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 DRE S S I N G FO R T H E C ULT UR E WA RS

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 DRESSING FOR THE
CULTURE WARS
ST Y L E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S
OF SE L F - P R ES E N TAT I O N
IN THE 1 960 s AN D 1 970 s

BETTY LUTHER HILLMAN

university of nebraska press | lincoln & lond on

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 © 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University
of Nebraska. Acknowledgments for the use of
copyrighted material appear on page xi, which
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United
States of America

Publication of this volume was assisted by the

Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of
Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of the University
of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luther Hillman, Betty.

Dressing for the culture wars:
style and the politics of self-presentation
in the 1960s and 1970s / Betty Luther Hillman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8032-6975- 0 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8032-8444-9 (epub)
isbn 978-0-8032-8445-6 (mobi)
isbn 978-0-8032-8446-3 (pdf)
1. Clothing and dress—Sex differences—United
States. 2. Clothing and dress—Social aspects—United
States. 3. Fashion—Social aspects—United States. 4.
Fashion—United States. 5. Feminism—United States. 6.
Sex—United States. 7. Sex role—United States. I. Title.
gt605.h57 2015
391.00973— dc23
2015017201

Set in Sabon Next by M. Scheer.

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 CO NT E NTS

li s t o f i llu s trati o ns vii

ac k n ow le d gm e nts ix
i nt ro du c ti o n: The Significance of Style
in American Culture and Politics xiii

1. “You Can’t Tell the Girls from the Boys”: Changing

Styles among American Youths, 1964–1968 1
2. “What to Wear to the Revolution”: Self-Presentation
Politics in Social Movement Activism 31
3. “No Woman Can Be Free . . . Until She Loses
Her Femininity”: The Politics of Self-Presentation
in Feminist Activism 61
4. “Wearing a Dress Is a Revolutionary Act”:
Political Drag and Self-Presentation in the
Gay Liberation Movement 91

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 5. “Everyone Should Be Accustomed to Seeing
Long Hair on Men by Now”: Style and
Popular Culture in the Late 1960s to 1970s 123
6. “Ours Should Not Be an Effort to Achieve
a Unisex Society”: Legal Regulations of Personal
Presentation in the Workplace 155
Epilogue: The Politics of Style in Retrospect 187

no te s 1 91
b i b li o gra ph y 229
i nde x 245

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 ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Campaign volunteer getting “Clean for Gene” xiv

2. Students protesting suspensions for long hair in 1968 3
3. Unisex pantsuits 25
4. Attack on a longhaired antiwar protestor 33
5. Black Power activist Angela Davis 41
6. Protestors at the Miss America Pageant in 1968 64
7. “Stamp Out High Heels” Flyer 69
8. Women’s liberationists demonstrating change of style 73
9. Gay activists at a rally 96
10. A poster advertising political drag 101
11. Gay activists in drag 104
12. “Macho Man” gay image on The Insider 121
13. New Yorker cartoon of men’s long hair, 1972 133
14. Midiskirt protest, 1970 138

vii

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 ACK NOW L E D G ME N TS

This book began as a dissertation during my

years in graduate school at Yale University, and both projects have
benefited enormously from the guidance and support of my adviser,
Joanne Meyerowitz. She has been a wonderful mentor, and I’m grate-
ful to have worked with her. I’m also thankful to Matthew Jacobson,
George Chauncey, and Robert Gordon, for their astute comments and
suggestions, and to Joanne Freeman, Steve Pitti, John Mack Faragher,
and Mary Lui, for their scholarly feedback and support. I am grateful
for the invaluable input from Nancy Cott, Nancy Hewitt, Susan Ware,
and anonymous readers at a number of scholarly journals. Nancy
Hewitt’s workshop group at the 2008 Schlesinger Library Summer
Seminar on Gender History provided crucial feedback early in my
research. Many other friends and colleagues also helped to shape my
thoughts on this topic, especially Adam Arenson, Anne Blaschke,
Ryan Brasseaux, Debbie Dinner, Brian Distelberg, Kate Kokontis,
Ana Minian, Katherine Mooney, Lauren Pearlman, Aaron Potenza,
Tim Retzloff, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Miti von Weissenberg. I’d

ix

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 like to offer special thanks to Stephanie Kenen and Amy Dru Stanley,
my mentors at Harvard and the University of Chicago. In particular,
I never would have made it through graduate school without Katie
Turk. No matter where our paths will lead, I hope we’ll continue to
be on panels together discussing all that the world needs to know
about gender history.
I am thankful to the archivists and librarians who helped me to
find critical sources in my research, in particular, Tim Wilson at
the San Francisco Public Library, Rebekah Kim at the glbt Histori-
cal Society of Northern California, and Kevin Pacelli and Gregory
Eow in the microfilms division at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.
I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Univer-
sity of Chicago, and Yale University for their financial support, and
Edward Barnaby, Pamela Schirmeister, and especially Marcy Kaufman
for their administrative support during my time at Yale.
Alicia Christensen believed in this project and lent her support
and advice as I was writing this book. I am grateful for comments
from Gael Graham as well as an anonymous reviewer, both of whom
seemed to understand what my project was “about” and offered sug-
gestions that helped to strengthen it. Thanks also to Daley El Dorado,
Maggie Boyles, and the publication and marketing teams at the Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press. Judy Wu believed in my work and published
my article in Frontiers, which is what connected Alicia Christensen
to me in the first place. She has been a generous mentor, and I’m
grateful for her support.
In my quest to find engaging images for this book, I am thank-
ful for the time and generosity of Tricia Gesner, Rosemary Morrow,
Nichole Calero, Karen Hagberg, Susan Carter, Jeanne Cordova, Tim
Wilson, Jim Baldocchi, Christina Moretta, Merrideth Miller, Meredith
Eliassen, Michael Denneny, Marjorie Bryer, Cheryll Fong, Bernard
and Howard Gotfryd, and the “wrong” Rita Goldberg.
For three summers during graduate school, I taught history courses
at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, which
was always the highlight of my year. I’m particularly indebted to
the students in my summer 2009 course, American Studies: The

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 Sixties, whose insights about cultural and political conflicts in the
1960s helped to shape this project in crucial ways. I’m also grateful
to Galen White and many others at cty for fun times. Teaching at
cty inspired me to return to a career in secondary school teaching,
and I’m lucky to have landed at Phillips Exeter Academy, with won-
derful students and colleagues. I’m thankful for the support of Meg
Foley and Bill Jordan, the previous and current history department
chairs, as well as to each of my history colleagues, for their enthusi-
asm and dedication to the study of history.
Portions of material in chapters 2, 3, and 5 have appeared in an arti-
cle entitled “‘The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power’:
The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women’s Libera-
tion,” published in Frontiers. Portions of materials in chapter 4 have
appeared in an article entitled “‘The Most Profoundly Revolutionary
Act a Homosexual Can Engage In’: Drag and the Politics of Gender
Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–
1972,” published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. My thanks
to the editors of those journals for their support of my scholarship.
I am grateful to my family for their love and support. Starting with
our weekend-long car trip from Minneapolis to move me into my
apartment in Chicago, my father, Mark Luther, has been consistently
enthusiastic about my pursuit of education in history, and I know
he is very excited to add this book to his long reading list. My mom,
Carolyn Ameli, has been continually supportive of me and has also
been a huge help in the editing process. I’m lucky to count my twin
sister, Beverly Luther, among my fans. I’m also thankful to my grand-
parents, Shirley and Earl Hill, for their encouragement throughout
my life. I am grateful, too, for the support of Phyllis Siracusa, Tamar
Siracusa, Robi and John Richards, Carol and Charles Tropp, Jenni-
fer and Howard Sneider, and Laura and Michael Grabowski. Special
thanks to Laura for her academic publishing advice and to Charlie
for doing the index!
My most important word of thanks goes to my spouse, partner,
and best friend, Benjamin Siracusa Hillman. He has provided me so
much guidance, encouragement, support, and love throughout this

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

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 process. From dc to Chicago, New Haven to San Francisco, Brook-
lyn to New Hampshire and beyond, I’m lucky to have found a part-
ner with whom to share life’s adventures. Our biggest adventure so
far has been in raising our daughter, Johanna. Tied with Ben, she is
my favorite, and I love her more than words can say.

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 I NTRO DUCT I O N
The Significance of Style in
American Culture and Politics

The dress and hairstyles of campaign volunteers

are rarely considered significant to politics; but in the 1968 presi-
dential election, hair and dress mattered to the Eugene McCarthy
campaign. McCarthy positioned himself as the anti–Vietnam War
candidate, and hoped to garner the support of youth activists and
college students who had helped to make the war a central political
issue of the election. However, McCarthy also wished to distance him-
self from the tactics of so- called hippie youths, who irritated politi-
cal moderates. Therefore, McCarthy’s campaign adviser instituted a
strict dress and grooming code for volunteers. Men had to cut their
hair, shave their beards, and wear coats and ties. Women were forbid-
den from wearing pants or miniskirts. Students who failed to follow
the dress code were turned away, or were moved to the basement of
campaign headquarters to file papers, out of the sight of the public.

xiii

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 FIG. 1. A McCarthy campaign
volunteer shaves his beard
to get himself “Clean for
Gene.” Special Collections,
University of Minnesota
Libraries.

“Clean for Gene” became a slogan of the McCarthy campaign, por-

traying a “clean- cut,” respectable, and gender-normative image for
the Democratic candidate.¹
The “Clean for Gene” campaign slogan is rarely recounted among
the significant events of the tumultuous year that was 1968; the assas-
sinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the violence
at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Richard
Nixon’s ultimate victory in the presidential election are most often
cited as major turning points in the year that allegedly marked the
demise of 1960s radicalism and the rise of the New Right political
coalition. McCarthy’s campaign, however, was not the only time
that year that styles of self-presentation became the topics of public
debate. Newspapers discussed the wide marketing of unisex fashions

xiv INTRODUCTION

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 that blurred gender distinctions in clothes and dress; presidential
candidate George Wallace derided the long hair and short skirts of
student protestors; and women’s liberationists demonstrated at the
Miss America pageant by throwing cosmetics, girdles, and bras into
a “Freedom Trash Can,” protesting mainstream fashion and beauty
culture as oppressive and objectifying of women.²
At the outset, these events might appear to be tangentially related
at best, symbols of the restlessness and dissent that characterized
the 1960s. However, the examples above illustrate how debates over
dress, hair, and self-presentation were deeply implicated in the larger
cultural and political struggles of the 1960s and the decades that fol-
lowed. Bell-bottom jeans, miniskirts, love beads, and long, flowing
hairstyles on both men and women are ubiquitous in images of the

INTRODUCTION xv

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 1960s. While many scholars have discussed hair and dress styles as
part of the history of the 1960s, no scholarship thus far has integrated
these fashion styles into the larger story of the conflicts of the era,
nor have scholars fully explored how dress and hairstyles impacted
the political activism and polarizations that defined the decade.
This book explores how changing styles of self-presentation shaped
the culture, politics, and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s,
illustrating how culture and dress contributed to the tumultuousness
and conflict of these decades. It shows how numerous social move-
ments, such as the hippie counterculture, Black Power, the New Left,
women’s liberation, and gay liberation, adopted and adapted popu-
lar hair and dress styles as cultural tools for their political activism.
Long hair, beards, “strange” and “colorful” dress styles, blue jeans,
and other styles of self-fashioning became symbols of social activ-
ists’ fights against American racism, sexism, imperialism, material-
ism, and conformism. A closer exploration of the politicization of
dress and hairstyles illustrates how these cultural tactics united many
of these disparate social movements as they fought for various, and
sometimes opposing, goals.
But particular styles of self-presentation also carried implications
that became a point of contention for both the activists themselves
and for their observers. Broader changes in fashions among men and
women in the 1960s fueled cultural anxieties about gender, race, class,
and norms of traditional American respectability. Conflicts over the
implications of these self-presentation tactics divided activists of the
era and often fostered political backlash against them. This book
thus illustrates how dress and hairstyles operated as symbols of the
divides in American culture—what some have called the “culture
wars”—that have come to define American society in the decades
following the 1960s.
Scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of fashion
as a political and cultural statement. Contemporary fashion theo-
rists have described a “language” or communicative aspect of fash-
ion. Clothing and dress signify racial, class, and gender identities,
and social norms are both constructed and challenged by individ-

xvi INTRODUCTION

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 ual choices of dress. As fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson has noted,
“Everywhere dress and adornment play symbolic, communicative,
and aesthetic roles.”³ Fashion and style thus contain meanings that
stretch far beyond the actual clothes or styles on one’s body; rather,
fashion and style can take on political, cultural, and societal mean-
ings, signifying messages about the individual wearer and creat-
ing a nonverbal discourse on the messages contained in individual
choices of style.4
The 1960s were certainly not the first time that styles of self-
fashioning became imbued with political meanings. Nor did Ameri-
cans adopt new styles of hair and dress in the 1960s solely for political
reasons. American consumption increased in the decades after World
War II, and the rise of baby-boom youth culture in the 1960s provided
a large and profitable market for new fashion trends.5 Moreover,
the rise of visual culture through the media and television played a
large role in increasing knowledge of and attention to these trends,
in some cases making changes in style appear more widespread than
they actually were.6 Television also helped to increase the emphasis
on personal appearance as part of one’s politicization. The chant “the
whole world is watching” by protestors at the Chicago Democratic
National Convention in 1968 signaled their awareness that television
and the media were instrumental in visually broadcasting their mes-
sage to the outside world. Knowing that the eyes of the world were
upon them helps to explain why some activists used dress and hair-
styles as visual cues to signify their political goals.
Indeed, many social movement activists adopted nonnormative
dress and hairstyles as symbols of the ideological messages imbed-
ded in their political activism. While the social movements of the
1960s are best known for their political accomplishments—the end
of Jim Crow laws in the South, the passage of civil rights legisla-
tion, legal battles against racial and gender discrimination in the
workplace, and protests of the Vietnam War—underlying the polit-
ical activism of each set of activists was a broader critique that each
group offered of American culture. Martin Luther King Jr., in his
famous letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, explained that racial

