This week Chelsea Sarvis, a female student in Chapin, SC, won the right to wear pants to her high school graduation. No, seriously, this really happened this past week, and at a public school. It only feels like 1950. Apparently the principal, Mike Satterfield initially backed the school’s antiquated dress code, which forbids girls from wearing pants, even dress pants, at the commencement ceremony. Said the local news station:
Satterfield initially stood by the dress code and said he believed it was fair.
“It’s certainly appropriate to ask young ladies to wear a dress or a nice shirt and a nice outfit and young men to wear slacks, a shirt and a tie,” said Satterfield. “If a young man showed up in flip-flops and shorts, and said I wanted to walk, we’d say no you can’t.”
Give me a fucking break. Since when do women’s dress slacks not constitute a “nice outfit?” They’re not the equivalent of shorts and flip-flops and never have been. I don’t know if Mr. Satterfield has been hiding under a rock for the past, say, 30 years or so, but women–including a recent presidential candidate, a couple of Supreme Court justices, a whole bunch of Senators, and the Speaker of the House–have been flagrantly wearing pantsuits in much more august places than Chapin High School.
Ms. Sarvis, who recently won the “Heart of Chapin” Award for her exceptional school spirit rightly pointed out: “I just don’t see why girls have to wear dresses…If it looks nice, why can’t they wear it?”
Well, yeah. The ban on dress slacks was so obviously outdated and sexist that Principal Satterfield began receiving e-mails from former students, parents and “concerned community members” about it.
Ultimately Satterfield backed down in a letter he sent home with students, and managed to admit he was wrong, even if his excuse for enforcing the policy was a little suspect:
“You should also know that the guidelines regarding appropriate attire for graduation have been the same for at least 25 years, well before I arrived at CHS. To my knowledge there has never been a complaint of this nature. Most importantly you should know that I am not opposed to young ladies wearing dress slacks to this or any other event, regardless of how it was portrayed in the news.”
Okay, maybe the fact that the policy is 25 years old might have been a tip-off that it needed revisiting? And if he wasn’t opposed to young ladies wearing dress slacks, then why would he initially try to prevent this young lady from wearing them?
My guess is he’s one of those male principals who loves rules for rules’s sake–an attitude that 99% of the time goes hand-in-hand with Patriarchy and privilege. My own high school principal was the same way, and he and I wound up at loggerheads more than once when I was a student (but I was lucky: my mother was also a principal in the same school system, which protected me from retaliation. Other kids were not as fortunate and paid a high price for questioning authority.). Principal Satterfield had a knee-jerk reaction: someone was questioning the rules and rules must be defended! It wasn’t until a number of people pointed out the obvious that he realized the rule was ridiculous and indefensible, and, if his letter is to be believed, contrary to his own views.
At any rate, I really wish Ms. Sarvis well. Apparently she also wore a tuxedo to prom, which, IMHO, is totally kick-ass. It may seem like a small thing to get this petty rule overturned, but I think small victories matter, and it clearly got a lot of people in her hometown thinking about fairness and sexism, including–if belatedly–the man in charge.
Just yesterday I was screaming GET ME OUT OF SOUTH CAROLINA and now I have another reason. Yesterday’s reason? The governor signed a law allowing loaded guns on school property. Yep. This place is INSANE.
Also, at the university where I work, guess what they wear to graduation? Girls wear white dresses, boys wear white dinner jackets. It looks like a creepy mass wedding or maybe a giant debutante ball. I prefer the dignity of academic regalia.
Sounds like he should meet my boss.
I wore a tux to prom. And to my graduation, I wore… well, my favourite ‘I look like a grownup’ blazer and no hat, so my parents could see my face. Granted, I live in Holland, so graduation wasn’t very formal (no gowns or funny hats with tassles), but I don’t think any school here could get away with mandated dresses.
Usually I heart you funnyface but I graduated from that college and I’m sort of insulted. There was nothing creepy or weird about wearing a white sun dress instead of a cap and gown. SC in May is one hot-ass place and I would have died of heat stroke in anything polyester. For the record, no one said boo if a woman wore pants instead – several did. It may be traditional and Southern but the school didn’t force anything on us the way this principal was trying to do.
It would be GREAT if EVERYONE wore dresses to the Graduation – INCLUDING THE GUYS!!!!
I’m certainly not insulting the students who graduate here, and I clearly like the school and think it’s a good one– I work here and am now a student here too! I just think it’s an odd spectacle, though I get that it’s tradition. I graduated in the South in May in a cap and gown, at an outdoor ceremony, myself.
dear principal: UR DOIN IT RONG.
Funnyface and Blondgrlz-
Would that college be in a particularly historic and coastal city? Because I go there (yay)!
And, FWIW, I plan to wear a white tux to my graduation, if I graduate from there (being an out-of-state student, those are slim chances).
In other news, I’ve been on a Buddy Holly and Four Seasons kick lately, so the title of this post felt kind of ironic for me. Yeah.
vegkitty- indeed! we should probably take this elsewhere so as not to threadjack, but you can clicky my sn to get to my blog and my email addy, since we’re both on the same campus!
I got into a huge fight with my 8th grade chorus teacher, who wanted to force all the girls in choir to wear skirts at the uniform. Her statement was “Heavier girls might feel more comfortable in a skirt.” Mine was “Then give them that CHOICE. I am NOT wearing a skirt.”
I did not know the term ‘genderqueer’ at the time, but I refused to wear a dress. I told her in front of the class that I would rather change my student designation to male than wear one for her sake.
I won, she didn’t make us wear skirts. Though she did have the boys wear bowties and girls “rosettes”. Grrr designating sex by clothing options.
It still pisses me the hell off that men can run around topless outdoors in public, but if women try to wear as little as a bikini top we get yelled at, and topless we get taken in for ‘indecent exposure’. That law is so blatantly sexist. What’s indecent about a woman’s body, hmm? The breasts? But some men have far larger breasts than I, and can still go topless. And some women have no breasts at all, but they cannot. What the hell? Obviously a body control issue.
(Much ranting, gendered clothing norms being a huge pet peeve of mine.)
@Magnetic Crow
I hear ya! At camp when I was 14, all the girls got a huge lecture on what was “appropriate behavior” for women our age (read: stop talking about blowjobs. It’s weirding out the counselors.) Part of that was a big long speech on how it wasn’t “appropriate” to play sports in just sports bras and shirts.
The collective response was, “Um… the boys run around shirtless. It’s not our faults that they get gaga over our bellies and inch-and-a-half of cleavage.”
The counselor leading the discussion, in typical fashion, mumbled something about telling the boys to put on shirts.
Needless to say, I didn’t love being a counselor there years later and having to enforce those kinds of rules.