The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Read Free Book Online Page A

to dress like ‘a woman.’”
    “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?”
    “Well, the women in
Buren
v.
City of East Chicago
had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’”
    “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?”
    “Don’t bet on it. In
Diaz
v.
Coleman
, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.”
    It would be funny if it weren’t true. And when we see that British law has evolved a legal no-win situation very close to this one, a pattern begins to emerge.
    We can save the British woman the baffling guided tour through her wardrobe: It’s the same situation, if not worse. The GOQ is defined as permitting “sex discrimination” when the job requires, among other things, “physical form or authenticity—for example, a model or an actor.” But since 1977,
M. Schmidt
v.
Austicks Bookshops, Ltd
. has been broadly interpreted to make it legal for her to be hired or fired generally on the basis of physical appearance. Miss Schmidt lost her job and the case because she wore trousers to her work in a bookstore. The Employment Appeal Tribunal dismissed her case, which was based on the fact that the dress code was more restrictive for women than men, byruling not only that an employer is “entitled to a large measure of discretion in controlling the image of his establishment,” but also that the whole issue is insignificant: They ruled that telling a woman how to dress was no more than trivial. In
Jeremiah
v.
Ministry of Defense
, employers tried to avoid hiring women for higher-paid work on the grounds that it was dirty and would ruin their looks. Lord Denning in his ruling mused: “A woman’s hair is her crowning glory . . . She does not like it disturbed, especially when she has just had a ‘hair-do.’” The employers’ counsel suggested that compelling women to ruin their hairdos at a higher rate of pay would lead to industrial unrest.
    Dan Air was challenged in 1987 for hiring only pretty young women as air crews; they defended their discrimination on the basis of customer preference for pretty young women. (Two years later, the publisher of
USA Today
, in an editorial using the same logic, would call for a return to the days when stewardesses were hired pretty and young and fired upon maturing.)
    In
Maureen Murphy and Eileen Davidson
v.
Stakis Leisure, Ltd
., we can see the wave of the future. Waitresses objected to a change in “image” that put them in a “more revealing” uniform and forced them to wear makeup and nail polish. One waitress described the costumes as “straight out of
The Story of O
,” consisting of a miniskirt and a plunging cleavage over an external corset or basque so tight that the women bled from it under their arms. One of the litigating women was pregnant when she was forced to wear it. Management admitted that the change was imposed on the women as a sexual draw for male customers. Waiters had no such requirements made of them. (Incidentally, the waitresses’ obligation to appear in a state of undress in front of the opposite sex violates
Sisley
v.
Britannia Security Systems
, which ruled that the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act could be used to “preserve decency or privacy” from the opposite sex while “being in a state of undress.”) The women’s counsel got nowhere pointing out that makeup, revealing costumes, and nail polish sexualize the dress code in a way that
cannot
be parallel for men. This case too was dismissed as
de minimis
—too trivial to consider. The women lost the case but kept their jobs—for six weeks. They have both been fired; they have filed a complaint charging unfair dismissal.
    So if you refuse to wear a sexually exploitive costume to workin Great Britain, you can lose your job. But in
Snowball
v.
Gardner Merchant, Ltd
., and
Wileman
v.
Minilec Engineering, Ltd
., a woman’s