INTRODUCTION xvii

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 injustice was not merely the product of racist laws, but of an Ameri-
can culture that denied to African Americans the “self respect and a
sense of ‘somebodiness’” that was afforded to whites. Similarly, the
Port Huron Statement, written by members of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society (sds) in 1962, was less a criticism of specific American
policies than it was a treatise on the state of American culture in the
postwar era. Racism, the threat of atomic warfare, and the typical
middle- class lifestyle revealed to its authors the “complicated and
disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America.” Unjust American
policies could be easily linked to the “hypocrisy of American ideals”
that sds lambasted. It was America’s “twin needs for richness and
righteousness” that ultimately caused the war in Vietnam, according
to sds president Carl Oglesby in a 1965 speech; American materialism
was thus considered to be the underlying cause of anticommunist
policies that the New Left criticized. Feminists and gay liberation-
ists also attacked American culture for the gender stereotypes and
roles that rested on notions of female and homosexual inferiority.
While activists disputed American policies at home and abroad, it
was American culture itself that was to blame for creating a society
that supported these policies.7
Self-presentation techniques provided a rich tool for activists to
visually display their disagreement with and alienation from Ameri-
can culture. By growing their hair long and donning beards, activist
men protested middle- class standards of respectability they saw as
conformist and artificial. “Hippie” men and women adopted “strange”
dress styles as part of their disagreement with American materialism
and aesthetic competition. Some antiwar protestors connected men’s
long hair to their critiques of militarism that they argued promoted
needless warfare abroad. African American men and women wore
“natural” hairstyles and Afro garb to challenge white, Euro-American
cultural standards of beauty as racially biased and disrespectful to
their African heritage. Feminists and gay liberationists used hair and
dress styles to visually dispute fallacies of gender difference and ste-
reotypes of masculinity and femininity. And teenagers fighting for
the right to dress and wear their hair as they wished pointed to the

xviii INTRODUCTION

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 hypocrisies of parents and schools attempting to restrict their attire,
wondering why the American creed of “freedom” did not seem to
apply to them. Self-presentation through dress and hairstyles was thus
a cultural tool for activists to display their disagreement with and
alienation from an American culture they abhorred as hypocritical,
discriminatory, and misguided. Self-presentation styles also symbol-
ized the freedom of expression guaranteed by the American creed,
and the right of social activists to express their opinions no matter
how unpopular or radical their ideas might seem.
However, many others disagreed with these activists’ interpreta-
tions of American culture. Groups that found comfort and privi-
lege in the old social order felt threatened by these movements for
racial and gender equality and against traditional middle- class values.
Scholars have linked these groups to the New Right political coali-
tion that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.8 On nearly every count,
this new coalition of conservatives disagreed with the views of leftist
activists. Policies that social movement activists described as discrim-
inatory and imperialist were to social conservatives the bulwarks of
an American culture that they adored. Anticommunism was not an
imperialist ploy to feed American corporations, but a necessary set of
policies to protect America from a dangerous economic and political
system that would destroy economic freedoms, outlaw democracy,
and place the world at risk for nuclear war. Conservatives perceived
battles for racial integration as causing restrictions on their freedom
of association, destruction of the property values of the homes they
had worked so hard to purchase, and degradation of the school sys-
tems for which their tax money paid. The “sexual revolution” emerg-
ing in the 1960s was further proof of the erosion of Judeo- Christian
values upon which American society had been built. And increas-
ing numbers of women working outside of the home, young men
dodging the draft and speaking out against warfare, and the rise of
feminism among young women, all signaled that so- called radical
activists were out to destroy the gender roles and family structures
that were central to traditional visions of American social order. The
hairstyles and modes of dress adopted by some youths and activists

INTRODUCTION xix

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 were thus interpreted and portrayed as symbols of their fundamen-
tal threats to traditional American society. To opponents, these styles
came to symbolize rebellion, dirtiness, overt sexuality, gender-role
confusion, and lack of middle- class “respectability,” mirroring the
fundamental threats that other changes in America seemed to hold
for the traditional social order that they prized.
Scholars often position the 1960s as the beginning of the “culture
wars” that would come to shape American politics in the decades
to come.9 Religious conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s focused on
Supreme Court decisions involving birth control, prayer in schools,
and abortion to illustrate how American culture was straying from the
traditional Judeo- Christian values upon which they claimed America
was based. At the same time, the civil rights, Black Power, feminist,
gay liberationist, New Left, and student movements mounted chal-
lenges to cultural conceptions and social hierarchies of race, class,
age, and gender. This book suggests another point of origin for these
culture wars: not just religious or political differences in philosophy,
but also differing interpretations of the messages conveyed in chang-
ing styles of self-presentation. What some Americans saw as stylistic
freedom or political protest, others saw as signs of the demise of the
gender, sexual, racial, and middle- class traditions of “respectability”
they held dear. While these latter concerns would fade into the 1970s
as social activism waned, they would never cease entirely, remain-
ing embedded in American cultural discourse as a warning of what
might happen if certain fashion styles were taken too far.
The following six chapters present a chronological and thematic
exploration of changing styles of self-presentation and their politi-
cal implications from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Utilizing
newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements, the grassroots
periodicals and papers of social movement organizations, court cases,
photographs, and memoirs, this book charts shifting styles of self-
presentation as part of American fashion trends and illustrates the
significant roles that these styles played in the political landscape of
the 1960s and 1970s. It shows how social movement activists adopted
and politicized these trends, and how cultural anxieties over chang-

xx INTRODUCTION

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 ing styles became intertwined with political anxieties over gender
and sexual mores, racial and class tensions, increased feminist activ-
ism, and the state of American youth. While popular culture pro-
moted acceptance of these styles by the 1970s, cultural battles over
styles of self-presentation continue in some cases to the present day.
Hairstyles, dress, and self-presentation therefore remained potential
signs of political and cultural conflict into the 1970s.
Chapter 1 discusses the media’s focus on cultural changes in dress
and hairstyles among white, middle- class American youths in the
1960s. Starting with the Beatles, who popularized the “mop” hairstyle
among male teenagers in 1964, this chapter explores how hair and
clothing trends in the second half of the 1960s blurred gender, sex-
ual, and class boundaries and garnered scrutiny from various social
commentators. Opponents of the new styles criticized their disrup-
tion of gender and sexual norms and their challenges to middle- class
respectability. In response, teenagers and liberal adults argued that
one’s choice in hair and dress styles was an extension of the freedom
of expression guaranteed to American citizens, and they forged legal
battles against school officials who attempted to suspend students
for their unconventional styles. Dress and hairstyles in the 1960s,
this chapter shows, were never merely cultural phenomena or sim-
ple matters of style; rather, they were intertwined with generational
conflicts and political debates over American ideals and social norms.
Chapter 2 analyzes how styles of self-fashioning became political
tools for social movements of the 1960s. Black Power activists were
among the first to politicize dress and self-presentation by adopting
natural hairstyles and “African heritage” clothing. New Left and hippie
countercultural activists built on this politics of appearance, promot-
ing long hair as a protest against the image of “crew- cut masculinity,”
which they associated with the Vietnam War. The unconventional
dress and hairstyles of both men and women in these movements also
contributed to their critiques of American conformity and capitalist
materialism. However, opponents of these movements interpreted
their self-fashioning styles as a threat to norms of gender, sexuality,
and respectability, intertwining with the larger threats of the sexual

INTRODUCTION xxi

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 revolution and the Cold War that troubled many Americans in the
1960s. As opponents of these social movements grew more adamant,
dress and self-presentation became a point of contention among activ-
ists themselves, disagreeing as to whether or not self-presentation tac-
tics ought to be used as part of their political protest. As conservative
politicians targeted the dress and hairstyles of antiwar protestors in
garnering support for the burgeoning New Right political coali-
tion, the leaders of some New Left organizations and liberal political
campaigns pushed their student members to adopt more traditional
styles of dress. This chapter therefore argues that the self-fashioning
styles of leftist social activists advanced their political goals but also
helped to inspire conservative backlash against them.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on self-presentation in the feminist and gay
liberation movements. Unlike earlier social movement activists who
did not explicitly protest gender norms, women’s and gay liberation-
ists were the first to connect gender-bending dress and hairstyles to an
explicit politics of gender that challenged broader conceptions of sex
roles, masculinity, and femininity. Some women’s liberationists and
lesbian feminists cut their hair, rejected traditional feminine cloth-
ing styles and makeup, and donned men’s jeans and work boots to
protest fashions that they claimed sexually objectified and demeaned
women. Similarly, some male gay liberationists wore “political drag,”
which mixed countercultural long hair and beards with women’s
dresses and makeup, to symbolize their disagreement with norms
of heterosexual masculinity. These groups of activists used dress and
hairstyles to challenge the naturalness of gender distinctions between
males and females, which they believed were socially constructed to
be a source of their oppression as women and homosexuals. These
self-presentation tactics, however, exacerbated the fears of outside
observers that feminists and gay liberationists aimed to destroy all
distinctions between the sexes, rejecting masculine and feminine dif-
ferences entirely. Dress and self-presentation tactics thus exacerbated
the backlash experienced by these movements and created dissent
from within the movements about the appropriate modes of femi-
nist and gay liberationist self-presentation. Some feminists, such as

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 Betty Friedan, rejected the politicized self-presentation of women’s
liberationists as damaging to the image of feminism. Moreover, some
women’s liberationists argued that politicized styles of self-fashioning
exacerbated class and racial divisions among women and failed to
allow women the essential choice to dress as they wished. Gay and
lesbian activists criticized drag styles for confusing homosexuals with
transsexuals and perpetuating harmful stereotypes of homosexuals
and women. The politics of self-presentation thus became fraught
for activists who wished to challenge gender norms in their politi-
cal activism, but also hoped not to alienate mainstream Americans
from their cause.
Chapter 5 explores the growing ubiquity of unisex styles in the
1970s and changing media reactions to them. On the one hand, as
styles from the 1960s became popularized and commercialized, the
media found them harder to oppose and promoted acceptance of
these styles through newspaper articles, movies, television shows, and
Broadway musicals. On the other hand, the media helped to strip
these styles of their political meanings, portraying long hair on men,
pants on women, miniskirts, and Afro hair as styles among an array
of choices in hair and dress. These styles, the media began to claim,
were not necessarily political, nor were they disruptive to traditional
conceptions of gender, class, or respectability. As the social activism
of the 1960s faded, acceptance of these styles became more palpable
as their political messages faded into the background.
However, chapter 6 explores continued anxieties over self-
presentation as reflected in court cases challenging workplace restric-
tions on dress and grooming styles. Utilizing the guarantee of freedom
of expression in the First Amendment and Title VII of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race and sex
in the workplace, men and women began to challenge workplace
restrictions on long hair, facial hair, Afros, miniskirts and pantsuits.
These legal cases forced the courts to grapple with standards of dress
at a particular historical moment when norms of self-presentation
were changing rapidly. The opinions of judges provide insight into
how changes in dress and self-presentation were perceived in courts

INTRODUCTION xxiii

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 of law, as well as how cultural norms of gender shaped court deci-
sions surrounding the legality of restrictions on dress. Some judges
acknowledged that changing styles—long hair on men, pants on
women, and unisex clothing—made old regulations outdated. But
other judges were hesitant to rule against regulations of gendered self-
presentations, choosing to recognize the fears of both private employ-
ers and of American society more broadly when men and women
crossed certain boundaries in their fashion choices. These court deci-
sions reflected continued conflicts over changing dress and hairstyles
into the 1970s despite their ubiquitous spread in popular culture.
Dress and hairstyles were more than just cultural phenomena of
the 1960s and 1970s; they held connotations that grew to symbolize
the broader political challenges of these decades. Some social activ-
ists used dress and hairstyles to fight for a new vision of America:
a society without “machismo” warfare and gender stereotypes and
with equality, justice, and freedom for all. But opponents of these
movements defended their own vision of America: a society with
clear distinctions and rules governing gender, sexuality, respectabil-
ity, and social order. It was this polarization on the meaning of cul-
tural changes in dress and self-presentation that helped to define
the broader conflicts of the era. Nothing less than the direction of
America itself was at stake.

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 DRE S S I N G FO R T H E C ULT UR E WA RS

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 1 “ YO U CA N’T T E L L T HE
GIRLS FROM THE BOYS ”
Changing Styles among
American Youths, 1964–1968

In January 1968, fifty-three boys were sus-

pended from Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk, Connect-
icut, because of the length of their hair. The school, fed up with
new fashions and hairstyles among their teenage students, began
to enforce their dress code more rigorously, also sending home
female students wearing “thigh-high miniskirts.” “We aren’t anx-
ious to see boys’ hair becoming as long as girls,” a school official
explained. “We are simply holding the line.” Rather than cut their
hair, the students fought back. Enlisting the help of the American
Civil Liberties Union, the students picketed the school, carrying
signs reading “Does Society Hang by a Hair?” “Is Hair Unfair?” and
“Unconstitutional Harassment.” In court, the lawyer for some of the
suspended students quoted the Magna Carta and the U.S. Consti-
tution in arguing that the school regulations were a violation of

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 fundamental liberties that had nothing to do with the purpose of
public education. While the students lost the case—the judge ruled
that it would be unfair to overturn the rule when some of the sus-
pended boys had already cut their hair, avoiding the constitutional
issues at hand—they still made their point that restrictions on hair
and dress contradicted fundamental American values of democracy,
liberty, and freedom of expression.¹
This incident was just one example of the many conflicts that arose
across the country in the 1960s over new styles of self-presentation
among American youths. Longer hairstyles on men, miniskirts and
pants on women, “Peacock” clothing styles for men, and unisex styles
for both males and females became significant sources of social con-
cern and debate. This chapter traces changes in self-presentation styles
among white, middle- class American youths in the 1960s as they
were discussed in newspapers and other forms of media of the era.
These new styles of personal presentation stoked unrest among the
adults, social commentators, and authorities who struggled to rec-
oncile them with their own understandings of social norms of self-
presentation. In particular, these ascendant styles rejected the stark
gender divide that limited males to “masculine” styles and women to
accentuated female styles. Media coverage of these tensions sparked
a national conversation, often sensationalizing these changes while
also reflecting broader national discussions on the meanings of these
new styles of fashion.
Clashes over the meaning of stylistic changes exposed the deep
and widening fault lines that separated the ascendant youth cul-
ture from their parents. The “baby boom” generation, born in the
years following World War II, was reaching adolescence in the
1960s, and producers of television, movies, music, and goods mar-
keted products specifically toward baby boomers for consump-
tion.² But teenagers of the baby-boom generation also created and
popularized their own cultural styles and senses of social mores,
both of which often irked older generations for their alleged loud-
ness, uncleanliness, and rebelliousness. Despite the controversies
they evoked, these styles proved popular and eventually reshaped

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 FIG. 2. Students protesting the suspension of fifty-three boys from Brien
McMahon High School in 1968. AP photo courtesy of the Greenwich Times.

mainstream style conventions. Indeed, as they gained media and

marketing attention, older men and women began to adopt the
styles as well.
Concerns about new styles of dress also channeled deeper con-
cerns that many Americans felt about the revolution in sexual
mores that was simultaneously taking place in the 1960s. The advent
of the birth control pill in 1960 increased avenues for women to
explore their sexuality without fear of becoming pregnant; chal-

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 lenges to college curfews and dorm rules exploded on university
campuses in the 1960s; and by 1968, a New York Times report on male
and female college students “living together” off- campus sparked
national controversy.³ Some of the new dress styles, miniskirts for
women most notably, exacerbated concerns that the sexual mores
of the younger generation were rapidly expanding outside of the
bounds of respectability. Similarly, burgeoning feminist activism
in the 1960s increased social concerns about the role of women
in American society. Growing numbers of women working jobs
outside of the home fostered social anxieties that women would
abandon their “traditional” roles as wives and mothers for pro-
fessions and lifestyles previously designated for men. Changes in
self-presentation for women fueled these concerns, with social com-
mentators worrying that women dressing in new styles, and men
dressing in styles similar to those previously reserved for women,
could further erode traditional gender roles.
Analyzing tensions over changing fashion styles during the
1960s reveals how mainstream American notions of gender, sex-
uality, and class were challenged and remade in those years. In
rejecting the highly gendered style of their parents’ generation,
teenagers and young adults began experimenting with personal
presentation. Men’s hair grew longer, women’s hair grew shorter,
and unisex styles became increasingly popular. When some social
commentators attacked these trends as tearing at the fabric of tra-
ditional American culture, the young people fought back, fram-
ing the issue as profound and political. They defended Americans’
right to dress and wear their hair as they pleased—rights, they
noted, that were part of the concept of freedom of expression at
the heart of American ideals. Hair and dress styles thus became
battlegrounds, not only for differences of age and class, but also
for concepts of American values and liberties. Dress and hair-
styles were never merely frivolous accouterments of the 1960s;
rather, they held serious implications for underlying conflicts in
American culture over gender, respectability, and the meaning of
American identity.

