Skirts Skirts Everywhere!

[BrotherTailor]

We must embrace life with humility and meekness. Changes and all. As an adult I have developed a deforming and painful condition for which nothing can be reasonably done. This has totally changed my life. I have had to give up many of the things once taken for granted as to my abilities and capabilities. I simply cannot do what I used to do.

Now, I could resent this and go through life angry and bitter about it. I chose to adapt and accept this as God's will. I walked away from an enterprise that I had spent ten years building up. It is all about attitudes, and a willingness to see ourselves as servants to others, giving place to honour another, putting ourselves last. In the end, it matters not what station or rank we hold in life. We are all equal. There is a sense in which it takes more discipline and courage and strength to live in a self-effacing way. The natural tendency is for self-justification, self-assertion, competition, one-up-manship, and on and on. I just walked away. My goals and dreams lie elsewhere. It is to this end I must bend my will.

I place no barriers to anyone else's journey. Godspeed to each one.

I am different...

[sapphire]

I presented a short social history of post WW2 changes in the US that led to women seeing skirts as objects of opression in an attempt to provide background and understanding for a comment that Bob made.

These are things that happened in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. They are historical record and as such are not open to "what should have been done"

[Skirt Chaser]

It seems like up until 50 years ago, the whole female world wore lovely dresses and skirts. Page after page shows women doing everything imaginable, from officework to housework, to farmwork, to gardening, and cleaning, to cleaning eavestroughs all wearing dresses and skirts. It must have made the world a more interesting and beautiful place. I can only imagine darkly what sort of competitive monster has poisoned the minds of Modern Woman in her almost categorical rejection of the skirt or dress.

I think "desire" and "comfort" are the twin evils leading to women dressing as they please. I grew up in the eighties so browsing my grandmother's 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica set was always fascinating- what an alien world it showed. The women did look nice enough in the articles about cooking and teaching young children but I would not have wanted to wear those clothes other than as a costume or be limited to the options they presented as what women do.

Girls in their frilly, impractical play clothes looked dressed for a party rather than real life. The emphasis seemed to be on the importance of being pretty as opposed to doing stuff in the world and using their minds. I'm glad I didn't have to grow up under those restrictions. I don't mourn the loss of the days gone by and those looks. Skirts certainly do look nice but I'm happy to get my fix here looking at people feeling free in skirts rather than hindered by them.

Quiet Mouse

[sapphire]

QM
Thanks for bring up the frilly impractical play clothes that girls were subjected to. I grew up in the 1950 and had to wear those frelly impractical dresses, and get scolded when I got them dirty or damaged. Eventually, my Mom let me wear pants for play.

One positive for all those skirts and petticoats that girls were required to wear was avoiding getting damagged when getting a beating. My grandmother was born in 1896 and had to wear layer upon layer of skirts and petticoats. How she avoided heatstroke is a marvel. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Anyway, Gran was not al all the delicate type and kept running into trouble for which she'd get a dose of my great grandfather's belt. Only Gran would not sit still for the beating but ran into the forest, her skirts taking the blows of the belt.

Once into the forest, shed tuck the skirts around her waist so she could run faster and go deep into the forest where no one coukd find her.