“Fashion Feminists” versus the “Freaks”: The Implications of Changing Hair and Dress Styles for Feminist Activism in the 1960s and 1970s

Miniskirts, bell-bottoms and blue jeans are ubiquitous in our image of female fashions of the 1960s and 1970s, but no historical scholarship thus far has explored how changes in dress and self-presentation shaped the politics of the era. This paper connects changing female fashions to the growing feminist movement by illustrating how fashion and dress were a means for “ordinary” women to engage in women's liberation without participating in organized feminist politics. Famously, fights against the “midiskirt” in 1970 revealed a new assertiveness among women to not blindly follow the dictates of the fashion industry. Moreover, when schools, workplaces and social institutions attempted to restrict changing female fashion styles, women fought back with petitions, protests and lawsuits, claiming a right to choose their own style of dress. This language of “choice” reflected one of the main arguments of feminist activism, demonstrating the effect of women's liberation on mainstream women in the 1970s. However, many women also wished to distance themselves from the politicization of dress by radical feminists, who used short hairstyles and traditionally masculine attire to challenge broader conceptions of gender. Perceiving these tactics as rejecting womanhood and femininity altogether, mainstream women separated themselves from radical feminists by maintaining that pantsuits could still be “feminine,” and rejecting feminist calls to abandon makeup, high heels, and miniskirts as oppressive to women. “Fashion feminists” thus maintained that liberated women could choose a feminine style and still be liberated simply by having a choice, separating themselves from the feminist “freaks” that seemed to reject their female identities entirely. While dress and fashion allowed ordinary women to participate in women's liberation, debates over the politicization of self-presentation also divided mainstream women from women's liberationists, suggesting one of the origins of the polarization of women in the 1970s over the meanings of feminist activism.