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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—Katherine Berman Mariano (b. 1957)
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—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)