Friday, July 29, 2016

white, purple and green (and HRC)


You could read this as a flowering hedge - with white picket fence and russian sage beyond - that I passed on my way home.  Or you could note that these are the colors of the suffragette movement.  I don't know that I would have noticed if I hadn't read a piece today about how Hillary Clinton's white pants suit was a subtle shout-out to the fact that the suffragettes wore white, albeit with purple and green trimmings (maybe she was having a private joke with her underwear, since white is white, to me, and no one thought to claim Melania Trump's white dress as an icon of suffragism (that being said, nothing was funnier than the fact that Joyce Beatty, Rep. from Ohio, spoke wearing the identical dress, which her husband had rushed out and bought for her).  

However, I've read nothing on what seems to me a huge breakthrough - that she was wearing a pants suit in the first place.  I went to a school - 11-18 - that was supposedly relatively progressive, and we didn't have to wear uniforms.  But pants/trousers/and of course jeans were very emphatically Not Allowed.  Why?  It was an all girls' school, and the idea that we were learning to Dress How We Would for Going to Work (in our presumably professional jobs).  "Women never, ever wear trousers to work," our High Mistress (aka Headmistress, aka Principal) drummed into us.  Hagh!  I hope that she - Alison Munro - is revolving in her grave.

And as for sartorial representations of that glass ceiling shattering, I trust that you all saw Madeleine Albright's pin.

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