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 THE BEATLES, POPULAR CULTURE
F I G U R E S , A N D M E N ’S LO N G H A I R
Long before the sixties, various styles of personal presentation chal-
lenged cultural norms of gender and respectability. Hair had always
been a particular flashpoint for these debates, with Elvis’s “greaser”
hairstyle reviled as a symbol of his challenge to conventional propri-
ety.4 The Beatles, however, took concerns about hair to a new level.
The British rockers first arrived in the United States in February 1964
and were greeted at airports, hotels, and theaters by thousands of
screaming fans (mostly young women), eager to get a glimpse of the
four young men. The Beatles became a music and media sensation,
playing on the Ed Sullivan Show for a television audience of seventy-
four million people, nearly half of the American population at the
time.5 The television performance exposed many Americans to the
Beatles for the first time, introducing them not only to their music
but also to their hairstyles. A Chicago Tribune columnist described
their hair the day after the live performance: “Their bowl haircuts
flop over their eyes in sheepdog fashion. Their haircuts, or lack of
them, are somewhere between the styles of Julius Caesar and Daniel
Webster. Their hair is long, but their pants are tight.”6 The reporter’s
reliance on figures from Ancient Rome and nineteenth- century U.S.
history to describe their hairstyles indicates just how unusual they
were for the time.
Although their styles, just slightly longer than the standard crew
cut of the 1950s, would look tame in just a few years, the hairstyles
of the Beatles attracted as much media attention as their music.
And most media commentators, whether journalists or individuals
writing letters to the editor, focused predominantly on the gender
implications of the Beatles’ “mop” hairstyles. “Now come the Bea-
tles, the bushy-haired boys whose sex is not immediately apparent,”
wrote one reporter in the Hartford Courant. The author postulated
that the gender ambiguity of the Beatles helped them to attract so
many teenage girl fans, who “seize on the boy-girl type of crooner
who, while undoubtedly masculine, has much of the same appear-

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 ance as the adolescent girl.”7 A later column further explained why
adolescent women were attracted to these “boy-girl” styles on men:
“The boy-girl is not a girl. Neither is he a masculine man. His hair
distribution . . . is typically feminine . . . . The boy-girl makes it pos-
sible for the timid adolescent girl to make a tentative step toward
the opposite sex without too much danger.”8
Whether or not the Beatles’ hairstyles were merely a marketing
ploy to attract teenage girls through unusual gender cues, commen-
tators tended to agree that there was something about the Beatles’
“long” hairstyles that was gender bending, if not gender ambigu-
ous. Whichever it was, many adults did not like it. “The Beatles are a
curse to humanity,” wrote one reader in a letter to the editor in the
Chicago Tribune. “They have no talent. They cannot sing. . . . They . . .
have queer hair- dos. . . . The world is fast disintegrating into a bed-
lam of chaos.”9 “I want to tell girls from boys,” wrote another reader
in the Christian Science Monitor. “I think the Beatles are sissies!”¹0 The
editor in chief of the Christian Science Monitor wrote numerous col-
umns deriding the hairstyles of the Beatles as effeminate and there-
fore improper for young men. “This isn’t the Middle Ages. Isn’t it
rather pleasant for boys’ hair to be distinguishable from girls’ hair?”
he asked in one column.¹¹ “I like to tell boys and girls apart just by
looking at their heads,” he wrote in another column. “So I’m hoping
that the longs and shorts of fashion will run their course speedily,
and we’ll go on as before.”¹²
But to these onlookers’ horror, the mop style quickly spread as a
fashion trend among American youths. Whether they were aspiring
to the Beatles’ celebrity success, or perhaps hoping to attract female
admirers of the Beatles, teenage boys began wearing their hair in the
mop cut, which became known as the “Beatle” style.¹³ For youths who
didn’t want the permanence of a haircut, or because their parents
forbade it, wigs imitating the Beatles’ hairstyle became widely avail-
able.¹4 The New York Times declared that these hairstyle trends were
the latest evidence that “Beatlemania” was taking over: “Teen-agers
who once considered the G.I. crew- cut the height of adolescent fash-
ion are letting their locks curl down their necks and over ears and

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 across foreheads. Twenty thousand beatle wigs have been sold.”¹5 In
1964 the Beatles had sparked a revolution in teenage hair, even as the
enduring impact of their music remained an open question.
Other male performers adopted similarly unkempt hairstyles. Per-
haps attempting to imitate the Beatles’ massive success, other British
bands began growing their hair even longer, flaunting their locks
during their American tours. The Rolling Stones appeared on the
American music scene in the summer of 1964, with “hair . . . twice as
long as the Beatles’ and they never comb it,” according to the Wash-
ington Post.¹6 The Dave Clark Five was another British group that
imitated the Beatles’ mop-hair look, although the New York Times
explained that “they swirl their hair around their foreheads instead
of wearing it in a beefeater bob.”¹7 Before long, American musicians
adopted these styles as well. By 1967, at the Monterey Pop music fes-
tival in Northern California, numerous musicians wore longer hair-
styles, including the members of Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and
the Papas, the Who, and Country Joe and the Fish. Male young adults
in the audience also wore hairstyles of various lengths, ranging from
the Beatles’ mop style to the shoulder-length styles sported by many
of these musicians.¹8 Indeed, by 1967, some of the Beatles members
themselves had grown their hair down to their shoulders.¹9 Mick
Jagger, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, spoke about the vast
attention given to his band members’ hair: “[Commentators] seem
to have a sort of personal anxiety because we are getting away with
something they never dared to do. . . . They’ve always been taught
that being masculine means looking clean, cropped and ugly.”²0 Jag-
ger was thus explicit about the ways that these styles challenged tra-
ditional standards of self-presentation that were expected of white,
middle- class Americans and mirrored many of the concerns that
consternating adults raised about the new hairstyles.
One often- expressed concern over long hair was the issue of clean-
liness. Commentators often assumed that longer hairstyles were more
difficult to wash and that boys wouldn’t take the time to do so prop-
erly. But even the look of longer hair signified dirtiness to some indi-
viduals. “It doesn’t look good at all—it is sloppy,” said one person. “It

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 makes them look . . . as if they came from rotten homes.” Another
person decried the styles: “I think long hair looks disgusting. . . . It
makes them look sort of cheap and dirty.”²¹ Others complained that
long hairstyles on boys violated gender norms. Adults claimed that
boys with longer locks could easily be mistaken for girls with short
hair.²² “This will go down in many family histories as the year of the
great haircut wars— or the summer you could no longer tell for sure
at more than 10 paces which of Junior’s friends is male and which is
female,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 1965.²³ One Cleveland gym
teacher told the longhaired boys in his class that they would have to
wear pink hair nets, a subtle reference to the alleged feminine qual-
ity of their hairstyles.²4 A 1965 Gallup poll on the issue of hair length
found “overwhelming opposition to the long hair styles” among its
respondents. “If my son wore his hair like that, I’d make him wear a
skirt until he got it cut,” said one individual. Replied another: “There
are enough ‘queers’ around and letting boys look like girls won’t help
to identify the deviates.”²5
Negative comments about long hair on teenage men revealed a
number of concerns. One was the concept that men were supposed
to look different from women and that males adopting a longer
hairstyle closer to that of females were deviating from masculinity
by implicitly calling into question this supposedly inherent gender
difference. As one newspaper columnist put it, “Long hair is a viola-
tion of what people are used to; our culture has distinct notions of
an obvious separation between the sexes. Long hair tends to confuse
that separation. And because we tend to place a higher value on the
male than the female, long hair may debase the supposed prize of
masculinity.”²6 The gym teacher who threatened to force his male stu-
dents to wear pink hairnets, or the parent who said he would make
his longhaired son wear a skirt, underscored this idea that boys with
long hair were, in some way, less masculine. Second, statements that
long hair was “queer” or “deviate” suggested that these critics feared
a latent homosexuality among the wearers of these styles, or that lon-
ger hair could be a step toward a homosexual lifestyle. Stereotypes of
homosexual men as “effeminate” bolstered this concern, with critics

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 contending that long hair on men was a sign of male effeminacy.²7
Finally, concerns about cleanliness underscored norms of middle-
class, clean- cut respectability that these styles seemed to violate. “We
associate short hair,” one commentator noted, “with the middle- class
tradition of the good guy.”²8 Fears of gender, sexual, and middle- class
respectability thus became combined in the minds of social com-
mentators who feared the implications of long hair on teenage men.
Underscoring these concerns was the problem of the perceived
rebelliousness of longhaired male youths. In the 1950s, fears of juvenile
delinquency made teenage rebellion seem particularly problematic;
parents in the suburbs feared that their children would squander the
opportunities of middle- class life by engaging in crime.²9 While con-
cerns about juvenile delinquency had decreased from their fever pitch
in the 1950s, many parents and adults believed that longer hairstyles
symbolized a rejection of middle- class values and signaled the poten-
tial for more serious forms of rebellion that teenagers could commit.
One psychiatrist interviewed in the Los Angeles Times explained, “Hair
not only threatens the authority of parents but it hangs out there for
the rest of the world to see, advertising the willingness to rebel.”³0
Long hair itself was thus seen as a form of rebellion against the ideas
and authority of the older generation. Another father of a long-
haired teen noted, “If our young people don’t have anything to rebel
against, they rebel by letting their hair grow.”³¹ Some teenagers played
up the rebellious aspects of their longhaired appearance. “You don’t
like my long hair, do you?” said one teenager interviewed in the New
York Times. “It really gets you, doesn’t it? You’re annoyed? You hate it?
Good!”³² As another teenage commentator put it, “It is a much-talked-
about subject among the older generation and this only makes the
style more acceptable to the already rebellious teen.”³³ Long hairstyles,
as well as the growth of facial hair on some male teenagers, were thus
seen as symbols of rebellion from authority that some adults found to
be inherently threatening to their sense of propriety and social order.
Many teenagers and young adults, however, spoke up to defend
their longer hairstyles. Lots of famous men in the past wore their hair
longer, wrote one adolescent in the Chicago Tribune: “Take Schubert,

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 for instance. He looks like he just took his curlers off. Beethoven’s
hair doesn’t look any better. . . . These guys’ music can’t even compare
with that of the Beatles,” the author concluded.³4 Additional exam-
ples that teenagers cited of longhaired figures in history included
Samson, Christopher Columbus, and George Washington.³5 Other
youths denied that longer hairstyles on men were effeminate. “Long
hair shows masculinity,” explained another longhaired male. “Look
at Sampson; look at Jesus Christ.”³6 Others disputed the notion that
long hair was unclean: “As long as they are clean physically and mor-
ally I see no reason” for deriding the style, claimed one writer in a let-
ter to the editor.³7 Some teenagers complained that long hair wasn’t
the real issue; parents and adults were simply trying to assert author-
ity over them. “Grown-ups don’t like our long hair because it shows
disrespect to them,” one individual explained.³8 And one youth pro-
claimed to the adult complainers, “You’re just jealous about their
hair. You’re probably bald!”³9
Defenders of longer hairstyles thus disputed their opponents
on a number of levels. Teenagers challenged adults’ authority to
regulate their hairstyles, suggesting that superiority in age was not
a compelling reason to leave this decision to the grown-ups. They
debated the notions that long hair violated norms of class and gen-
der, arguing that these norms were somewhat arbitrary in the first
place. Most importantly, teenagers and their adult defenders claimed
the right to wear their hair as they wished. “A man’s right to wear
his hair as he wants to is one of the glories of a free society,” wrote
one letter writer in the New York Times.40 “Part of our American
way is the free expression of individuality,” another person wrote
in a letter to the Chicago Tribune. “Along with free speech . . . we
males enjoy also the privilege to wear long hair if we so desire. The
idea of forcing a boy to get an alleged ‘all-American haircut’ . . . is
most reactionary and un-American.”4¹ “The issue is not how long
or how silly his hair may be, but whether the personal appearance
of . . . any human being . . . ought to be prescribed,” wrote another
in the Los Angeles Times. Unacceptance of long hairstyles, he con-
cluded, “reveals a sad tendency on the part of many Americans to

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 indulge in fuzzy thinking and unwitting bigotry.”4² These defenders
of long hair explicitly acknowledged the value of freedom inherent
in choosing one’s personal appearance. As an editorialist in Roll-
ing Stone magazine put it, “The right to be different is at stake.”4³
Thus, to many longhaired young men, their hairstyles represented
fundamental autonomy and protected self- expression, as well as a
rejection of their parents’ social norms.
These debates over long hairstyles came to a head as schools across
the country attempted to restrict these new styles. The first cases
were reported in 1964, as teenage boys began to adopt the Beatles’
mop hairstyle; some school officials decided that the hairstyles were
not allowed and suspended the students until they got a haircut.44
These battles continued in schools throughout the decade, as many
students challenged restrictions against long hairstyles by bringing
lawsuits to court. As Gael Graham has documented, “Over one hun-
dred hair cases were appealed to the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals;
nine appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”45 These court
cases were part of broader struggles in the 1960s for legal recognition
of the rights of high school students. It would not be until 1969, in
Tinker v. Des Moines, that the Supreme Court would rule that high
school students did retain some of their civil liberties within their
high schools, although the opinion did not include freedom from
hair and dress regulations as part of its ruling.46 Beyond the legal
question of the civil liberties of minors in a public school setting,
these court cases, and the media discussion of high school groom-
ing codes, reflected the broader debates over males’ long hairstyles,
pitting the maintenance of social order against ideals of freedom of
expression.
Defenders of school regulations preached the necessity of main-
taining order in a school setting. The Hartford Courant argued that
schools were “preserving a framework of order and decorum within
which teaching and learning may proceed. . . . It is a tough enough
job now to get a couple of dozen adolescents to pay strict attention
to class work. When a distraction is added, such as a [long] haircut,
it creates an atmosphere in which concentration is impossible.”47

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 “Distraction” was an often- claimed rationale for the restrictions,
arguing that long hairstyles were not “conductive to a good educa-
tional atmosphere.”48 The “blurred gender lines” promoted by long
hairstyles were also part of the disorder that school officials sought
to prevent. Particularly, longhaired boys might be able to more eas-
ily “sneak into girls’ restrooms,” a recipe for both gender and sexual
disaster, as far as school officials were concerned.49 School officials
believed that the enforcement of social norms was part of their role
as educators. “The school should be a stabilizing force,” one princi-
pal explained.50
Opponents of the regulations argued that these grooming rules
were a violation of personal freedoms. They viewed the repression
of longer hairstyles for men as a harbinger of more sinister forms of
social control. “What has happened to our freedom?” asked one let-
ter writer in a student newspaper. “Where is the line drawn? If they
dictate to us the type of dress we should wear, how long our hair
should be, what comes next? Will they dictate what books to read,
what to believe?” While school officials were worried about disorder
and decorum, this student worried about restrictions to freedom of
choice and personal expression. “We don’t understand this kind of
‘democracy,’” he concluded.5¹ This sentiment implied that ideals of
freedom and choice were more central to American beliefs than tra-
ditional notions of order and adherence to social standards. Restric-
tions of hairstyles, as one commentator put it, “actually violate the
most inherent principles of America— democracy and self- expression,
and in the one place where these principles must never be violated—
our schools.”5² Commentators thus argued that schools, rather than
promoting social norms and rules, ought to teach respect for free-
dom and support individuality: “Schools should be less concerned
with unorthodox hair lengths and more concerned with why they
are turning out so many orthodox minds willing to submit to the
corporate haircut.”5³
Opponents of school regulations were not ignorant of the gen-
der issues implicated in this fight. Here, too, high school students
protested the regulation of gender norms. “Why do people criticize

