Margie’s Meanderings: 2/7/2023

I’ve been thinking about the Missouri state legislature’s recent update to the dress code for women. There was a lot of backlash calling the update sexist and accusing lawmakers of being fashion police. The creator of the amendment explained they were just clarifying the already existing dress code to mirror the dress code for men.

But we are not men!

When I entered the workforce after graduating from college, power suits for women were in vogue, power suits with impossibly high spiky heels. We all wore short white socks with our white Reeboks over nylons to commute and then changed into our heels when we got to work. Or, if you were me, you roller skated to work on your spiffy new quads designed by a little guy in a basement shop across the street from Cheers, and then changed into your heels.

Memories always make me digress!

Over 30 years later we’re still talking about the glass ceiling, but back in the late 80’s it was even worse for women trying to get a toe-hold in the business world. We somehow bought into this idea that if we dressed like men and acted like men, we would be accepted and respected by men as equal peers.

But we are not men!

Woman have qualities and strengths that are unique to us that are equally needed in the business world, in politics, in international negotiations. Last June, Liz Cheney shared this to applause and chuckling at the Reagan Presidential Library, “Let me also say this to the little girls and the young women who are watching tonight: these days, for the most part, men are running the world and it is really not going that well.”

We are needed! Not as women dressed up as men and acting like men, but as women being who we uniquely are. This world needs our compassion, our grit, our peace, our determination, our perception, our inner mama-bear, our itelligence, our multi-tasking, our beauty, our strength.

To require us to wear blazers so we mirror men in look and in deed is the very antithesis of what this world needs.