WHO TOLD US HOW TO DRESS?

Who started the dress code that Americans and most Europeans lived by for at least hundreds of years? It wasn't my mother, who told me how to dress for about fifteen years, when I started to try and get her to let me pick out some of my own clothes, but even then I didn't push back very hard. She was after all, my mother. Like it or not she was still the person cooking most of my meals and driving me to school and church and just about any other place I needed to be, or wanted to be. Movie on Friday night with my friends? I didn't want to walk five miles to the theater so mom took me. She wasn't afraid to remind me either. She lived through the Great Depression. By every account I've ever heard from people who lived through the Great Depression it wasn't any fun. So I got to be reminded occasionally, not too often, but often enough that I didn't forget, that mom and dad had both survived the Great Depression. 

They were also farmers who escaped to the city after World War II. Did I ever hear them brag about the war effort? When I wasn't being reminded about the Great Depression I was being fed stories about World War II and all the sacrifices Americans had to make in order to ensure The United States of America won the war. Patriotism was huge in the house where I grew up. Don't like it here, Don't like the USA? Then leave. It's far too precious a place to waste on those who are too ungrateful to appreciate it. You were allowed to complain about some new program, or against government abuse like reckless spending habits, or inadequate maintenance of city facilities. Poor police response, but not about the country as a whole. Disagreements are inevitable, but if you wanted to burn the flag or refuse to repeat the flag salute or stand for the National Anthem then as far as they were concerned you weren't welcome here. 

If I had ever told them I wanted to join a demonstration against the flag or if I didn't like the rules of our home, dropped out of school, or refused to work they would have said, 'We love you son, but no one is holding you here against your will. We have rules in this house and until you can afford to make it on your own you will live by those rules.' They meant it too. So when mom went shopping for clothes I didn't have much to say about style or brand name. If I was lucky I could pick the color, but I had to be careful about that too. And my mom frequently used examples of farmers when 'helping' me pick out clothes. Many of those are my favorite stories.

"Nope, you can't wear that, those are the type of clothes field hands wear and my kids are not going to school dressed like hicks." My mom had been a 'hick' and she was tired of that life and none of her kids were going to dress like that. She let us know that she didn't care what other kids were wearing. If their moms wanted them to look like that, that was their problem, not hers. Or mine evidently. In her defense during my teen years most schools had a dress code. Not uniforms those were for private schools and military personnel, not my moms kids. No, there were restrictions. Boys could not wear denim pants for example, and girls had to wear a dress or a skirt and not a short skirt either (no street walkers in our schools). 

"It is a distraction for the boys to see girls showing off too much of themselves, no one dared talk about a girls 'body' in those days (no vulgarity either). Skirts had to be at least two inches above the knee. And yes, there were some teachers and administrators who would use a ruler to measure if they suspected a violation. I've heard stories about some educators making girls kneel in the hallway so they could measure from the floor up thus ensuring a more accurate measurement. That never happened at my school and I hope it was never accepted practice at any school. I have no doubt that there were a couple of jerks somewhere in this vast country who were that stupid and hopefully the girls' fathers met them later for a severe 'counseling' session if the violator were a man and a slightly less intense, but still memorable, scolding for a female violator. 

So mom had to somehow satisfy the school requirements, make sure we didn't look like we 'just came off the farm', and we still maintained a little dignity among our schoolmates. The latter being the least important. There were some parents in our area who had also survived the difficulties of the Great Depression and World War II and were more traumatized by those events than others. It seemed to me that they were mostly from some of the larger cities around the Great Lakes and New York. Listening to their stories I think they may have had it worse than a lot of farmers, even farmers who were poor. My mom for example lived on a farm in a remote area of the state of Idaho. By the 1930's some areas in the state of Idaho had electricity, but not all. She lived in a house on a farm in an area with no electricity or running water. Their house was about 900 square feet and had two bedrooms; one for my grandparents and one for their nine children. The two oldest were boys, then a couple of girls and another boy and then mom, six girls, three boys, and a blind father. 

Even to a knucklehead like me that sounded like a hard life. I was living in a small city in Southern California in a stucco house with four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a fireplace, three bathrooms, and wall to wall carpeting. In every room. And a swimming pool in the backyard, and we were on a hill so I had a great view of the city, especially at night. Mom's house had a dirt floor and don't think she didm't mention that a couple of times. She wasn't into guilt though. She was into clean living and hard work. She also told me that one thing they didn't experience much on the farm was lack of food and they had a clean well and a good stove. In the city they had rationing. Food, clothing, tires, gasoline, lots of things were rationed and everyone was issued some sort of ration card, or sticker for their car, or other vehicles, which although not that many people could afford one, cars were also in short supply. All of the materials used to make cars had to be used to build ships, and tanks and troop transports and airplanes big and small, and uniforms and rifles, machine guns and bullets and bombs, and the troops had to be fed so canned foods disappeared from the shelves so they could send C-rats to the troops. Everyone was expected to help with the 'war effort' and everybody did. If anyone complained they were practically shunned by all of their neighbors who were getting 'condolence' telegrams from the President of the United States just about every day. 

In four years there were almost 500,000 military men and women killed fighting against tyranny overseas in order to make sure it didn't come here to mom's beloved America. And almost 700,000 came home with severe wounds, missing eyes, ears, arms and legs, or a foot or a hand, or a nose. And I was brought into this world by parents who'd lived through that. If you didn't salute the Flag you were dirt, or a commie, which I think was worse than dirt. She said that being a dirt poor farmer in Idaho had some perks too. Because they were farmers and her father was blind her brothers were not only exempt from the draft, they couldn't fight if they wanted to, "What's the matter with you boy! There are boys overseas who are fighting and dying and you don't want to help feed them? You get back to that plow and you grow the best crops you can so they've got something to eat! And don't come simpering to us anymore. We know what we're doing." One of her brothers did want to join the army because he was tired of farm life, it was boring, and he wanted to see a big city, but Uncle Sam wouldn't take him. 