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 men and boys for having long hair like girls when no one criticizes
girls and women for having short hair like men?” asked one stu-
dent. “In the ‘20s short hair for women was part of emancipation of
women. Could long hair for men be a type of emancipation from
conformity for men?”54 Gender norms, this student argued, were yet
another way that society attempted to instill conformity in its citi-
zens. Picket signs at Brien McMahon High School noted that Jesus,
Shakespeare, and George Washington all had long hair, implying
that restrictions on long hair in the 1960s were arbitrary given the
hair lengths of men in the past.55 These high school students thus
stressed the arbitrary nature of gender-based dress and grooming
codes, implicitly noting the historically changing nature of norms
of self-presentation.
In the end, no clear consensus emerged, either in the courts or
among the American public, as to whether or not restrictions on
hairstyles were valid. As Graham notes, “The opinions of the courts
reflected the conflicted views of the nation as a whole. Americans
could not agree on what long hair meant, how much it mattered,
or if it mattered (although paradoxically some of them expended
considerable energy and passion on a matter they proclaimed triv-
ial).”56 But clearly, hair mattered, as young men with long locks
faced continual harassment throughout the decade. By 1968 groups
across the country had sponsored billboards in their communities
that pictured a longhaired youth and a simple message: “Beautify
America: Get a Haircut.” Over two thousand billboards appeared
in towns across the United States.57 Workplaces often restricted the
hair length of male employees, firing longhaired men from their
jobs.58 At schools, longhaired teenagers were harassed by other
students. Kevin Compton, a student in the 1960s, remembered the
constant challenges he faced due to his long hair: “I had . . . experi-
enced a lot of prejudice because of [my hair], having the greasers or
jocks back at the high school or in town pick on you or try to start
fights, just because you had long hair. They’d say things like, ‘Are
you a boy or a girl?’ It got to the point where [I would think], ‘God,
can’t you guys think of anything else?’ And this was not just kids,

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 but adults in authority. I remember I got pulled over [by police]
a lot of times. . . . Even my physical education teacher threatened
me physically, pushed me up against a locker, and said, ‘You’d bet-
ter get a haircut.’”59
As Compton’s account suggests, a longhaired appearance some-
times provoked violence. In 1966 the student-body president of Stan-
ford University was kidnapped by a group of fraternity brothers and
taken to an empty parking lot, where they proceeded to shave off
his long hair.60 In another case, a fifteen-year- old boy was hospital-
ized after two men assaulted him and “scalped” a patch of skin from
his longhaired head.6¹ Males with long hair met similar violence in
schools and communities across the country.
Debates over men’s long hair were symbolic of larger cultural bat-
tles of the era over the social mores of youth, middle- class respecta-
bility, and authority. Long hairstyles on men also caused controversy
due to their implications for gender norms of masculinity. To many,
long hair represented a slippery slope. If they refused to conform
to traditional masculine styles, what other harbingers of traditional
manhood would they attempt to evade? What many teenagers saw as
their personal freedom to choose their own hairstyles, some adults
and social authorities saw as an implicit threat to norms of middle-
class masculinity and respectability.

MINISKIRTS , PANTS, AND CHANGES IN FEMALE FASHION

While long hair on males stood out for the intense debates the style
inspired in the second half of the 1960s, changes in women’s fash-
ions were equally discussed in the American media. The most famous
change, of course, was the introduction of the miniskirt. Miniskirts,
which rose to various lengths above the kneecap depending on the
whims of the designer, were first introduced in Britain and France in
the early 1960s. After much publicity in Europe, by 1966 miniskirts
were making waves across the Atlantic.6² Despite much consterna-
tion in the media, the miniskirt became an immediate hit among
American youths, “a sweeping success” at stores across the country,
and even inspiring above-the-knee hemlines for wedding gowns.6³

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 Miniskirt styles were as controversial as they were successful. A 1967
opinion poll found that 95 percent of Americans had “heard or read
about the ‘miniskirt.’” The poll noted with some irony that “at the
same time less than half the populace say they have followed recent
discussions over the foreign aid program and far fewer than half are
able to identify many national political figures,” illustrating the major
attention received by the style. The poll found that the majority of
adults disapproved of the fashion, with 70 percent responding affir-
matively to the question, “Would you object to a daughter of yours
wearing a miniskirt?”64 Like long hair on teenage men, short skirts
on teenage women raised concerns of respectability, propriety, and
norms of gender and sexuality, in addition to fostering generational
divisions among teenage youth and their female elders.
One obvious criticism of the miniskirt was its sexualized nature.
One newspaper noted that the phenomenon of women wearing
miniskirts in public “causes men to stop and stare on crowded streets
or creates disconcerting situations in the subways or draws curious
groups when miniskirted women board taxis.”65 The overtly sexual
nature of the miniskirt, of course, was seen as a benefit for many of
its wearers and admirers. Many men vocally approved of the style,
and women from the 1960s remembered the whistles they received
from men when they wore miniskirts in public.66 Other commenta-
tors, however, decried the sexualized image of women that the style
presented. “Today’s immodest fashions—disgusting, ugly, degrading,
and deliberately suggestive,” one letter writer to the Washington Post
lamented. “The British fashion designer who introduced the mini-
skirt says that the purpose of fashion is “sex.”67 Another journalist
noted that the short skirts “tend[ed] to make the wearer look pro-
miscuous,” and another individual complained, “Women might as
well go naked.”68
Miniskirts were certainly not the first foray of young American
women into sexualized styles of dress; the flappers of the 1920s, for
example, were equally controversial in their time. But short skirts
took on new meaning in the context of the “sexual revolution” of
the era. Female sexuality in the 1950s was often repressed and ide-

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 alized as passive and demur; while “bombshell” pinup models and
movie stars were popular, sexual psychologists argued that “normal”
women expressed their sexuality solely in the context of heterosex-
ual marriage. Although Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 study called into ques-
tion the notion of female sexual passivity, most public discussion on
sexuality centered on marriage and women’s role in the home. Jane
Gerhard writes that “marriage experts . . . felt profound unease at the
specter of unconstrained female sexual desire” and therefore depicted
female sexuality as “tightly associated . . . with motherhood, sexual
dependency, and men . . . help[ing] to articulate the bounds of nor-
mal and implicitly white and middle- class femininity.”69 Women’s
sexuality was thus “contained and domesticated,” according to his-
torian Elaine Tyler May, to stress the maternal and passive nature of
female sexual expression.70
The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, along with miniskirts, chal-
lenged this view of passive female sexuality. Miniskirts, like the Pill,
were imagined to be a sign of women’s newfound independence and
a symbol “of the new feminine drive for full freedom and equality,” as
one journalist claimed.7¹ Particularly in the realm of sexuality, mini-
skirts demonstrated women’s freedom from previous social mores
of modesty. “The miniskirt, of course, is only the latest and most
obvious sign of this revolution in mode, manners, mores, and (no
doubt) morals,” one journalist wrote.7² Some wearers of the miniskirt
embraced the sexual freedom that the style connoted: “It’s my inde-
pendence flag . . . and besides I look good in it,” one teenage woman
remarked.7³ But other commentators found this symbolism to be
threatening to traditional norms of womanhood. “This is equality
of the sexes gone mad,” one journalist remarked.74
The popularity of the miniskirt style, particularly among teen-
agers, also implicated generational divides that shaped youth- elder
conflicts of the era. One of the chief complaints about the miniskirt
was that many women, particularly of the older generation, did not
look attractive in it. One newspaper article noted that some older
women were interested in shorter skirt styles, “but recognize that
wearing the pure miniskirt requires a strong dash of courage, not to

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 mention good legs and a good figure.”75 Women who did not have
the “good figure” of the slender teenage silhouette found themselves
left out of the miniskirt craze. “Knees that are protruding or bumpy
are not attractive,” wrote one commentator in the Los Angeles Times.76
“The miniskirt does look ridiculous on older women,” remarked one
young woman in the New York Times.77 The publicity of miniskirt
styles as a fashion for younger females perhaps exacerbated genera-
tional divides that were already causing conflict in the 1960s.
Older women, however, were often quick to deride miniskirt styles
as unflattering and unfeminine. “[Men] like . . . full skirts that come
to a lady-like length just below the knees,” one woman wrote in a let-
ter. “They’d like to see more modesty and femininity, not grotesque
caricatures. Am I right?”78 This woman, using the terms “femininity”
and “lady-like,” implied that miniskirt styles challenged traditional
conceptions of “modesty” in femininity, in contrast to the image of
female dress that had been common in the suburban 1950s. Another
woman, in a letter expressing anger over an airline’s decision to allow
flight attendants to wear mini- dresses, wrote, “Does the airline . . .
believe that a young woman is more feminine, womanly, graceful,
poised, dignified and efficient when clothed in a mini- dress? Is not
the task of a stewardess one demanding a responsible, emotionally
mature, gracious personality? Will she best present this image when
dressed in a ridiculous little-girl costume? Or is the role of a steward-
ess becoming so unimportant that her position is now on par with
the night- club cigarette girl?”79 This letter suggested that some com-
mentators saw the sexualized version of womanhood presented by
the miniskirt to be at odds with a more traditional vision of female
respectability. Another woman expressed the sentiment more politely:
“I think teen-agers look cute with short skirts, but after 40 a woman
should have a little more dignity about her.”80 These comments sug-
gested that, to some observers, the miniskirt disrupted traditional
visions of “dignified” womanhood: an ideal that exuded modesty
rather than overt sexuality. Indeed, it was precisely these concerns
about modesty that led many high schools and places of employ-
ment to restrict the styles, despite the protests of teenage women.8¹

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 Other fashion changes exacerbated these concerns about traditional
norms of womanhood. The emergence of jeans and pants as every-
day fashions for women in the 1960s presented a clearer challenge
to women’s traditional modes of dress. Previously, pants had been
considered women’s “sportswear,” to be worn for casual occasions or
the outdoors. But Paris designers hoped to make women’s pants an
“elegant” alternative to dresses and skirts, appropriate for professional
or fancy occasions.8² Designers hoped to market pantsuits as an ele-
gant alternative to dresses. Coco Chanel, for example, “gussie[d] up”
her styles with “glamorous fabrics, jeweled chain belts and pearl and
jeweled earrings” to make them “look even more female,” and other
designers styled the pants so they could be easily disguised as dresses
and skirts, sometimes making the bottoms “loose and wide . . . like
a sailor’s trousers” to give them a more “floppy” look.8³ Known as
“bell-bottoms,” these styles quickly caught on with younger Ameri-
can women. Teenage and college girls flocked to army-navy stores to
outfit themselves in bell-bottom pants and blue jeans.84 Bell-bottom
pants even made their debut in place of a bridal gown for one “far-
out wedding.”85 While younger women were somewhat quicker to
don bell-bottom pants and jeans, some older women, too, began to
adopt the styles, thrilled with what they deemed to be a more com-
fortable alternative to tight, short skirts.86
The American public instantly became divided on the acceptability
of these new pants styles for women. Debates ensued as to whether
women’s pantsuits should be allowed at fancy restaurants or elegant
social events. Some workplaces forbade the style, and many restau-
rants at first refused to allow women wearing pants to be seated,
forcing some female patrons to scramble to find a makeshift skirt in
order to be admitted.87 Some restaurants relented on their policies,
so long as women still “look[ed] like ladies” in their pantsuits. As
one owner explained, “Ladies should be dressed as ladies and gentle-
men as gentlemen.”88 As this statement suggests, much of the contro-
versy surrounding pants for women was the concern that pants were
simply not feminine enough for women to wear as common attire.
Indeed, commentators who discouraged the style, many of whom

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 were women, often claimed that pants were inherently masculine. “It’s
too mannish [to wear pants],” explained one woman. “After all, we’re
still women.”89 “Horrible and unfeminine,” was how another woman
described the style.90 “Far too masculine,” said another female, and yet
another woman agreed: “Men like women to be feminine and few
women can remain feminine in pants.”9¹ “If you’re really a woman,
you don’t hanker to look like a boy,” explained another. “There’s
something so pretty about the swirl of a skirt I wouldn’t give up.”9²
To some extent, the concerns about the “unfemininity” of pants
reflected a generational divide between younger and older women.
Similar to the miniskirt, some feared that older women would not
look as attractive in pants styles, lacking the slim silhouette of younger
women. “It’s a darned difficult fashion to wear—hard enough for
men who are approaching the paunchy stage let alone women whose
curves often run rampant after age 19,” one columnist noted.9³ One
college woman admitted that pants were “not for everybody”: “I’m
pretty skinny,” she said, “but I don’t know about older women. If
they made the jackets long enough to cover the bulges, I suppose
they would be all right.”94 Another female commentator was more
blunt: “Women who own pants should also own rear-view mirrors,”
she said.95 Pants and jeans styles thus implicated a generational divide
among younger adopters of these styles and older women who found
them to be physically unflattering.
But comments that pants were “unfeminine” underscored a deeper
concern that these styles disrupted a vision of femininity that had
also been challenged by the miniskirt. Indeed, journalists often wrote
about miniskirts and pants styles in the same articles, implying that
these fashion trends were two sides of the same coin. It was notable,
for instance, that the same French pop singer who “helped popular-
ize the miniskirt” later “showed up at a gala Paris opera performance
dressed in a man’s tuxedo, complete with black tie.”96 Both styles, in
different ways, challenged previous conceptions of feminine dress and
seemed to symbolize deeper changes in societal definitions of wom-
anhood. Broader shifts in women’s lives were often discussed along-
side media conversations about pants and miniskirts. One journalist

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 wrote that “the steamroller of Female Emancipation” was reflected
in these styles.97 Another commentator explained, “Women have
seen their traditional roles as wives and mothers become less all-
embracing in the years since the legal emancipation of the female
was followed by The Pill, which has emancipated her in still another
way. . . . Increasing numbers of women are pursuing careers after
marriage and children.”98 Changing styles of dress for women thus
reflected other changes in women’s roles that were controversial in
the 1960s, thus adding to anxieties over the new styles. “Sure, equal
rights . . . but not identical dressing!” one columnist exclaimed.99 For
some, new styles of female self-presentation represented a new fron-
tier for womanhood that they believed should not be crossed, even
as they acknowledged other positive elements of this era of personal
emancipation for women.
As women’s pantsuits gained popularity, however, advocates of the
style argued that gender bending was unnecessary. Pants could be just
as feminine as skirts and dresses, they argued: “The trouser-wearing
girl,” Vogue explained, was not necessarily one “whose femininity has
crossed . . . wires.”¹00 Women just needed to pay attention to other
aspects of their appearance in order to emphasize their femininity:
“Now that women are wearing the pants . . . they’ve simply got to be
more female,” explained one article in Cosmo.¹0¹ “A woman in pants
with a man’s haircut, man’s shoes, shirt and tie, and no make-up is . . .
quite different from a feminine woman in slacks carefully tailored
to her proportions,” wrote fashion columnist Amy Vanderbilt. “This
woman will have her nails manicured, wear makeup and some kind
of fashionable coiffure even though it may be quite short. In other
words, she will be a feminine pants wearer.”¹0² Women’s magazines
thus stressed that pants on women could still be feminine as long
as women paid attention to other aspects of their appearance, such
as hairstyles and makeup.
Defenders of the new fashions, moreover, argued that pants were
not necessarily related to political agitation for women’s rights; rather,
they were simply a comfortable fashion for women. “Pants are com-
fortable, warm and convenient,” wrote one woman. “Women have not

