Members of Britain’s Parliament stood tall for women last week. Members of the U.S. Congress . . . did not.
Yes, the GOP-led Congress celebrated both International Women’s Day and the start of Women’s History Month by trying to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s premiere providers of health care to low-income women.
Great timing, legislators!
But Parliament’s lawmakers – who about 70 years ago decided that good health care should be available to all, regardless of means, and established the National Health Service to fulfill that ideal, thus negating the need for organizations like Planned Parenthood – decided instead to devote their attention to a problem that has long plagued women worldwide.
They went after the pernicious practice of corporate dress codes mandating that women wear high heels during working hours.
You go, you adorable limeys! I salute you with my comfortable white sneakers!
Some years ago, my old friend Sara gloated that she was of an age to go for ease, not style, and she went everywhere in her comfy old-fashioned sneakers. If she wanted to add a bit of pizzazz to her outfit, she’d tie little pink pompoms on the back of them. And doggone it, she was right! Although I didn’t personally adopt the pompom flourish.
The Brits’ demand that corporate masters stop nitpicking their female employees’ attire was prompted by a receptionist who was sent home without pay when she showed up with flat shoes. Nicola Thorp – who was then working for a temp agency – was irked, and she started an online petition that quickly gathered more than 150,000 signatures and led to a parliamentary examination into such dress codes.
A lawmaker helping the investigation talked of “attitudes that belonged . . . in the 1850s.” Thorp’s agency’s dress code, for one, specified that women wear “non-opaque tights” (Britspeak for pantyhose), hair with “no visible roots” and “regularly applied” makeup. (You can be sure there wasn’t a similar code for men ruling out visible male-pattern bald spots and paunches over belts.)
Topping the demands: Women had to wear shoes with heels between two and four inches high. Four inches! To earn their paychecks women were forced to teeter around on tiptoe each day, toes unnaturally bent and crammed into little pointed shoes!
This is a bad idea, as a whole thicket of websites just a Google click away reminds us. We’re talking likely harm to feet, legs, hips and backs. Including ingrown toenails, bunions, irreversible damage to tendons and muscles, osteoarthritis of the knee, even sciatica. These are not good, people!
Not that such potential damage matters. Women are acculturated to love heels. The die is cast early in life, when little girls slip their feet into their mothers’ heels and totter around the living room to the cooing approval of the grownups. And a whole lot of grown women willingly submit to such tortures.
It’s nearly impossible to try to convince women not to wear them. The sad truth is that the posture of a person wearing high heels is somehow alluring. They thrust the body up and slightly forward. Legs are somehow both curvier and more slender.
For years, I was among them, proudly traipsing about 12 city blocks in three-inch heels to my first real grown-up job, thus joining the history of heel-wearing humans.
In fact, some say heels apparently first popped up, at least in hieroglyphics, when ancient Egyptian butchers devised them to avoid walking and working directly on the horrendous floors of the abattoirs. But they came into their own in Asia, when horsemen realized that heels helped them keep their feet in the stirrups.
They appeared in the west in the 1500s, and their first adopters were men, especially short men. Heels became quite the rage in fashionable circles in the 17th century. France’s Louis XIV was a real shrimp and thus deeply devoted to his red-soled pumps, which gave him height and his legs a comely curve he enjoyed exhibiting.
Men lost their monopoly on heels soon enough, though, when courtesans picked up the fashion, which then spread to other women of the court and leisure classes able to enjoy the luxury of totally impractical footwear.
And women have been wearing them ever since. But voluntarily!
Mandating heels is something else entirely, which was vividly demonstrated in the recent critically acclaimed and popular movie Hidden Figures, about the previously unheralded black women mathematicians who endured the endless indignities of Jim Crow racism in 1960s Virginia while ultimately triumphing in their contributions to early American space flight.
Perhaps the most enduring image lingering from the film is the repeated shot of Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who calculated the orbit of John Glenn’s historic first flight, having to race from her lab across NASA’s then-segregated Langley Research Center complex to be able to use the one “colored” women’s restroom.
And she was forced to make the brutal run – all day, every day, in any weather – in dress code-mandated high heels.
At least now in Great Britain, such pernicious codes are out, according to the current Conservative government’s women and equalities minister.
“Shod in heels or flats, we are collectively putting our foot down,” said Caroline Dinenage.
In new fashion news, there was a separate report last week that Stella McCartney – Sir Paul’s fashion designer daughter – was reviving the ludicrous pointy bra of the unlamented 1960s. I wonder if Minister Dinenage could be interested in snuffing that out at the start.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)