Feminist Attitudes Towards High Heels
The high heel has been a central battleground of sexual politics ever since the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Many second-wave feminists rejected what they regarded as constricting standards of female beauty, created for the subordination and objectifying of women and self-perpetuated by reproductive competition and women's own aesthetics. Some feminists argue that the high heels were designed to make women helpless and vulnerable, perpetuating the gender role of males as protectors of the slowly staggering women. High heels have also been blamed for reducing the woman to a sex object by sacrificing practical comfort in favour of an alleged increase in sex appeal. Some second-wave feminists, such as Judy Grahn, have tied high heels to menstruation rituals that various cultures have used.
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“Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
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“Franceska: I was happy in the life I built up for myself. I put a fine high wall of music around me and nothing could touch me. I was safe and secure. And then you had to come along and knock it all down and I hate you for that.
Maxwell: On the contrary, you love me.”
—Muriel Box (b. 1905)
“And there were present
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—Samuel Foote (1720–1777)