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 donned blue jeans in an organized attack on men’s ‘sexual superior-
ity.’ We’d just like to be as warm in freezing weather as you are. We’d
simply like to be able to relax and move, and sit naturally as you do.”
Fears that women and men were becoming more alike, she argued,
were nonsense: “To those men who complain that they can’t tell the
boys from the girls when both are wearing pants, I suggest that they
should concentrate more on improving their familiarity with the
subject than on dictating what women should or should not wear.”¹0³
Finally, advocates of pants also adopted arguments about the
importance of freedom of choice in one’s dress. Pants, one jour-
nalist explained, were the “new symbol of feminine emancipation,”
promising women “new freedom” from restraining and conforming
fashions.¹04 “The women who are flocking to the racks holding pants
in stores’ sportswear, coat, and suit departments give fairly pragmatic
reasons: comfort and freedom. They’re remarkably similar reasons
for getting into miniskirts,” explained another journalist.¹05 These
supporters of women’s pantsuits argued that women deserved the
freedom of choice to dress as they wished. “We don’t have a right to
dictate to women,” one restaurant owner explained. “If this is what
today is, let it be.”¹06 Teenagers who protested restrictions on skirt
lengths at high schools used similar arguments about their right to
choose their mode of dress. “They just want us to conform,” said one
girl who was sent home from school for wearing a miniskirt, “and
why should we?”¹07 Proponents of women’s new styles thus inter-
preted female emancipation as a positive development, with pants
symbolizing the importance of increased choices offered to women.
Miniskirts, pants, and bell-bottom styles for women seemed to
signify broader changes in gender roles and sexual mores in the
1960s that had called into question traditional norms of woman-
hood. Some commentators feared that women were embracing
these changes a bit too readily, criticizing the sexualized nature of
the fashions that rejected an older vision of traditional “dignified”
womanhood. For younger women, however, these styles symbolized
fashion, fun, and freedom—a freedom they embraced despite the
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 “ M O D S , ” THE PEACOCK REVOLUTION,
AND UNISEX TRENDS
“There’s an asexual attitude towards clothes developing,” one sales
clerk at an army-navy surplus store noted in 1966. “It’s getting so you
can’t tell the girls from the boys.”¹08 Miniskirts, pants, and jeans on
young women and longhaired styles on young men converged in a
new form of unisex style that brought both delight and dismay to
various factions of the American public. Initially described as “Mod”
fashions (short for “modern”), American youths were quick to adopt
the styles that had first appeared in England.¹09 Young women as well
as young men began to imitate the mop hairstyles of the Beatles, with
women cutting their hair short to match the style. Hair stylist Vidal
Sassoon promoted a “boyishly short” style for women, and when
actress Mia Farrow cut her formerly “long, blond hair” into a “crew
cut,” females of all ages began imitating the style.¹¹0 Similarly, bell-
bottom-styled pants, originally introduced to give women’s pants a
“floppier” look, were quickly adopted in fashions for men. “Remind
you a little of that wide-legged outfit on feminique’s cover?” asked a
caption in the Chicago Tribune below a sketch of men’s bell-bottom
pants.¹¹¹ As male and female fashion trends began to converge, the
media labeled the fashions “Uni-sex—a peculiar new class of teen-
age androgyny.”¹¹²
Fashion commentators also noted how these styles were marketed
to men of all ages, rather than solely to youth. Long hair, for example,
did not remain restricted to teenage boys; in 1967 both the New York
Times and Time magazine reported that longer hairstyles were becom-
ing a new trend for some middle-aged men as well. “After several years
of excoriating . . . their own teenage-sons for hirsuteness, city men
of middle-age are letting their hair grow. Such traditional squares as
stockbrokers, physicians, and corporation executives are relinquish-
ing the crew cuts to which they have clung since they returned from
service in World War II.”¹¹³ For men who wanted to keep their hair
short for professional reasons but also wanted to look groovy on the
weekends, stores began marketing fake hair products to men—beards,

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 sideburns, and mustaches—so they could easily change their look
from day to day.¹¹4 While it is unclear just how many men adopted
these new hairstyles, the publicity they garnered made some Ameri-
cans fear that the styles would soon become ubiquitous.
Long hair was only one aspect of broader trends in men’s styles
that challenged previous conceptions of masculine respectability in
personal presentation. The “Peacock Revolution” in men’s clothing,
analogizing from the male peacock’s colorful plumage that attracted
female mates, promoted brightly colored clothing styles for men, as
opposed to the gray, brown, and black hues that defined menswear in
the 1950s.¹¹5 Peacock styles also included the introduction of ruffled
shirts, necklaces, medallions, handbags, perfumes, and creams mar-
keted specifically to men.¹¹6 The Nehru jacket, for example, allowed
men to forgo collared shirts and ties in dress wear (a jacket, notably,
that some women also bought as a dress).¹¹7 Designers also began
to show turtlenecks under collarless jackets for men, accented with
a necklace-like medallion, which was “necessitated,” they claimed,
because the outfit lacked a tie.¹¹8
Despite the bright colors, necklace-like medallions, and ruffles of
these “peacock” fashions, designers denied that there was anything
“effeminate” about them.¹¹9 Indeed, some claimed that these fash-
ions signaled “an assertion of masculinity” because, “in the animal
kingdom . . . it is the male that is resplendent in order to attract his
mate.”¹²0 Colorful and intricate fashions for men, thus, might have
been imagined as a return to a more “natural” masculinity symbol-
ized by the plumage of male animals in the wild. Clever marketing
also made it possible for men to purchase these products without feel-
ing they were risking their masculinity. The Hartford Courant noted
that “sex, youth, [and] masculinity were the powerful and pervasive
messages” in advertisements for these new products.¹²¹ “It is the man
who wears colorful, even flamboyant clothing, not the one in grey
drab, who is high-spirited, adventurous, courageous, and victorious,”
one journalist wrote.¹²²
Despite the claims of designers and advertisers that these new
styles for men were not effeminate, many commentators were still

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 uncomfortable with them. Newsweek suggested that the peacock look
was “psychologically unsettling to many men” because such fashions
might be seen as a “homosexual conspiracy.”¹²³ According to one anti-
homosexual pamphlet published in 1964, “a taste for unconventional
clothing,” “attraction to bright colors,” and “special hairstyles and art-
ful combing” were all considered potential signs of homosexuality.¹²4
“There is something almost feminine about the look of these boys,”
novelist Tom Wolfe commented on the new Mod styles.¹²5 Concerns
about gender transgression and (homo)sexuality were thus in the
forefront of the minds of critics of these male fashions.
As men adopted bell-bottom pants, colorful clothing, and longer
hairstyles and women donned pants and short hairstyles, many jour-
nalists pronounced that a new era of “unisex” fashion had arrived. “If a
Fashion’s Good Enough for Her, It’s Good Enough for Him,” declared
the New York Times in 1968, announcing the newfound popularity
of unisex fashions.¹²6 Life magazine explained the trend as follows:
“With-it young couples, no longer inhibited by what looks mascu-
line and what looks feminine, are finding that looking alike is good
fashion as well as good fun.”¹²7 While teenage consumers might have
led the way in popularizing these look-alike trends, young adults and
middle-aged couples joined in as well, and mainstream department
and specialty stores began to carry unisex clothing lines, although
many stores expressed uncertainty as to whether to place the clothes
in the men’s or women’s department.¹²8 While unisex styles were
sometimes imagined as a way for heterosexual couples to bond, the
term itself, and the confusion over which department should carry
the clothes, implied that the sexes were moving closer together than
ever before in their choice of fashion styles.
Of course, not every fashion trend of the Mods suggested a blur-
ring of the sexes; the facial hair adopted by some men was certainly
no harbinger of femininity, nor did men adopt miniskirts as a male
fashion, although some journalists wondered if they would.¹²9 How-
ever, some commentators focused on fashions that seemed particu-
larly gender bending, arguing that these styles were evidence of the
erosion of traditional gender roles. In 1965 psychiatrist Robert P.

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 FIG. 3. A designer and his girlfriend model unisex pantsuits.
Bettmann/Corbis /AP Images.

Odenwald wrote in his book The Disappearing Sexes, “We are raising
a race of less masculine men and less feminine women, and we are
in danger, if this trend continues, of developing a population of neu-
trals with virtually nothing to distinguish them but the shape and
size of their breasts and genitals.” While Odenwald primarily blamed
women’s work outside of the home and changing sexual mores for
the disappearance of gender distinctions, changes in clothing styles
were also at fault. “More and more teen-age boys and girls are hav-
ing their hair cut in identical ways, so that it is increasingly difficult,
if not impossible, to tell which sex is which,” he explained. “Mommy
works in the factory on the night shift and the children see visible
proof that she wears the pants,” he argued, implicitly connecting the

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 trend of pantsuits on women to their increased employment outside
of the home. The result of this gender confusion, Odenwald argued,
would be homosexuality.¹³0 In 1968 sociologist Charles Winick came
to a similar conclusion. In his book The New People, he argued that
unisex dress and hairstyle trends would lead to such confusion in
sexual identities that the human race would fail to sexually repro-
duce. Winick also blamed women’s increased work outside of the
home and increased sexual permissiveness for the gender confusion
in American society, which he argued was symbolized by changing
mores of self-presentation. Unisex fashions and hairstyles, Winick
argued, were part and parcel of broader changes in masculinity and
femininity that threatened the very divisions between males and
females that made biological reproduction possible.¹³¹
More often than not, these theories were derided in the media.¹³²
“His ideas of social morality seem quite rigid . . . and his forecasts of
doom a trifle overwrought,” one reviewer of Winick’s book wrote dip-
lomatically.¹³³ “The Cassandras among us are crying out dire warnings
about the increasing blurring of distinctions between the male and
the female of the human race,” wrote one tongue-in- cheek editorial
in the Hartford Courant. “We are becoming an androgynous world,
they mourn. We are being depolarized, they wail.”¹³4 Proponents of
unisex fashions argued that the styles represented freedom and indi-
viduality to their wearers, who wished to escape from traditional, so-
called Establishment styles. Others commended the symbolism of
unisex for “mark[ing] the beginning of the end of the ancient battle of
the sexes,” as one commentator put it. Unisex fashions “symbolize[d]
greater freedom of communication between” men and women, the
author argued. “It heralds a conjugal era of equality, sharing and
togetherness.”¹³5 Proponents of unisex styles argued that the clothing
symbolized freedom of choice in one’s dress, unconstrained by con-
ventional norms of gender, and allowed men and women to express
their individuality and understanding in their relationships. “If young
people today are not worrying about sex roles but are just trying to
see each other as people, they are going to create a much healthier
climate,” one journalist concluded.¹³6

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 As unsympathetic as the media was toward criticism of unisex fash-
ions, it was impossible to deny that anxieties existed in some pock-
ets of American culture. Various retailers across the country refused
to carry the styles in their stores despite their growing popularity,
and others refused to use the term “unisex” in marketing the clothes.
“They do not want to appear to encourage a cross- over of the sexes,”
the New York Times explained, and one fashion director noted, “Many
don’t like the use of the word ‘unisex.’ It represents a connotation that
they would like to avoid.”¹³7 At the very least, both proponents and
opponents of the fashions pondered the implications, with journal-
ists interviewing fashion designers, scholars, and shoppers on their
thoughts about the trends. “What is happening to the two sexes?” one
article pondered. “Do ‘male’ and ‘female’ mean anything today?”¹³8
While the media certainly helped to sensationalize the issue in rais-
ing these questions, there was no denying that “sex traditions [were]
rapidly changing” in the 1960s, and unisex clothing styles provided
yet another sign of these societal trends.¹³9 In publicizing the issue,
the media may have tapped into preexisting social concerns over
changing gender roles and norms that the styles seemed to symbolize.

ST Y L E A N D T WO V I S I O N S O F A M E R I CA N I D E A L S
In January 1970, Life magazine published the results of an opinion
poll on controversial issues from the 1960s. Hair and dress styles
were among the areas of concern, and public opinion was sharply
divided. While 54 percent of those surveyed believed that “new styles
of hair and dress are signs of moral decay,” the results showed that
the answers to this question varied greatly based on age, with 65 per-
cent of adults over fifty agreeing with the statement but 64 percent of
respondents between the ages of sixteen and twenty disagreeing.¹40
While younger Americans seemed to accept new styles more readily
than the older generation, the opinion poll suggested that Ameri-
cans were deeply divided.
This chapter has shown that conflicts over dress and hairstyles
ran deeper than mere generational divisions between baby-boomer
youths and their elders. Rather, in the context of the sexual revolu-

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 tion and changing women’s roles, concerns about dress and hair-
styles reflected deeper anxieties about traditional sexual and gender
order in America. Miniskirts, unisex clothing, and long hair on men
threatened traditional notions of sexual propriety, whether expressed
as keeping men from sneaking into women’s bathrooms or keeping
women from asserting themselves as sexual beings in public. Long
hair and “peacock” fashions on men inspired fears of homosexuality,
either by suggesting that the wearers of these fashions were gay, or by
undermining gender differences that some believed were the basis of
heterosexual attraction. Moreover, pants and miniskirts challenged
traditional notions of modesty in female respectability, while long
hair, bright colors, and ruffles on men seemed to indicate a decline in
masculinity. Social commentators concerned about changing styles
of self-presentation thus defended their own vision of the American
ideal: a society with clear distinctions and rules governing gender,
sexuality, and respectability. As one high school principal explained,
longer hairstyles on men were “un-American” and “reflects a symbol
that we feel is trying to disrupt everything we are trying to build up”
in America—a society governed by norms of middle- class respect-
ability for both men and women.¹4¹
For others, however, battles for freedom in dress and self-
presentation focused on the rhetoric of rights, liberty, and freedom
of expression. Teenagers argued that restrictions on their hairstyles
and dress were arbitrary violations of their personal freedom. Con-
cerns about gender norms, they believed, were merely ploys to enforce
conformity and traditional gender and sexual propriety, while ideas
of freedom and self- expression at the core of the American creed
were overlooked. Proponents of new styles advocated for freedom
in fashion choices and the emancipatory nature of these styles from
outdated conventions of conformity.
Through the media, each side sparked a national conversation
on these dual visions of American culture. Adults and youth who
approved of (or tolerated) new styles of self-presentation fought for
the liberty and freedom of expression they believed were guaranteed
by American ideals. Parents, school authorities, and social commen-

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 tators who opposed these styles fought for their own set of American
values, which safeguarded middle- class respectability through tradi-
tional conceptions of masculinity, femininity, morality, and the fam-
ily. Societal battles over dress, hairstyles, and self-presentation thus
revealed larger cultural divisions over the meaning of American val-
ues and identity in the 1960s— divisions that reemerged in reaction
to the social movements that defined the era.

