I am on research leave this fall semester, working on Age Appropriate. So far, that has meant a mix of reading, very rough drafts, and daydreaming. But today I took a huge step, but reaching out to people who -- hopefully -- can help me with a vital part of my research. In just over a month, I will head to North Platte, Nebraska, the town where I lived as a little girl. The burning question on mind is, "Who would I be, if we had not moved away?" 

You may wonder what this has to do with gender and fashion. So do I, sometimes. But deep inside, I know there is a connection. My journey from infancy to the edge of old age is not just temporal; it is also geographical, social, and cultural. I have reached out to the local paper, the high school I would have attended, the town library, and the church where my family worshipped. Now I just have to hope that at least some of the kids I knew stuck around.

​Wish me luck!

Girly culture -- pink, princess, sexually precocious -- has been studied extensively. Right now I am at work on a piece that examines boy culture, specifically the norms and expectations that shape boys from infancy to adolescence. I am working my way through the academic literature, especially the works of Michael Kimmel, but I have a question for the men in my audience. 

This is very much a draft.
Let's assume that boys AND girls are influenced by girly culture, and girls AND boys are shaped by masculine culture. I want to look at this from the boys' point of view. Girly culture has a purpose for boys, and it the same as insect repellent. A firm knowledge of girly culture is required for boys to avoid being contaminated by femininity or anything associated with women and girls. If all we need to protect the fragile masculinity of boys is a visual culture that signifies GIRL so clearly that no child under the age of six months will ever mistake one for the other. What then, is the purpose of boy culture? 

If you are embarking on research on clothing and gender, I've recently written a bibliographic essay on the topic for the Berg Fashion Library. It is now available online -- for FREE! I tried to provide a solid foundation for anyone new to the topic, and would love to get feedback.

I can't resist sharing my favorite warning about the dangers of pants for women, from none other than physician Robert Bradley, author of the very-popular Husband-Coached Childbirth. 

This was a popular "science-based"argument in the 1960s and 70s for why women should not wear pants. (Strangely, it was not used to discourage us from wearing underpants!) Later studies found trousers innocent on all charges; instead the major culprits were nylon panties and pantyhose.

I've been collecting dozens -- no, make that hundreds -- of images as part of my research and I want to share them with you all, because they are fun, thought-provoking and even astonishing.

They are all here on my new Tumblr, Gender Mystique. Enjoy!

Everyone who knows fashion has heard of Carnaby Street, the crucible of youth style during the "Youth Quake" of the 1960s. But how about King's Road in Chelsea, which Rodney Bennett-England dubbed "the perfect microcosm of contemporary British male fashion"? 

In 1968, that bastion of American middle-brow style, debuted its King's Road collection for young men. It's not Chelsea, but it will do. The King's Road fashions are pretty much the high water mark of the flood of "peacock styles" in mainstream fashion. These examples of "total color harmony" are from the spring, 1970 catalog. More to come, I promise!

And here is a TV ad from 1973. Football stars wear them, so you know they are manly!

Need to get your own? There's Ebay. 

I was setting out my tomato plants this morning, at last. It's late, because the Maryland weather this spring has been fickle, and I only had four plants, too few to risk losing any. While I worked I listened to a podcast sermon on creativity and the divine. In it, the minister suggested that humans are driven not to "get back to the garden" but to create the garden anew, to complete our world.*  

As often happens while I putter, or walk, or shower, a flash of insight hit me. I study gender because it is what I must understand to understand my own life. For others, the puzzle may be race, or death, or something else, but my deepest questions have always been about this paradoxical thing we call gender. I call it paradoxical because the term was invented in the 1950s to describe the social and cultural expressions of biological sex, yet in everyday usage sex and gender are almost always conflated, inseparable in many peoples' minds.

You see me here in two very different childhood pictures. The formal portrait (above) is me at about 3 and a half, in a velvet-trimmed dress I still remember fondly. My mother's red houndstooth check dress was also trimmed with velvet, and my father and brother wear nearly-identical warm gray suits. The very model of a gender-appropriate family in 1952. At the right is a snapshot of my brother and myself taken around 1955 in our back yard. My hair is in its natural state, and I am wearing my brother's old T-shirt and jeans. This was my world in the 1950s: dresses and pin curls for school, church and parties but jeans for play. 

I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up, and my parents humored me with a cowboy outfit with a two-gun holster for Christmas (along with a dollhouse). I adore all of these pictures because they are all so very me.

I got my first period the year after the Pill was approved by the FDA. In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, I was just starting high school. Like so many young women who were swept along in the sexual revolution and the cultural shifts of the 1960s, I was promised much and given -- well, not little, but less than "revolution" implied. 

*The sermon is available to read or hear at the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship website.

As I finish the chapter on children's clothing, I'm sorting through my images and videos about adult fashions. Here's one you'll enjoy, from an early Soul Train episode. Notice the range of gender expression, on both men and women. A thought: did African American men have more or less leeway in this realm than white guys? My first impression is more, but also that I may be dazzled by the flashiness.

I'm working on a careful description and analysis of the children's styles fro the Sears catalogs, and decided to get reactions from my readers. These images (211 of them!!!) are arranged in chronological order, by year and then season (Spring-Summer, then Fall-Winter). You can view them as a slide show and add comments here or on Flickr. 
What do you see? (patterns, trends, surprises, memories) 

Here’s what I detect in the pages of the Sears catalogs from 1962 to 1979:

Consistent rules:

• dressier clothes are more gendered
  
• girls looking boyish=ok
  

Fading rules:

• babies are not toddlers are not children (toddler images to come)
  
• pants are for casual wear only, for girls
  
• flowers are ok for all babies
  

Feminist biology professor Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University contacted me recently about a research note about gendered colors in  that struck her as weak on evidence. I had the same reaction, and was mulling over how to respond to the article, but felt competent only to address the author's approach to historical evidence, not his science. (The original piece is behind a paywall, but described in this post at Life's Little Mysteries.) 

Fausto-Sterling and I reached across the disciplinary divide to co-authored a response that was just posted on her blog at the Huffington Post. Frankly, we need lots more of this in gender studies. Gender formation and the creative and transmission of gender signifiers are complex, multidisciplinary topics, and the more disciplines enter the conversation, the better we will understand them. And someday, I will even meet Anne Fausto-Sterling in real life! In the meantime, thank heaven for the Internet.