The puzzle is, that this good sense is not applied to the wearing of high heeled shoes by adult women. The majority of women in public life who provide role models for girls and young women, newsreaders, MPs, party leaders, businesswomen, female actors on television, wear shoes that signal subordination in an even more direct way than the ones that Clarks provides to children. Their high heels create problems for walking and standing and make running, including escape from male aggressors, impossible. Women in high heels suffer the constraints upon locomotion once imposed upon foot-bound women in China. Children see women in this degrading footwear and are likely to see the practice as normal if not exemplary.
Lest anyone should argue that high heels empower women, it should be pointed out that the women at the BBC who wear them earn considerably less money than their male counterparts, even for jobs that are pretty much identical. The social requirement that women should wear crippling shoes is not separate from their lack of earning power, but reflects it. The powerful do not choose to obey appearance and behaviour norms that undermine their dignity and mobility.
If there was not considerable pressure to do so, it is hard to imagine that women such as politicians and television personalities would choose to walk in pain and be unable to run for the bus. The dignity of women political leaders is undermined if they fall or lose their unsuitable feminine shoes, as Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia, did on more than one occasion. Yet the way in which their fetish costume lessens their authority in public is never remarked upon, as if their apparel were simply a fact of nature rather than the effect of forces of power.
Sheila Jeffries is right, as usual.
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