One of my earliest memories is me in my mother’s closet trying on her high heels. I remember one pair so vividly: yellow pumps adorned with flowers and vines. I thought they were the height of fashion. I would walk around her room, feet slipping, and imagine myself as a grown woman, self-possessed and confident, as she was. One day, I would fit into those yellow heels and I would be a woman. Woman was a beautiful word to me. It meant my mother.
She wasn’t around much, my mother. She is self-made, the daughter of a hog farmer and a home economics teacher in rural Nebraska. She put herself through college and law school to give me and my brothers a better life. She worked long hours, sometimes eighty a week, and often went away on trips. I always looked forward to my mother coming home so I could see what she wore. My mother would arrive exhausted, but her hair and makeup would always be beautiful. We weren’t especially close but we connected over clothes, in those early years. I think that was her gift to me. She would go away for a week, but would always lay out clothes for the time she would be away to make sure I looked good. Our time spent together, just the two of us, was always shopping.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that our connection over fashion was my mother’s attempt to teach me how to be a woman—or at least, her version of a woman. She taught me how to dress to be taken seriously. As a woman who grew up with insurmountable obstacles to success, she taught me that dressing like you belong sometimes tricks people into thinking you belong. Dress is the armor she wore and she passed it onto me. Never overestimate the power of makeup, nails, curled hair, and pumps over people. You can make them believe anything. In this, she taught me much more. She taught me how to dress against beauty. Sometimes this is a much more effective way of making people take you seriously. To dress as if dress is beneath you communicates a carelessness about materiality. All black, light makeup, and glasses shows seriousness. She also taught me how to dress to be seen as a desirable woman. To show a little cleavage and wear heels just a touch too high demonstrates an effective femininity that makes people dismissive of you. I think this fluency in dress—a strategic freedom she could manipulate, in no small part because her cisness meant her femininity was less scrutinized—was her greatest weapon in a world commanded by misogyny.
All of this is dress. Dress is a comprehensive guide to existence in a patriarchal society. Dress is how we present ourselves to the world. It is how we speak, wash, coif, rouge, pluck, shave, touch, smile, listen, clothe, and perfume. It is the attributes we communicate in order to be taken seriously. This is what I got from my mother. Don’t speak too loud. Dress to impress. You can attract by wearing heels.
I suspect most of what my mother taught me about femininity was subconscious. It was what her mother taught her, and her mother before her. There’s a genealogy to the way I was taught to dress. For generations, the women in my family have taught each other how to navigate the world. It is knowledge I will pass down to my daughter. I will teach her dress. I hope to give her something more. I hope to teach her the joy of the sartorial, whether it be the masculine, the feminine, or the nebulous other that fosters expression. But even if I tell her she can dress however she likes, I will still, subconsciously, impart upon her the questions I ask myself when I open my closet doors every morning: How should I dress today? Who must I impress? Who must I convince to take me seriously?
I chafed against the restraints my femininity placed upon me in my teenage years. I was righteously angry. I hated the rules my mother had taught me. This, of course, caused an immense amount of strife in my household. I denied my mother’s idea of my fated inheritance and chose my own path. My favorite color was no longer pink and my hair was always tangled. My dress in those days built bridges between the masculine and the feminine. Blazers that hid my chest or trousers that denied the existence of hips. On days I wanted to be feminine, but in ways that weren’t within my mother’s vision of femininity, it was daisy dukes and tiny, tiny tops. I wanted a sartorial life outside of gender. I revolted against what was safe, prescribed, and embraced something else. Now, as if by divine force, I’ve returned to what I was taught. I take risks, to be sure, but my mother’s voice is ever present, telling me what is too far. I like my modest cotton dresses and I love my long hair. I find joy in the processes of womanhood and the minutiae of aesthetics. But there’s always the question: is this all I get? All I have from generations of women’s knowledge is how to dress? I understand it, begrudgingly. If your whole life is dependent on the patriarchy seeing you as worthy, you learn how to dress as worthy.
I wonder if me, in my mother’s closet, slipping into yellow pumps was a product of who I am or what I was taught. Did watching my mother dress in heels every morning tell me that heels were a requirement for femininity? Did my mother, tugging down my shirt over my stomach as a teen, tell me all I needed to know about what a dirty thing it is to be a woman in this world or is my chastity something inherent? Detangling my personal style from my mother’s instructions on performing femininity only leaves me with more knots. All I can tell you is this: for all the teachings and lessons passed down over generations, not one has protected me from my reality of being a woman. They never made me much safer. They never made me more comfortable at night.
And yet, it is absolutely glorious, our dress. My mother willed me blue jeans, cowgirl boots, and wool ponchos. We wore dresses and boots to weddings and funerals, our dress so beautifully rural. We knew how to dress for sweat and labor. I love the family gatherings when the women all sit around, talking of the day, in their worn Carharrt coats and scotch caps. That version of our dress felt so much ours. We didn’t try to be beautiful or attractive. We lived and worked in that dress, so utilitarian. I never felt constrained in that dress. Despite all the curling irons and mascara wands I saw my mother use every day, she was never more beautiful than when she came into the house, sweaty and tired, scraping cow shit off her boots.