I'm not exactly sure why one of them couldn't go, there were lots of boys from farms who were drafted into the army, or at least allowed to join during the War. The government had a quota system based on algorithms and things I don't understand and it could be that the ratio of girls to boys was off and the blind father, but mom said that just because they were girls didn't mean they lounged around the house all day cooking or something. There was lots to do and a farm keeps you busy. Anyway, her brothers didn't get drafted and they worked the farm. And shortly after the war ended two of the boys did leave the farm. One graduated from a university and became a teacher for almost twenty years before purchasing a farm of his own in Wyoming and returning to a life he had decided was not that bad after all. He got tired of the big city life and returned to farm life. It was different this time because he and his wife had saved enough money teaching school that they could afford a more comfortable farm than those they each had grown up on. They both lived long lives as 'gentleman farmers' in Wyoming and their farm was prosperous. 

So between the War Years and the Great Depression I was in a pickle. My classmates with parents who fled the filth and noise of the big city and were tired of things like rationing and curfews and other regimentation associated with city life, didn't really care what there kids wore. 

"Hell! Let 'em wear whatever they want!" They were so happy to be living in a place that had all of the comforts of the big city without the noise, crime and dirt that they just wanted to relax and enjoy life. Plus there were jobs to be had that paid real money. No more hawking fruit on the corner or running errands for the local market, or driving a beat up truck for some farmer on the outskirts of the city. The big shots in those days in the big cities were the few who wrangled jobs driving the city bus or some other government job. In California manufacturing was just getting started. There were lots of farms, but small cities were popping up everywhere. And large firms were hiring engineers and architects and there were oil refineries that paid big bucks. 

Life was good. People were getting paid enough to live a good life and the truth is people were happy. Many of them had learned things in the military that made them valuable to American corporations back home. People were dreaming big. We'd been looking at the moon for years and kind of, in an off handed way, wondering what it was like there, but the guy who lived across the street from us saw it differently; he was going to send a team of astronauts there and he worked for an aerospace company that was going to help him do it. And the year I got my driver's license they did do it. 

That was the backdrop I was living in while my mom was still basically dressing me. I put them on, but my mom told me what clothes I was going to wear. Kids whose parents came from the chaos of the grimy cities could wear whatever they wanted; kids whose parents came from the order of farm life wore what mom told them to wear. I wasn't the only one. I had some friends in the same boat. Girls from both backgrounds wore dresses or skirts with blouses and those blouses were properly buttoned if they had buttons and if it was some sort of pull over top they fit properly. No tight sweaters or even sleeveless and especially no bare bellies. Today girls go to high school wearing hot pants and a bra. We could actually use a few more moms who aren't afraid to teach their girls about appropriate dress. 

The question still nags at me; who told us how to dress? I'm not a student of fashion history, but I'm going to take this from the beginning of life. Life began in the Garden of Eden. Democrats unfortunately will lose interest entirely at this point since there is no such thing as the Garden, Adam and Eve or even God. Adam and Eve broke a major rule and were kicked out of their house and had to learn how to take care of themselves. Heavenly Father loves all of us but he has rules and He expects us to obey his rules. He also has taken great pains to make sure we know what those rules are so we know how to stay out of trouble and earn our way back into His house and enjoy an eternity continuing to learn from Him. With that in mind when Heavenly Father made them leave the garden paradise He created for them he gave them instruction on what to do. He didn't just yell at them and tell them to go fend for themselves, he told them they would now have to work for their existence. We know they received instruction because after Heavenly Father made them leave the Garden he made sure clothes were made for them to protect them from the elements. There had to be someone who explained to them what the clothes were for and how to wear them and even how to repair them when they were torn and replace them when they wore out. 

Thus began the world of fashion. We are told they had clothing made of skins to keep them safe in their new environment. It seems likely that Adam and Eve were shown how the process worked and for the first time they witnessed the death of one of their animals. It would have been the first death they had ever witnessed. I'm sure they were given a variety of other instructions as well. They needed to know how to till the earth, how to cook, every survival tool necessary for then to stay alive had to be taught to them. They were commanded to populate the earth, to have offspring and to teach them right from wrong. Since there was no one else around to teach them, Adam and Eve taught their children how to dress. Their children taught their children and after several years there were a lot of people dressing themselves after the manner they were taught by our original parents. 

Since God himself stated he created people in his own image; male and female, that must have been the way it was and Adam and Eve set the tone for the difference in dress between boys and girls. Nobody knows how many years ago that was, but it was a very long time ago, and although I'm sure clothing trends and styles have evolved over the years, there was always a standard of dress that set men and women apart from each other and it worked perfectly well from the days of Adam and Eve until now. So who's to say that Mother Eve and Father Adam made a mistake? And when did this rebellion begin? What rebellion? The rebellion that tells boys and girls, and men and women to cross dress; to go against nature and try to justify it. 

That is another topic for another essay. For now let's remind ourselves and each other that God is a God of order. There is order in the universe and when we find ourselves acting in a way that goes against that natural order God is not behind it, there must be another source. Who told us how to dress? Mother Eve and she taught her children how to dress and that manner of dress has been preserved through the ages. It is important to understand the order of the universe and our role in it. Eve did not put her sons in dresses and her daughters in Pants and she taught them to dress differently for a reason. Fashion as changed over the years, but boys and girls have dressed differently from each other forever and that's the way it should be. Mother Eve taught her children how to dress, and how to act, and what the roles of boys and girls were. Today a lot of people think they can change the way God made them. It cannot be done. Trying to change our nature is contrary to the order of the universe and an offense against God.