My year of modesty
I swore off makeup and covered my hair, arms and legs for nine months. It was frightening -- and liberating
Topics: Beauty culture, Body Wars, Editor's Picks, Feminism, Headscarves, Hijab, Life stories, Life News
The idea for my modesty experiment began when I worked in New York City as a receptionist for a company at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, while I edited short films on the side. Every morning I would shoehorn myself onto the train with thousands of expensive-smelling, coiffed women who somehow managed to keep their hair looking great under wool caps in winter and despite hot, stinky gusts of subway backdrafts in the summer. It was an army of ladies sporting fitted waistlines, toned arms, blown-out hair, full faces of makeup and heels (which was incredible, considering all the walking we all had to do). Everyone looked good, no one was phoning it in, and we were all stylish.
I hated every second of it. It felt like putting on a costume. In fact, that was what I called it: my “Grown-up Suit.” Still, given where I worked, I had to look like that. Every. Damn. Day.
By contrast, on my way home to the warehouse I inhabited in Williamsburg, I would look at Hasidic women in their headscarves and long skirts with something akin to envy. Gawd, I thought. How nice would it be not to have to think about stupid crap like the latest accessories and whether my hair had gone limp?
Mind you, these Hasidic women were stylish: They looked good. They just didn’t look like everyone else. These women were not “fashionable” first, like most of the women I saw everywhere else — they seemed to be focused on something else, something more important than what was trendy. They had a very good reason for not dressing like the train-squishing crowd of Fifth Avenue, and I wanted a reason too.
Out of curiosity, while I sat behind my desk answering phones or prepping conference rooms I began to research Quaker, Jewish and Muslim belief systems, which allowed adherents of both sexes to dress modestly for spiritual reasons. I briefly considered beginning to dress like a Quaker, but I thought to myself, “What’s my excuse? I can’t just magically dress like a Quaker or a Muslim because I’m tired of dressing like an American.”
Eventually I scrapped the idea: I had no excuse to buck the trend. Plus, it would be a little ridiculous: “No, I dress like this because I’m pretty sure the beauty industry is a ploy to keep us from thinking about how to break into the boys’ club of corporate America, and obsession with your appearance is frivolous and time-consuming! Would you like some more coffee, expensively dressed and perfectly nice female co-worker?” No, thanks.
Two years later, I was a first-year student at Candler Theological Seminary in Atlanta. (Don’t ask how I went from wanting to be a filmmaker in New York City to applying to seminary. It’s as long and weird a tale as you might think.) One day, a woman came to my “Women in Church History” class. She had spent some time in the Middle East with her husband (who is Middle Eastern) and children, and while there she had been required to cover her hair and adhere to particular clothing requirements.
She was there to talk specifically about hijab, the modesty requirements for many Muslims, and its effect on women. To a classroom full of vocal, educated feminists who were eager to prove themselves, this lecture might have been your typical Islam-slamming discussion on whose fault it is that men desire women (it’s men’s, in case you’re wondering). I was ready to go to battle.
Instead, it was a shock to all of us.
The speaker explained very clearly how much she had enjoyed (and admittedly, sometimes hated) dressing in accordance with modesty rules. She talked about her daughter who, being half-Muslim, had decided to wear a headscarf at age 8 soon after returning to the States from overseas. The speaker didn’t advocate for hijab, but she certainly wasn’t opposed to it.
This was not the podium-pounding, acrimonious discussion I had prepared for. Instead of feeling self-righteous and angry, I felt inspired — and profoundly unsettled. I didn’t know it then, but what I had learned about modest dress was teaching me about my own hypocrisy.
After class I retreated to my favorite couch — the one on the fifth floor the faculty didn’t usually catch me napping on — and buried my nose in that week’s reading assignment, “Muslim Women in America.” It’s not possible, I thought, that women would feel freer dressed modestly, that women would choose to be ashamed of their bodies.
But it wasn’t shame, I soon learned. In fact, for many women, it was pride. It was a desire to be considered for things other than what their hairstyle communicated, or whether their butts were shaped right — a desire that many people, not just women, share today.
In America, Islamic dress is often a choice, and the women who make this choice are declining to endorse Western Imperialism and the sexualization of their bodies. It’s a way of expressing modesty and resisting the pressure to be scrutinized against Western standards of beauty.