It’s not only in Afghanistan or the Middle East that dress codes are used to reinforce traditional gender roles and the subjugation of women and girls. 

This recent article in the Washington Post reports on the successful suit of three young plaintiffs against  Charter Day School in North Carolina, which serves kindergarten through the eighth grade and is a tuition-free open-enrollment public school. The girls challenged the school’s requirement that they wear skirts, jumpers, or skorts as part of their school uniforms.  

Baker Mitchell, the founder of the Roger Bacon Academy, which runs Charter Day School, defended the code as necessary to “preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men.”   Apparently, he thought that the code would prevent “teen pregnancies” and “casual sex,” while creating a learning environment that “embodied traditional values.” 

In court the school argued that eliminating the “visual cues” of the skirts would undermine respect between the sexes and that the policy was necessary to preserve “order and discipline.” So, one obvious effect of the policy was to teach girls that it is their responsibility not to disturb or provoke boys by dressing inappropriately.  The school seems not to have paid attention to the girls who reported boys looking up their skirts during safety drills that required them to crouch and cover their heads.

U.S. District Court Judge Malcolm Howard, who found the policy unconstitutional, observed that the policy required girls to “pay constant attention to the positioning of their legs during class, distracting them from learning, and has led them to avoid certain activities altogether, such as climbing or playing sports during recess, all for fear of exposing their undergarments and being reprimanded by teachers or teased by boys.” So, the second effect of the policy was to undermine girls’ agency.  Indeed, the only one of the three plaintiffs still attending the school responded to the decision by remarking, “You can really do more in pants than you can in skirts,” she said. “I’m just so happy.”

Unfortunately, this is hardly an isolated incident.  Since 2000, anxiety about the effect of girls’ bodies on boys has spawned a wave of dress codes in U.S. middle schools.  If you’re interested in the issue, I discuss it in Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 61-66.

EDITOR’s NOTE: You may also wish to take a look at some of these resources, several of which contain pictures of the kinds of outfits that can get girls sent home from school or forced to wear baggy school-provided t-shirts over their clothes for the rest of the day.

• National Education Association. “When School Dress Codes Discriminate.”
• Lyn Mikel Brown. “Girls Against Dress Codes.” ReThinking Education.
• Sasha Jones. “Do School Dress Codes Discriminate Against Girls?” Education Week.
• Talia Lakritz. “Times Students and Parents Said School Dress Codes Went Too Far.” Insider.

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