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 2 “ W H AT TO W E A R TO
THE REVO LUTION ”
Self-Presentation Politics in
Social Movement Activism

On May 8, 1970, a group of New York City

college students held an anti–Vietnam War protest on Wall Street.
Since the mid-1960s, numerous student protests against the war
had taken place in various locations across the country; but the
New York City protest quickly turned violent, when a group of
middle-aged male construction workers and Wall Street business-
men converged at the protest and attacked the students. Accord-
ing to the front-page article in the New York Times the next day, the
attackers smashed windows, tore down banners, and beat students
with their fists and with their hardhats. The counter-protestors also
stormed the steps of City Hall and forced up the American flag,
which had been flying at half-staff to commemorate the deaths at
the antiwar protests at Kent State a few days earlier, and sang the
“Star-Spangled Banner.”¹

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 This attack, later called the “hardhat riot” due to the number of
construction workers involved, epitomized the broader conflicts over
student protests and anti–Vietnam War activism that had embroiled
the nation during the previous years. Class differences were one root
of these conflicts; working- class Americans were angry at the scorn
that privileged college students seemed to demonstrate against the
American government and its policies, while the sons of the work-
ing class were at war fighting against the same Vietnamese commu-
nists that the student protestors seemed to support.² The hardhat
riot also demonstrated deep divides between the protestors and their
attackers on the meaning of American identity. Raising the flag at
City Hall in spite of the deaths at Kent State symbolized the work-
ers’ belief that the Vietnam War was a fight for American values and
ideals. To them, the student protestors flouted the American identity
that they should have cherished.³ But Joshua B. Freeman has dem-
onstrated how conflicts over gender also fostered the hardhat riot.
Feeling their role as masculine breadwinners threatened by social
changes of the 1960s, the construction workers lashed out against
“new notions of manhood” represented by the student protestors,
who not only shirked their ultimate masculine duty to the state by
opposing the war and refusing to fight in it, but also, with their long
hair, failed to even look like proper men. Indeed, the press at the time
noted that the construction workers chose men with long hair for
the most brutal attacks.4
The cultural changes in self-presentation discussed in the previ-
ous chapter shaped the social movements that defined the 1960s.
Many of the individuals who participated in social movements and
student activism were among the baby-boom teenagers and young
adults who first popularized these new trends. But social move-
ment activists imbued these styles with new political meanings,
connecting their self-presentation to their political activism. Black
Power activists politicized their personal presentation by adopt-
ing natural “Afro” hairstyles and African-inspired clothing. These
trends also constituted a distinctive black unisex style; both men
and women sported Afros, blurring distinctions between mascu-

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 FIG. 4. A construction worker attacks a longhaired antiwar protestor during
the “hardhat riot” on May 8, 1970. Neal Boenzi/New York Times/Redux.

line and feminine hairstyles. New Left and hippie countercultural

activists built upon this politics of appearance, promoting long
hair as a protest against the image of militaristic masculinity pro-
mulgated by the Vietnam War and against American conformity
and materialism more broadly. Social movement activists of the
1960s thus distinctly politicized their self-presentation, appropriat-
ing cultural trends to make ideological statements that supported
their political views.
However, opponents of these movements interpreted activists’
self-fashioning styles as threats to norms of gender, sexuality, and
respectability, intertwining with larger concerns about the sexual
revolution and the Cold War that troubled many Americans in
the 1960s. Cultural fears about communism became intertwined
with concerns about the gender-ambiguous and sexualized styles
of student protestors. Self-presentation styles became further proof,
along with their open dissent against the Vietnam War and the
American government, that student protestors were radicals hop-

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 ing to sabotage both American national security and the norms
of American culture. The self-fashioning styles of leftist activists
thus became a point of contention for their opponents, providing
symbols, they believed, of activists’ threats to American political
and social order.
As opponents of these social movements grew more adamant in
the late 1960s, self-presentation became a point of contention among
activists themselves. As conservative politicians targeted the dress and
hairstyles of antiwar protestors in garnering support for the burgeon-
ing political New Right, the leaders of some New Left organizations
and liberal political campaigns pushed their student members to
adopt more traditional styles of dress and grooming. As police offi-
cers attacked student protestors with gendered and sexualized slurs,
and voters interviewed by the press decried the long hair of activists,
it became clear that politicized styles of self-presentation were just as
much a part of the national conversation on the social movements
of the 1960s as were their actual political goals.

BLACK POWER, AFRO HAIR, AND GENDER BOUNDARIES

The Black Power movement that emerged in the mid- to late 1960s
involved a cultural recognition of black pride that manifested itself
in art, music, and literature as well as dress and hairstyles.5 The Black
Power era was not the first time that some black Americans adopted
natural hairstyles. Robin D. G. Kelley has illustrated how bohe-
mian female intellectuals in the 1950s and female folk singers in the
1960s, including Odetta, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Marga-
ret Burroughs, wore their hair natural instead of following the hair-
straightening regime that was most common among black women
at the time.6 Many of these singers and intellectuals implicitly rec-
ognized the political ramifications of their hairstyle choices, echo-
ing the ideas of black freedom in their songs and writings.7 But the
self-presentation of civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s
was generally defined by traditional respectability and conformity.
Suits and close- cropped hair on men, dresses and straightened hair
on women, and well-groomed clothing and shoes visually illustrated

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 that African Americans were “respectable” and therefore deserving
of equal treatment and integration with whites.8
As younger individuals joined the civil rights movement in the
1960s, changes in styles of self-presentation began to spread among a
small but significant number of activists. While the first student sit-
ins at restaurants in the South enforced the “respectable” dress code
of early activists, by 1963 some members of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (sncc) began to adopt natural hairstyles
and casual forms of dress such as blue jeans.9 These styles allowed
sncc workers to blend in with the rural, working- class populations
they were organizing in the South.¹0 Some volunteers also connected
these styles to a sense of racial pride. Many female sncc volunteers,
for example, stopped straightening their hair as a symbol of their
involvement in the movement and as a sign of their budding impulse
to free themselves from the painful, expensive, and time- consuming
process that straightening one’s hair entailed.¹¹
Even before natural hairstyles became popular among sncc vol-
unteers, some black activists identified natural hairstyles as part of
the larger political project of black liberation. Eldridge Cleaver, who
would become a leader of the Black Panther Party, became politi-
cized around cultural issues of race while in prison in the early
1960s. In an essay he wrote in jail that was published in the Negro
History Bulletin in 1962, Cleaver drew attention to the ways in which
Caucasians defined cultural standards of beauty to exclude blacks.
In films, novels, television, and magazines, blacks were confronted
with images of beauty that included “creamy white skin, sparkling
blue eyes, and long flowing blonde tresses”; small wonder, Cleaver
argued, that Negroes spent their money on “hair-straighteners, wigs,
and skin-bleaches.” Negro women with naturally short hair, because
their “crinkly” hair failed to grow quickly, were “looked upon as
an especial abomination.” Cleaver argued that legal gains would
never be enough to combat the “feelings of inferiority” about Afri-
can Americans’ physical appearance: “It would be facetious of us
to campaign for a law to ban the Caucasian standard of beauty,” he
wrote. Cleaver therefore called upon blacks to take pride in their

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 skin color, hair, and physical features, recognizing that their feelings
of shame were “culturally conditioned” and were just as oppressive
as were discriminatory laws.¹²
The Nation of Islam, the largest black nationalist organization in
the United States at the end of the 1950s, also called for the rejection
of white standards of beauty.¹³ The organization’s magazine, Muham-
mad Speaks, featured photographs of black Muslim women, with cap-
tions proclaiming them “The Most Beautiful [Women] in the World.”
Although many of the women wore their hair covered in accordance
with Muslim religious tradition, some of the women were pictured
with natural hair. Articles in Muhammad Speaks implored men not to
straighten their hair, and two articles in 1963 celebrated black women
with natural hair.¹4 But the Nation of Islam was not always consistent
in its calls for “natural” female beauty, sometimes including profiles
of women with straightened hair in the “Natural Beauties” section
of its magazine.¹5 While the organization wanted its women to take
pride in their African heritage, it also wanted them to look “femi-
nine,” mandating that women wear “feminine” skirts to avoid the
“masculine” image of pants that was allegedly displeasing to men.¹6
Malcolm X, a former Nation of Islam minister who became an
inspiration to Black Power leaders in the second half of the 1960s,
also made hair an explicit part of his politics. In his autobiography,
Malcolm X wrote of the pain he experienced while “conking” his
hair as a young adult, trying to achieve the straight hair of white
men. “This was my first really big step towards self- degradation,” he
wrote, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh
with lye, in order to conk my natural hair until it was limp, to have
it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro
men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing
that the black people are ‘inferior’—and white people ‘superior’—
that they will even violate and mutilate their God- created bodies to
try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.”¹7 Malcolm X thus chastised
African Americans who straightened their hair for wasting their
money on painful chemical treatments and contributing to broader
cultural conceptions of black inferiority. In a 1965 speech shortly

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 before his assassination, he explained, “When you teach a man to
hate . . . the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God
gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the
skin that God gave him, you’ve committed the worst crime that a
race of people can commit.”¹8
In the context of continued violence against civil rights activists
in the South and new eruptions of violence in urban ghettos in the
North, African Americans began to turn to the words of Malcolm
X and the concept of “Black Power” in their calls for black activism.
While the Black Power movement is most famous for its promotion
of self- defense over nonviolent action, its leaders also advocated a
reclaiming of African American cultural pride, including the rejec-
tion of white standards of beauty. Stokely Carmichael, chairman of
sncc in 1966, became the unofficial leader of the Black Power move-
ment after Malcolm X’s assassination. In speeches and writings, he
continued to preach about the importance of black cultural pride.
In a 1967 interview, he explained, “We must see ourselves as beautiful
people. We keep thinking the only thing that is beautiful is white, a
chick with long blonde hair. We’ve got to understand that we have
thick lips and flat noses and curly hair and we’re black and beautiful.
And we’re not going to imitate the white man anymore.”¹9 The idea
of “black is beautiful” recurred in many of Carmichael’s speeches and
became a slogan among African Americans by the end of the decade.
Inspired by the words of Malcolm X and Carmichael, some black
men and women began to wear their hair natural, growing their
hair into large Afros to demonstrate that they were not “ashamed”
of their “nappy hair” and that they refused to cut it short in order to
hide its curls.²0 African American magazines and newspapers began
to feature the style, explicitly connecting it to the Black Power move-
ment. One article in Ebony, in 1966, profiled a “relatively small” but
“outspoken” number of black women who had adopted the “natu-
ral” style. Many of the women featured in the article were involved
in civil rights activism, and they echoed the statements of Carmi-
chael on the politics of black beauty. “We, as black women, must
realize that there is beauty in what we are, without having to make

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 ourselves into something we aren’t,” explained a twenty-three-year-
old Southern Christian Leadership Conference field worker.²¹ Sim-
ilar articles on African American males adopting “natural” or Afro
styles connected their hair to a growing cultural politics of racial
pride. “[Afros] are part of the debrainwashing of a lot of our people,”
explained one Afro wearer.²²
African-inspired dress styles were another trend that symbolized
the cultural pride of some Black Power advocates. Maulanga Karenga,
the founder of the black nationalist us Organization in 1965, was one
of the first individuals to promote the adoption of African language,
names, and clothing to restore the “cultural identity” of the African
American people.²³ Black nationalists in the 1960s were often visu-
ally identified by long, multicolored robes, loose-fitting shirts called
“dashikis,” Afro-inspired jewelry, and natural hair.²4 The visual dis-
tinctiveness of these self-fashioning styles coincided with the overall
political ideology of the Black Power movement; rather than advo-
cate integration and “sameness” with whites, as did the ideologies of
the early civil rights movement, black nationalists and Black Power
advocates argued that integration was impossible, and that separa-
tion and independence from white society ought to be the goals of
African Americans. Afro hair and dress styles thus served as visual
symbols of Black Power ideologies that promoted cultural separa-
tion and independence from whites.²5
While many of the political ideologies of Black Power never were
fully accepted by most African Americans—the vast majority rejected
calls for separatism and still believed in the goal of integration—hair
and dress styles were one of the cultural manifestations of Black Power
that gained a significant following among African Americans by the
end of the decade.²6 At the beginning of 1969, the Baltimore Afro-
American reported on the growing popularity of natural hairstyles:
“Only the most militant would dare let their hair go natural at the
beginning of 1968,” the article claimed, “but as the year dies the style
is included in some of the most chick [sic] fashion salons.”²7 The Afro-
American beauty industry began marketing products for natural hair-
styles, advertising creams and styling sprays that claimed to enhance

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 the Afro’s “natural beauty.” For those who could not grow their hair
in the large Afro style, some businesses sold Afro wigs.²8 Clothing
boutiques in black neighborhoods also began selling African-inspired
fashions.²9 Many news articles claimed that the adoption of these
styles had “nothing to do with the economic and political wars of the
Black Power movement,” but certainly the messages of “psychologi-
cal liberation . . . from an anti-black, anti-kink conditioning” were
drawn from the ideologies of Black Power activists.³0
Afro styles, however, were not without their critics. Some feared that
individuals wearing Afros would implicitly align themselves with the
controversial tactics of the Black Power movement, of which many
African Americans vocally disapproved.³¹ Other activists objected to
Afros for their unkempt appearance; short hair was considered to be
more “presentable.”³² As one woman bluntly put it, men with Afros
looked like “shaggy dogs.”³³ Some black activists worried that Afro
styles would stymie progress for racial equality. “Do you know . . .
an employer who will offer you a job with a future because you’re
wearing an Afro?” asked Joe Black, vice president of the Greyhound
Corporation, in an advertisement that appeared in numerous black
publications in 1970. “Chanting slogans, spewing hate and chang-
ing your physical appearance won’t stop hunger pains, or get you a
solid job with a future. . . . Remember it for yourself, for your future
and self respect, and for the dignity of black people everywhere.”³4 In
this advertisement, Black was concerned about more than employ-
ment prospects for African Americans; he also worried about the
“respectability” of an African American community besieged by Afro
haircuts. Concerns about “dignity” underscored fears that the Afro
style defied conceptions of “respectable” self-presentation for African
Americans and could undo the gains of the civil rights movement.
A letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Sentinel perhaps put it best:
“Negro men, please improve your image. . . . Trim your hair. . . . You
are setting race relations back 100 years.”³5
Other African Americans questioned the gender implications of
Afro hairstyles. Some claimed that men with Afros were more mas-
culine because they “seem to be a little more sure of themselves” with

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 natural hair.³6 Others disagreed: “Long hair doesn’t make a man look
more masculine, but more savage,” wrote one woman.³7 Particularly
for women, the Afro presented an uncomfortable challenge to nor-
mative definitions of feminine self-presentation. Ebony’s 1966 article
on the increasing popularity of Afros among activist women made
this concern clear: “Like all women, those who wear naturals . . .
recognize that short hair might detract from their femininity.”³8 In
1968 the Washington Post discussed the problem of African American
women attempting to wear their hair “natural” but still wanting to
look “feminine”: “No reason [for adopting the Afro] was usually deep
enough to prevent the shock of the rather masculine new image in
the barber’s mirror,” the article lamented. Women with natural hair, it
claimed, needed to wear large earrings and makeup, and avoid wear-
ing pants, in order not to be confused with men.³9 For some, Afro
hairstyles seemed to blur the lines between masculine and feminine
self-presentation. Commenting on the natural hairstyles featured in
the 1966 issue of Ebony, one reader wrote to the editor, “When I got
my June, 1966 ebony and saw the picture on the cover, I thought it
was a man. When I found out it was a woman and looked inside and
saw all those kinky heads, I just tore the cover off my book. I could
not look at it.”40
Some black activists, in contrast, used the Afro to redefine what
natural beauty and femininity ought to mean for African Ameri-
can women.4¹ “Today the black woman is seeing the beauty that lies
within herself,” wrote one woman in Black Panther, the organization’s
periodical. “The natural beauty of her mind, hair, and body. It is as
though a seed has been planted and is in the first stages of growth.”4²
The magazine of the Black Panthers featured photographs of black
women with large Afros, with the captions “Black and Beautiful”
proclaiming their beauty and implicitly, their femininity.4³ Some
black female activists like Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis became
famous for their extremely large Afros, which were often displayed
in media photographs.44
But for a number of black women, Afro hairstyles were rejected as
a threat to feminine beauty. “I think it’s time the black woman started

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 FIG. 5. Angela Davis, a Black Power female activist, was famous for her large
Afro hairstyle. Bernard Gotfryd. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

pressing her hair again and even buying an assortment of wigs to

keep her looking sweet, delicious, desirable and feminine,” wrote one
woman in Ebony. “Disagree all you want, but think. The men look
great and masculine in their Afro hair styles— our women look great
and masculine, too.”45 Advertisements for hair-straightening prod-
ucts persisted in black magazines, and many women continued to
straighten their hair, perhaps because they feared the gender impli-

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 cations of the natural hairstyle.46 As one woman explained upon giv-
ing up her Afro in 1975, “It just doesn’t look feminine.”47
Even at the height of the Afro’s alleged popularity, a Newsweek
poll in 1969 found that less than half of African Americans approved
of natural hairstyles, and even fewer expressed support for African-
inspired clothing.48 While advancing significant political goals for the
black freedom movement, Afro hairstyles and African-inspired dress
styles also triggered a number of fears—their association with the
militant politics and alleged violence of Black Power organizations,
their defiance of “respectability” in self-fashioning, and their blurring
of gender boundaries. While some African Americans adopted these
styles with pride, others rejected them for their challenges to tradi-
tional norms of respectable presentation. For significant numbers
of African Americans, Afro dress and hairstyles were a liability, no
matter how important they might have been for the broader politi-
cal project of African American cultural pride.

