[Avodah] how women should dress

[Chana Luntz]

RMB writes:

> Who wants their 12 yr old daughter to look sexy?
> 
> In contemporary culture, from Madison Av to both men's and women's
> magazines to even evolutionary psychologiest the notions of looking
> aesthetically pleasing and looking sexually alluring have been deeply
> confused.

I absolutely agree.  And I am absolutely sure that nobody was ever
advocating looking sexually alluring.

But if we step back a generation or two, I think we have, within our own
culture, had conflicting views on the validity of looking (and smelling, is
that not what perfume is about) aesthetically pleasing.  The image that
springs to my mind, just at the moment, as one that no doubt pretty much
everybody on the list will know of, is that of Rebbetzin Jungreis - always
immaculately turned out, made up, the works.  And the interesting thing is
that I associate this as a very Hungarian thing - that is how a lot of the
women from the Hungarian communities I knew looked.  Hair meticulously
covered in beautiful sheitels, made up to the nines, clothing that came down
below the knee and covered the arms and yet looked a million dollars.  And
while I never belonged to the Hungarian community, from what all the poskim
say, under those beautiful sheitels one could have expected to see shaven
heads, something hardly regarded by anybody as the epitome of beauty.

And there was growing up in other communities a certain turning up the nose
at this particular mode of dress (especially as linked to the shaven heads)
- as formulated precisely thus, look at these women who make such an effort
to look good when they go outside and then are so unattractive at home.  And
R' Schwab's criticism reminded me very much of precisely that sort of
charge.

Now the irony of it all is that I am not really a make-up and perfume
person, my instinctive origins are very much from the intellectual litvishe
milieu in which brains were prized and along with that went a certain
attitude that it is shallow to pay any attention to how one looks, and it
was especially shallow to spend significant portions on one's day, when one
could have one's head in a book, busy making up.  And of course sod's law,
or perhaps it is the logical consequence of broadening one's horizons, but I
have a husband who likes these things very much.  But I struggle to wear
them, because, you see, they are really not me, and never have been, and
hence putting them on for my husband is like dressing up as somebody else.
And the last thing I really want in our relationship is for my husband to
have a relationship with a fictional character played by me, and with whom I
cannot identify.

And that, you see, is why I think that this idea of only in the context of
marriage is actually an impossibility.  For many women, these ornaments and
make up and the like characterise part of their self identity.  It is
something that developed through teenagehood and marriageability, as they
lived out there in the world (yes it would no doubt be different if they
followed the Rambam's position and only went out every month or so and had
arranged marriages), and they then carry that into marriage.  And for others
it does not.   Those, it seems to me, are the only two real choices.  You
can frown on ornaments and cosmetics as shallow, and that natural beauty
should shine through, without adornment, or you can take a view that it is
proper and acceptable to use hishtadlus, if you like, to enhance, and to
make that part of who you are.

And thus of those two choices, it seems to me that Chazal were firmly on the
side of the second, or at least regarded the second as acceptable and normal
and to be supported and hence did not read Yesheyahu's rebuke in the way
that R' Schwab does.

> :-)BBii!
> -Micha

Shabbat Shalom

Chana