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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Famous quotes containing the words feminist, attitudes, high and/or heels:
“With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“Rarely do American parents deliberately teach their children to hate members of another racial, religious, or nationality group. Many parents, however, communicate the prevailing racial attitudes to their children in subtle and sometimes unconscious ways.”
—Kenneth MacKenzie Clark (20th century)
“The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“You show me a politician with his heels ten feet in the air, and by Judas priest, I’ll show you an honest politician.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)