and even better hats. Like the Knights of Columbus or the Bohemian Club, they are all about bolstering manhood through mutual esteem, fine whisky, cigars, and purest nepotism. 100 Black Men of America. The Guardsmen. The Boule. These and a thousand other networks are the backbone of the black bourgeoisie.
Yet such organizations operate within a distinctly ambivalent theater of relationship: On one hand, there is all that philanthropy. On the other, it’s all funded by terribly effete events like golf tournaments, tennis meets sponsored by law firms and cigarette companies, gourmet get-togethers, Caribbean cruises, black-tie dinners, fashion shows, and bachelor auctions. Oh, and did I mention those cotillions…?
One of the most interesting aspects of the Obamas’ ascendency is that neither one of them is the product of this approval-dependent world of relentless obligation, prayerful duty and punishing well-scrubbed-ness. In the first place, Obama’s mother was white, and membership in organizations such as Jack and Jill depends on mama-geniture (mother must be African-descended; it’s not as important that one’s father be black). And since both of Michelle Obama’s parents were working class, it’s doubtful that they would have considered the hefty fees and consuming time commitments a priority, even assuming they’d have met the more social-climbing criteria that a number of such clubs emphasize. (As in: You will be dropped if you miss too many meetings—unless, of course, you’re a legacy. You are likely to be shamed out of the ranks if your kids have the kinds of learning disabilities that preclude their becoming—at least!—doctors, dentists or lawyers. You can buy back into the ranks if you have enough money, influence, or celebrity.)
A friend who declines to be identified describes his experience as a teenager in Jack and Jill: “You were taught to be an Adam Clayton Powell kind of black person. We had dances at the Copacabana. You learned how to dress up, and competed in memorizing long passages from Ellison’s Invisible Man or the Bible. You were judged for your diction. If you succeeded in acting white, you succeeded at being an acceptable kind of black person.”
Sigh. But maybe we’re poised for a new, more mixed up chapter in all this. Last year, Michele Obama was made an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the oldest black sororities. And, hallelujah, these days there are few social clubs in the world—of any race, religion, class, or ethnicity—that wouldn’t welcome the Obamas and their gloriously well-mannered children into the fold.
Better still, the Obamas have begun to model a new, more ecumenical kind of community service that welcomes the contributions of traditional organizations but depends less on the need for exclusivity. It was no accident that Rev. Lowry ended his inaugural benediction with words that every African American heard as a call for an end to old, internecine prejudices, and a new day when “black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what’s right.”
As president, moreover, Obama has consistently emphasized the need for a broad, unified dedication to national service and political engagement—not just military service, but charitable efforts both large and small. Service that all of us can render—old, young, rich, poor. Not just spending years in the Peace Corps, but small tasks that add up in the aggregate: reading to young children, repairing homes, planting gardens, volunteering at hospital, teaching computer skills, stuffing envelopes, picking up litter, organizing book exchanges, food banks, small business support. This less-narrowly bounded vision of who can be a resource for whom is democratizing, energizing, a welcome step forward toward a collective future of mutual regard.
Leave a Comment
Filed under alpha kappa alpha, barack obama, boule, class, jack and jill, martha's vineyard, michelle obama, political commentary, race, gender, class, ethnicity