POLITICIZED SELF- PRESENTATION IN THE

COUNTERCULTURE AND THE NEW LEFT
At the same time that Black Power activists explicitly politicized their
styles of self-presentation, white middle- class youths also began to con-
sider the deeper implications of their choices of hairstyles and fashion.
While battles over “Beatle” haircuts and miniskirts raged in schools,
students and young adults across the country became involved in a
number of social activist causes: the civil rights movement, the Free
Speech Movement at Berkeley, and protests of the Vietnam War. Other
youths and young adults did not join any specific organizations, but
considered themselves to be members of the “hippie counterculture”
that emerged in urban areas in the late 1960s.49 Although involve-
ment in social movement organizations and social protest was often
fluid and amorphous for many of the individuals involved, there was
no denying the increased political awareness of many youths in the
second half of the 1960s. And in a proliferation of writings in under-
ground magazines and newsletters, social activists, self-proclaimed
“hippies,” and politically minded young adults expressed their views.

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 As discussed in the previous chapter, students protesting attempts
to restrict their hairstyles or modes of dress also began to recognize
the deeper political meanings and implications of these styles. Some
young activists were inspired by the “beatniks” of the previous decade
who adopted alternative styles of dress as politicized statements.50
One activist remembered her “high school nonconformity” in adopt-
ing a beatnik style and was inspired when she arrived at Berkeley for
college to meet a group of leftist intellectuals with “beards . . . blue
work shirts and lots of baggy corduroys.”5¹ For others, battles with
schools, parents, and the public over hair and dress styles became a
gateway for engagement in broader political activism. “As more and
more long-haired teenagers found themselves insulted, beaten, jailed,
searched, and similarly harassed by the defenders of status quo, it was
no time before the lessons of recent political movements became
clear to these kids,” explained one member of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society (sds), one of the largest organizations of the growing
New Left in the 1960s.5² Indeed, activist publications editorialized
on student battles against dress and grooming codes in high schools,
encouraging students to stand up for their rights and perhaps also
attracting young adults to join their cause.5³
As young Americans began to join social movement organizations
and political activism, they brought their new styles of fashion with
them. In the early years of sds, which formed in 1960, members fol-
lowed a dress and grooming code similar to that of early civil rights
activists: short hair, jackets, and ties for men; blouses and skirts for
women.54 But by the mid-1960s, styles of self-presentation began to
change among sds members. Todd Gitlin, a former president of the
organization, recalled that some of the changes began during trips
to join civil rights activism in the South; to blend in with the local,
rural culture, sncc and sds volunteers began to adopt the “back-
country look of Georgia and Mississippi: denim jackets, blue work
shirts, bib overalls.”55 Returning to Northern campuses in the mid-
1960s, older members noticed that “the new generation . . . dressed
and acted more casually than their predecessors” and were “shaggy
in appearance.”56

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 Indeed, some members of sds argued that hair and dress styles
were critical components of their politicization. Carl Davidson, the
national vice president of sds in 1965–66, was inspired by Stokely
Carmichael’s speeches on black beauty and realized that one’s physi-
cal appearance could be just as political as one’s ideas: If “you were
representative of the dominant culture [in your appearance], even if
you had revolutionary values, people would still look at you a cer-
tain way,” he explained.57 Students at the University of Kansas recalled
the solidarity they felt with those who adopted their same uncon-
ventional dress and hairstyles.58 As changing styles took hold, older
members of sds soon began to don the “new styles” promoted by
younger members.59
Some sds members also began to argue that hair and dress styles
could be symbolic of their broader protests against American val-
ues. Dress and grooming codes in high schools were “symptomatic
of one of the most serious problems in American society,” one sds
member wrote— cultural conformity to middle- class “respectable”
standards of dress. “People are too afraid . . . to deviate from the stan-
dards of their middle- class community,” the member complained.
“They have adopted an uncompromising view of the way people
should look and dress. They hold that students should be clean- cut,
well-scrubbed, and properly tailored. They assert that boys should
look like middle- class boys; and girls, like middle- class girls.”60 Cri-
tiques of middle- class standards of respectability and conformity
were common in writings of social activists of the era. The 1950s was
a decade of mass prosperity and growth for the white middle class,
as suburbs grew, consumer spending increased, and more individu-
als than ever before attained college and graduate degrees.6¹ Many
members of the older generation, having grown up during the lean
years of the Great Depression and World War II, welcomed these
developments; their children often found them to be stifling. Todd
Gitlin called the middle- class culture of the 1950s “a seedbed as well
as a cemetery,” and the affluence and prosperity of the 1950s also cre-
ated expectations of consumption and capitalist materialism against
which the student and youth activists of the 1960s would rebel.6²

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 The Port Huron Statement, one of the founding documents of sds,
vocally decried the values of the middle- class lifestyle: “The major-
ity of Americans are living in relative comfort—although their nag-
ging incentive to ‘keep up’ makes them continually dissatisfied with
their possessions.”6³
Young activists often connected their dress and hairstyles to a
broader rejection of middle- class values. Some self-identified hippies,
for example, derided the conformity of the normative middle- class
lifestyle, which mandated not only certain types of jobs and stan-
dards of living, but also certain modes of self-presentation. In a 1967
essay, “What Is a Hippie?,” one individual explained the connections
between countercultural dress and middle- class values: “The hippies
dress strangely. They dress this way because they have thrown a lot of
middle- class notions out the window and with them the most sensi-
tive middle- class dogma: the neutral appearance.” A “neutral appear-
ance,” according to the author, was one that blended in, showing one’s
tacit acceptance of middle- class values. The appearance of the hip-
pies, in contrast, symbolized their rejection of the middle- class “rat
race” of employment, money, and consumerism: “He [the hippie] has
escaped from a culture where the machine is god, and men judge
each other by mechanical standards of efficiency and usefulness. He
sees a madness in the constant fight to sell more washing machines,
cars, toilet paper, girdles, and gadgets than the other fellow. He is
equally horrified at the grim ruthlessness of the men who partici-
pate in that fight.”64 The culture of middle- class consumption, this
individual argued, created a lifestyle of greed and conformity that the
hippies allegedly rejected. Another self-identified hippie mocked the
consumerist routines of middle- class families: “Then comes Sunday,
when we all dress up in our best, go out to our shiny new car. . . . We
sit in our shiny automobile, nobody can see the potbelly sitting in
our legs, no one knows that the wife is wearing a Maidenform outfit
two sizes too small and can’t move.”65 The hippies decried the shiny
automobile, the too-tight dresses and clothes, and the general expec-
tations of middle- class life as materialist, shallow, and conformist.
In contrast, many hippies and youth activists promoted their modes

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 of self-presentation as more “natural” forms of self-styling. Hair and
dress styles (or nondress, in the case of public displays of nudity) pro-
vided a means for individuals to replace the conformity and consum-
erism of middle- class America with what they considered to be a more
natural lifestyle. As one “wild-haired” hippie explained, “We are hip
to all the mistakes society has made and is making. . . . We are hip to
the fact that Nature is everything. Nature is ageless.”66 Long hair on
men was imagined to signify a more natural form of masculinity. As
Jerry Rubin, a self-proclaimed spokesperson for the counterculture,
explained, “Man was born to let his hair grow long and to smell like a
man. We are descended from the apes, and we’re proud of our ances-
try.”67 Another longhaired hippie said even more simply, “I wear long
hair because I think that’s the way God meant me to look.”68 Long
hair, as well as love beads and other styles of dress, were considered
to be symbols of Native American cultures, who were imagined to
be closer to nature and therefore more authentic in their masculinity
(and who were also the victims of American imperialism).69 Facial
hair on men was also sometimes considered a facet of this natural
ideal. Some activist men grew long beards in addition to their long
hair, returning to what men looked like in “nature,” without razors
or scissors.70 For women, rejecting brassieres, makeup, girdles, and
not setting their hair or shaving their legs, constituted a more natural
form of femininity, free from the trappings of middle- class consum-
erism (although some countercultural women did wear miniskirts,
perhaps contradicting this anticonsumerist ideology).7¹ As one activist
woman who participated in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley
recalled, “Of the many lessons I learned for the revolution . . . not the
least of them was what to wear to the revolution: Wear cotton. Wear
open shoes. They breathe. We might even say, they breathe freely.
Which was, after all, what the fsm was all about.”7²
Hippies and youth activists also saw their choices in hairstyles
and dress as emblematic of the freedoms that were promised by
American culture but were rarely realized. Echoing the cries of high
school students and defenders of long hair, hippies used their self-
presentation to critique American culture more generally, which

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 obscured true freedom of expression, they claimed, by instituting
arbitrary restrictions on “acceptable” dress and hairstyles (as well as
equally arbitrary restrictions on drug use and sexual behavior). When
hippies were harassed or arrested for their appearance, they defended
themselves by citing concepts of individual rights and the constitu-
tional guarantees of freedom of thought and expression. As one hip-
pie explained, everyone had an “American right” to dress how they
wished, but “American rights are largely disregarded by the munici-
pal courts here. The one who dares to defy the mores (not the laws)
here is bound to have a legal bill to pay. All this is done in the name
of ‘order.’”7³ As this author pointed out, while legal channels might
have guaranteed individual freedoms, social mores seemed to trump
freedom in practice. Hippies implored America to live up to its ideals
of freedom and liberty for all, including the freedom to choose one’s
personal appearance. “There are no exceptions in this document . . .
regarding age or length of hair,” explained one hippie as he pointed
to a copy of the Bill of Rights.74
Student and youth activists also used their hair and dress styles
to make connections to other topics of political activism during the
decade. Influenced by the cultural politics of Black Power, some activ-
ists argued that their self-presentation turned them into minorities
and outsiders. Jerry Rubin made these connections between black
and hippie oppression explicit: “Long hair is our black skin. Long hair
turns white middle- class youth into niggers. Amerika is a different
country when you have long hair. We’re outcasts. We, the children of
the white middle class, feel like Indians, blacks, Vietnamese, the out-
siders in Amerikan history.”75 By equating hippies with other minority
groups, Rubin argued that long hair allowed white youths to express
solidarity with those who were oppressed because they looked “differ-
ent” from “normal” (i.e., white) Americans. Hippies, they contended,
also faced harassment due to their outward appearance. As Abbie
Hoffman explained in 1968, “You want to get a glimpse of what it
feels like to be a nigger? Let your hair grow long. Longhairs, that new
minority, are getting the crap kicked out of them by . . . police harass-
ment previously reserved only for blacks.”76 Hippies thus claimed to

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 attain experiential solidarity with racial and ethnic minorities. As
one hippie in Atlanta explained, after his cooperative store was fire-
bombed, “We’ve got a new nigger in our society, and the way to tell
him is by his hair and his beard.”77 While surely some members of
minority groups found this reasoning to be offensive—white men
and women could choose to look different, whereas many members
of racial minorities could not—these arguments did signal a feeling
of solidarity with minorities that white activists wished to express.
Styles of self-presentation not only made activists identifiable by
others for harassment, but also were believed to build solidarity as
members of a growing community with similar political and ideo-
logical views. As Jerry Rubin wrote, “Long hair is communication.
We are a new minority group, a nationwide community of longhairs,
a new identity, new loyalties. We longhairs recognize each other as
brothers in the street.” While Rubin’s use of the term “brothers” might
have made female members of this “community” feel ignored, he elu-
cidated the idea that long hair could symbolize a particular set of
ideological or political commitments: “Wherever we go, long hair
tells people where we stand on Vietnam, Wallace, campus disruption,
dope. We’re living tv commercials for the revolution. We’re walk-
ing picket signs,” Rubin concluded.78 Another individual explained,
“When I show up anyplace, I don’t need to tell my brothers and sis-
ters, or my enemies, ‘Hey look, I’m against the Vietnam War, racism,
poverty and pollution. I dig grass, black power and revolution.’ They
look at me and they know. . . . My hair tells the story.”79 Long hair
and nonconformist dress thus provided a symbol, at least in theory,
to identify like-minded dissenters and activists. One student activist
recalled looking around at the 1967 antiwar protest in Washington
dc, “and as far as the eye can see in any direction are people with
protest signs, kids with hair that’s getting longer, and banners, and
it’s like you just have a sense of solidarity.”80
Indeed, long hairstyles on men became particularly poignant as a
symbol of protest against the Vietnam War. American involvement
in the war escalated in the second half of the 1960s after Congress
authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in

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 fighting the North Vietnamese, and Johnson reinstated the draft to
increase the amount of American troops in South Vietnam. While
in reality, working- class and minority men were drafted most often
(as many middle- and upper- class men obtained educational defer-
ments or were otherwise excused from service), all men ages eigh-
teen through twenty-six were technically subject to the draft, and as
deaths of American soldiers in South Vietnam mounted, so too did
the fears of the men of the baby-boom generation who were com-
ing of age in the 1960s.8¹
The escalation of the Vietnam War coincided with the growing
disillusionment of many younger Americans with the government’s
Cold War policies. sds identified atomic weaponry as the source of
the terror that many young Americans had experienced surround-
ing the tensions with the USSR: “The enclosing fact of the Cold War,
symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we
ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’ we knew
more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time,”
they wrote in the Port Huron Statement.8² Some young Americans
began to wonder if the fight against communism was necessary or
worthwhile. “The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States
contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War
status quo,” sds wrote.8³ Investment in the military, weaponry, and
the “Cold War status quo” were linked in the minds of some young
Americans with the misguided values of American culture: “We’ve
watched them run into so many dead ends while they’re playing with
all their toys like the bomb,” one hippie wrote.84 Dissent against the
values of American culture—namely, materialism and capitalism—
thus fueled the ideologies expressed in anti–Vietnam War protest and
fit well with the alternative styles of self-presentation of some activists.
Long hair, in particular, also became a symbol of protest against
militarism itself. Previous generations had considered service in the
army to be an honorable obligation to one’s country, as well as a
critical component of masculinity. Nearly all of the men who came
of age in the 1930s and 1940s had fought in World War II, making
the war a significant coming- of-age experience for American men

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 of all races and ethnicities in the 1940s.85 But many men coming of
age in the 1960s feared their lives would be cut short by death in the
war. Moreover, some saw the war in Vietnam as yet another aspect
of American hypocrisy in which freedom was denied to citizens of
other countries who did not agree with America’s capitalist values.
As Barbara Ehrenreich has explained, the Vietnam War became too
brutal and too costly to be justified by the notion of masculine obli-
gation. Moreover, the horrifying images of war—the “gratuitous bru-
tality of American fighting men, as shown in full color on television
and in the pages of Life”—illustrated the pitfalls of aggressive, war-
mongering masculinity.86
Long hair thus symbolized for some activists their criticism of
the forms of masculinity promulgated by a culture of militarism
and warfare. “They say the army makes a man out of you,” one indi-
vidual explained. “By now you know better. The army just tries to
make a robot out of you. . . . There isn’t a damn thing about killing
that is ‘manly.’ A man’s job is to make babies, not kill them.”87 “This
country was built on machismo,” another activist explained. “Lovely
longhairs—they aren’t afraid to say To Hell With Machismo.”88 For
some, long hair was a criticism of the “mental indoctrination” of the
army itself, reflected in the short haircuts required of all soldiers.89
Some Vietnam War veterans grew their hair long when they returned
from service, symbolizing their protest against the war and against
the American military.90 However, other activists recognized that this
“army culture” of crew cuts and warfare actually held deeper roots in
the culture of Cold War America. One author in a 1967 anthology of
hippie writings decried his past as a “crew- cutted Seattle boy” who
was ignorant of the “poisoning and blighting” of Vietnamese men and
women in warfare.9¹ In expressing dissent against the war and discard-
ing his past identity, the author implicitly rejected the masculinity
of the 1950s—a masculinity defined not only by crew cuts, suits, and
ties, but also by masculine service in the war as an obligation of citi-
zenship. Through their long hair, antiwar activists implicitly rejected
an army culture that seemed to infuse American society, promoting
warfare and aggression as part of societal expectations of masculinity.

