Thursday, September 24: diction in Serena Williams' Catsuit Controversy Evokes the Battle over Women Wearing Shorts

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 I am missing lots of work from folks. These have been our assignments, so far this year. If you have not turned in one of the following, you have a zero in its place. If you have questions or concerns, please contact me. We can set up a zoom time, and on Wednesdays I have office hours from 9:30 to 10:30 and 1:30 to 2:30  See link here: https://classroom.google.com/c/MTQ5Mzc1Nzg1MTAz/m/MTc0MjYwODU2NDQ3/details

In class: today we are going to look very closely at the diction, the word choice, the author has used to write the article.

As we read through the article as a class, I have underlined words that evoke the speaker's (the author's) message.

What I would like you to think about is why the particular word was selected. The diction or word choice conveys or sends a certain message.  I will asking for your individaul ideas as we go along.

message

Our text:  Serena Williams' Cats

uit Controversy Evokes the Battle over Women Wearing Shorts

Vocabulary: please take the time to familiarize yourself with these words prior to reading the text.

* controversy-noun   disagreement, typically when prolonged, public, and heated

* French Open- major tennis tounament held in Paris. It began yesterday and runs until October 11. 

*scrutiny (noun) : critical observation or examination

* bifurcated (adjective): folded in two  (note that the prefix bi means 2)

* to rankle (verb) : to cause persistent annoyance or resentment

* aesthetics (noun): relating to the beautiful

*the old guard: the original or long-standing members of a group who are reluctant to accept change 

*satorial: (adjective) relating to clothing or dress

In this informational text, Deirdre Clemente discusses the controversy* surrounding what Serena Williams, a famous tennis player, decided to wear to the 2018 French Open*. Clemente uses this example to explore the attention that female athletes’ outfits have received historically. 

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At the French Open, Serena Williams wore a custom-made black catsuit. On Aug. 24, the president of the French Tennis Federation said the outfit “wouldn’t be back.” It “went too far,” he continued. It didn’t “respect the game and the place.”

Among Williams’ defenders, the pushback was swift — the decision indicative of how female athletes face more scrutiny and are held to outdated dress standards.

[3]As a historian of the American fashion industry, I’m not surprised when an outfit worn by a female athlete generates outrage. I thought of Suzanne Lenglen, the French tennis star of the late 1910s who shocked onlookers with her knee-length tennis dress. Coincidentally, Stade Roland Garros, the stadium where Serena wore her suit during the French Open, has a court named after Lenglen.

This is simply the most recent chapter of a century long debate over the place of informality and immodesty in our dress: how short can that skirt be? Should the first lady be able to don a tank top? What about wearing sneakers to prom? 

[5]Sportswear, which can be both informal and immodest, has served as a flashpoint in these debates — particularly for women.

In 1936, a sportswriter named Paul Gallico argued that female athletes and their clothing were offensive.

Women who play sports, he wrote, “stick out places when they play, wear funny clothes, get out of breath or perspire.” He didn’t like that because “it’s a lady’s business to look beautiful, and there are hardly any sports in which she seems able to do it.”

Nothing, it seemed, upset people more than women in shorts. Starting in the late 1920s, shorts became the much-contested replacement for bloomers, the puffy-legged, bifurcated garment  worn under long skirts. Women who did wear athletic garb were supposed to keep out of the public eye because it was deemed unfeminine and, yes, immodest. 

Female tennis players were on the frontlines of the battle for public acceptance of shorts. Even though tennis industry officials and country club muckety mucks wrote dress codes that outlawed shorts, many women refused to adhere to the rules and continued showing up to play wearing them.

[10]Some were thrown off the courts. But it’s hard to enforce dress codes when everybody’s doing it. Not surprisingly, this really rankled* the old guard.* 

“If you gals really knew how cute you look in a well-cut dress, you wouldn’t hanker to wear shorts,” one etiquette writer grumbled in the 1936 book, “Co-Ediquette: Poise and Popularity for Every Girl.” “Of course, you’ve got to be comfortable, ah, me! Even if you have to insult the aesthetic* sense of men to do it?”

Most women shrugged — and kept on wearing shorts, on and off the court. 

In time, shorts as hiking wear, shorts as gardening garb and shorts as loungewear became increasingly common. It seems the old guard had been worn down — or simply died off.

[15]By the end of the 1930s, younger women were acknowledging a shift in attitudes. “American women live 24 hours a day in sports clothes,” one college student told the Boston Post. “Husbands no longer come home and deliver stern lectures upon finding their wives cooking supper in shorts. It’s just taken for granted.”

While some husbands may have skipped the stern lectures, it took three more decades for shorts to fully reach widespread acceptance. 

But in tennis, notions of immodesty and informality die hard. When female tennis players such as Billie Jean King wore very short, gored skirts and sleeveless polo shirts in the 1970s, they were criticized for their “radical” outfits. Time and again, the powers-that-be in tennis push back on immodesty, and the players push forward towards personal choice and — dare we say — personal style.

So, we’ve seen this all before. New stuff — never-seen-before stuff — has long spelled trouble for female athletes and sparked public outcry.

[19]Today, the satorial* standards of what you can and can’t wear in certain settings have changed so radically that institutions can’t keep up. You almost feel sorry for the French official who announced the ban on the catsuit. In the big picture, he won’t do anything to stop the crawl of social change.

[20]And how did Serena Williams respond to being chastised for wearing her black catsuit?

She simply showed up a few days later to win U.S. Open matches wearing a tulle tutu.