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 The writings of self-proclaimed hippies and activists thus illustrate
how many individuals politicized their styles of self-presentation on
a number of levels. Countercultural or nontraditional hair and dress
styles came to symbolize a rejection of the middle- class “lifestyle,”
solidarity with other radicals and racial minorities, dissent against
a culture of warfare and militarism promoted by the Cold War, and
the freedom and independence of the American creed that activists
hoped to realize. Self-presentation became an obvious cultural tool
through which activist youths displayed their political messages. How-
ever, self-presentation also became a cultural tool for opponents of
these social movements to symbolize the threats these movements
seemed to promulgate against traditional American values.

CULTURAL ANXIETIES AND BACKLASH

OVER POLITICIZED STYLES
While the political messages of certain styles carried deep meaning
for many activists, they also created consternation within and outside
of the movement. The media, for example, was certainly focused on
these styles and played a large role in highlighting or even exagger-
ating the stylistic aspects of student activism. Media photographs of
sds, Todd Gitlin claimed, often purposely focused on members with
long hair or untraditional appearance. One issue of the New York
Times Magazine put a “long-haired, droopy-mustached” member of
sds on its cover, while “photos of five other, less hairy staff members
appeared safely inside” the magazine, which “superimposed a frame
of hairy deviance” on the organization.9² Similarly, media photogra-
phers focused on hippie youths with particularly long hair or out-
landish clothes in their photos.9³
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) aided the media in por-
traying a “deviant” image of sds members. Starting in 1964, the fbi
began to monitor the activities and meetings of sds, convinced that
the organization was connected to the Communist Party and infil-
trated with Soviet spies.94 While the fbi never found concrete evidence
to support these claims, its research helped to portray the organization
as a threat. The fbi built upon common themes in anticommunist

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 propaganda that alleged deviant sexuality and nontraditional gender
roles as characteristics of communists.95 In their memorandum on
the 1965 sds national convention, the fbi reported that “sexual pro-
miscuity” was “prevalent” among sds members, that students slept
in co- ed sleeping arrangements and shared bathrooms regardless of
gender, and that attendees were “beatnik types who wear sandals,
long hair, and dress in bizarre clothes.”96 The fbi thus conflated sex-
ual “deviance” with “bizarre” styles to hype the nonconformist nature
of activists. Sometimes the fbi leaked these memoranda to the press.
One was sent to a Columbus, Ohio, newspaper, and warned of the
upcoming sds national meeting in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which would
bring “more pairs of worn leather sandals, dirty tennis shoes, smelly
sweatshirts, and soiled T-shirts and slacks than ever before in the com-
munity’s history.” The memorandum highlighted the dirtiness, sex-
ual promiscuity, and drug use of the activists along with their styles,
emphasizing the “shoulder-length hairstyles among both males and
females . . . that will stir memories of the pirate-infested days of the
West Indies.” The memo also emphasized that the attendees would
include “swarms of young subversives and near-subversives, includ-
ing Communist Party members.”97 Another leaked memorandum
identified the “wildly nonconformist style . . . which sometimes defies
the outward visual determination of the sex of the person involved.”
The report concluded: “Ultimately, [their] hope is to tear our soci-
ety apart.”98 When similar statements appeared in newspaper articles,
it was clear from whom the media had obtained its information.99
Perhaps in response to this media coverage, some members of sds
began to fret about the organization’s image in the public eye. At their
1965 national convention, concerns about styles of self-presentation
came to the surface when attendees discussed a proposal to hold a
protest at the White House against the Vietnam War. During the dis-
cussion, some delegates suggested that only “clean-cut, ‘girl-next- door-
type’ students” should be allowed in the protest, and that “beatnik-type
students” should be excluded.¹00 This discussion signaled that not all
sds members were comfortable with changing self-presentation styles,
believing that their outward appearance was crucial to the organi-

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 zation’s public image. The organization also attempted to highlight
leaders who displayed a more “clean- cut” style of appearance. Paul
Booth, who was described by the Harvard Crimson as an “unlikely-
looking revolutionary,” was featured on cbs in 1965 wearing a suit
and tie, “confounding the stereotype of the radical agitator.”¹0¹ By
trying to maintain a traditional, “respectable” appearance, these sds
leaders hoped that the organization would avoid the controversies
surrounding changing styles of personal presentation.
But opponents of hippies and antiwar leftist activism were quick
to channel their frustrations with these movements into criticisms
of their hair and dress styles. Leaders of the organization Young
Americans for Freedom (yaf), a conservative student organization
that often pitted itself against sds and anti–Vietnam War protestors,
often called attention to the hair and dress styles of New Left activ-
ists as further proof of their threat to American society. Nate Gordon,
a spokesman for yaf, explained that “most of the people who were
demonstrating [against the American government] were the beatnik
type of person,” and that this beatnik style was a sign of their “sick
personality.”¹0² Articles in New Guard, the monthly magazine of yaf,
derided the hair and dress of left-leaning activists, and cartoons in the
magazine portrayed leftist protestors as longhaired beatniks.¹0³ Per-
haps as a counterpoint to the image of longhaired leftist protestors,
photographs of clean- cut, short-haired yaf male leaders were regu-
larly featured in the organization’s magazine, implicitly portraying
the middle- class respectability of its members.¹04 This traditionalist
image of yaf members was not necessarily accurate. A number of yaf
members wrote letters of complaint to the magazine, arguing that
they, too, wore long hair and unconventional clothes. “If conserva-
tism is truly individualism, then don’t ridicule individualists!” one
letter proclaimed.¹05 But yaf still implied that the alleged normative
self-presentation of their membership was evidence of the virtue and
Americanism of the organization.
Some politicians also focused on the self-presentation—and par-
ticularly the long hair— of leftist student protestors. George Wallace,
the former governor of Alabama who gained significant popular sup-

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 port as a conservative third-party presidential candidate in 1964 and
1968, often decried the “long hairs and short skirts” of student protes-
tors in his campaign speeches and would threaten to “grab some of
those college students by their long hair and teach them a thing or
two.”¹06 When leftist activists protested at his rallies, Wallace wasn’t
afraid to deride them to their faces. At one speech in Orange County,
California, when a longhaired man yelled at the stage, Wallace replied,
“And let me, ma’am, say this to you,” explicitly calling into question
the gender of the protestor.¹07 Not all of Wallace’s hecklers had long
hair or wore “hippie” styles, of course; but Wallace emphasized and
exaggerated these traits to exploit their self-presentation for his own
political gain.¹08 Indeed, crowds at Wallace rallies were occasionally
incited by his rhetoric. At one rally in San Francisco, some listen-
ers chanted “kill the hippies,” and one woman hit a bearded, hippie-
looking youth with an umbrella.¹09
Historians documenting the unexpected success of George Wal-
lace’s presidential campaigns have mainly focused on his views on
race and segregation, which garnered support from whites across the
country who were growing wary of the African American civil rights
movement in the wake of urban riots, the growth of Black Power, and
challenges to segregated schools and housing in the North.¹¹0 But
Wallace also gained support from Americans who were outraged by
the “unruliness” of student protestors who not only seemed to sup-
port anti-American communist forces in Vietnam, but also allegedly
refused to listen to authorities and obey the law. As historian Dan
Carter explains, “Wallace wove the specter of civil disorder, street
crime, the growing assertiveness of minorities, and Communist-
inspired pro-Vietcong street demonstrations into an angry tapestry.”¹¹¹
Wallace’s specific attacks on long hair and miniskirts suggest that
self-presentation styles signified the rebelliousness and “civil disor-
der” that these activists seemed to represent to their opponents. Inter-
views with Wallace voters emphasized not only their disagreement
with liberal public policies, but also their hatred of long hair on men,
miniskirts on women, and changing sexual mores among youths. “If
any of my sons came home with long hair . . . I’d cripple him for life,”

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 one Wallace supporter in Birmingham proclaimed.¹¹² In contrast to
their portrayals of student protestors, newspaper articles emphasized
the “clean” and “decent” styles of Wallace supporters. “No miniskirts
to speak of, but plenty of matrons with heavy makeup and floppy
hats and hairstyles,” was how one journalist described the Wallace
crowd. “They were all decent looking people . . . the men wearing
slacks and short-sleeved sport shirts and the women cotton frocks,”
wrote another.¹¹³ These descriptions of self-presentation styles con-
trasted with images of “disorderly” and “rebellious” social activists
to symbolize the ideological differences between the two groups. To
opponents of the social movements of the 1960s, the hair and dress
styles of activists symbolized their anti-Americanism, demonstrated
by their antiwar activism and their alleged contempt for social order.
George Wallace was not the only politician to criticize the self-
presentation styles of student activists. Ronald Reagan, the Republi-
can governor of California, famously described a hippie as someone
“who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”¹¹4
Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, who became Richard Nixon’s vice
president, also made fun of hippie styles and student protestors. At
a speech at Brigham Young University, Agnew remarked that the
campus “offers a refreshing change of pace. . . . Here the scenery is
magnificent, the buildings are handsome, and you can still tell the
boys from the girls. Now don’t misunderstand me, I don’t have any-
thing against long hair, but I didn’t raise my son to be my daugh-
ter.”¹¹5 Agnew’s (and Wallace’s) specifically gendered attacks on the
hair and dress styles of student protestors were matched by their
gendered attacks on the New Left and liberal politics more broadly.
In one speech in New Orleans in 1969, Agnew famously called anti–
Vietnam War protestors an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” imply-
ing that antiwar protest and leftist activism were unmanly and signs
of effeminate weakness.¹¹6 In other speeches, Agnew warned that stu-
dent protestors were turning America into an “effete society.”¹¹7 Wal-
lace made similar gendered attacks in his speeches, deriding liberal,
antiwar intellectuals as “bungling and effete.”¹¹8 Gendered attacks on
liberal policies exacerbated their derision of longhaired student pro-

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 testors, implying that leftist activists and their antiwar stance were
“unmanly” and a threat to conventional gender norms.
Some antiwar politicians distanced themselves from the styles of
self-fashioning that provoked so much ire among some Americans.
The dress and grooming codes for Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s 1968
presidential campaign volunteers—for which males cut their hair and
shaved their beards, and females eschewed pants and miniskirts—
epitomized this approach.¹¹9 One magazine article described the
efforts of McCarthy’s young volunteers as follows: “To escape the
hippie image, miniskirted girls went midi, and bearded boys either
shaved or stayed in the back rooms, licking envelopes. . . . One youth
cold-shaved his chin in a Concord street to get ‘Clean for Gene,’ while
another hirsute canvasser, barred entry because of his beard by an
irate housewife, borrowed a razor and tried to convert her while
depilating.”¹²0 The grooming and dress codes thus attempted to dis-
play a more moderate image of the antiwar movement to the public.
As one student volunteer put it, “Many of our friends are hairy in
their private lives, but when they are campaigning they know what
is appropriate for the situation. . . . We aren’t bothered by long hair,
but we know how our mothers and grandmothers think.”¹²¹ The dress
and grooming code of the McCarthy campaign therefore appealed
to public sensibilities that favored traditional modes of grooming
and dress and perhaps attempted to quell the symbolism of styles
that seemed to suggest rebellion or untraditional views.
Perhaps nowhere could the backlash against leftist activism be seen
more clearly than in the increasingly violent reactions to New Left
protests in the late 1960s. As dissent against the war and antiwar pro-
test mounted, so too did the number of counter-protesters at rallies
and marches.¹²² Opponents of the antiwar movement often focused
on students with unconventional looks, and sometimes became vio-
lent towards them.¹²³ Violent police interventions also became prev-
alent at marches and demonstrations. During “Stop the Draft Week”
in 1967, police famously attacked protesters at an Oakland, Califor-
nia, induction center in a riot that became known as “Bloody Tues-
day”; police violence and intimidation occurred at other antiwar

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 protests as well.¹²4 The riots and police brutality at the 1968 Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chicago have also become famous in
narratives of the 1960s for unraveling the New Left and altering the
course of the 1968 election, paving the way for Nixon’s victory as the
Republican candidate.¹²5
Certainly, violent reactions by police and others were seen as a
response to the unruly tactics that were allegedly used by student
activists themselves. But the self-presentation of antiwar protestors
was also a factor; whether due to the reality of students’ styles or to
media exaggerations of those styles, student protestors were believed
to be longhaired, strangely dressed “freaks” who transgressed norms
of respectability and propriety.¹²6 As the New York Times explained
of the protests in Chicago, “The police were confronted by a large
group of young people who had rejected much of what the police-
man, as a man, had grown up believing to be right. These youngsters
were . . . nonconformists who wore long hair and garish clothes, and
espoused unpopular, anti- establishment and even outrageous view-
points. Their very appearances inflamed the policemen with hostil-
ity.”¹²7 The hair, clothes, and “very appearances” of these activists thus
symbolized, for their opponents, the disorder they seemed to cause
and helped to incite anger against the movement.
Some police officers reacted to the self-presentation of student
protestors just as much as they reacted to any violence on the part
of protestors themselves. Sociologist Rodney Stark studied police
behavior in the late 1960s and found that some police officers, many
of whom grew up in working- class Catholic families, were particu-
larly irked by unconventional gender and sexual behavior: “They
are easily shocked by sexual freedom, casual nudity, ‘filthy’ speech . . .
‘strange’ clothing, [and] long hair,” he explained.¹²8 Along with other
countercultural behaviors like drugs and nudity, “sexual freedom”
and “long hair” challenged a police officer’s sense of “conventional
morality and sexuality,” and Stark found that anger toward sexual
and gender deviance could incite the police to violently abuse their
power. Accounts of police violence at antiwar rallies illustrated that
allusions to gender and sexuality were prevalent in their verbal attacks

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 on students. Abbie Hoffman recalled that police in New York City
called protestors “fairies,” and would yell, “You pull dese guys’ pants
off and they ain’t got no pecker”—implying that male student pro-
testers weren’t masculine enough to be “real” men.¹²9 The Walker
Commission Report, a study commissioned by the federal govern-
ment to determine the causes of the violence at the Chicago conven-
tion, found that the police were to blame for provoking the crowd,
often committing acts of “malicious” and “mindless” violence toward
the protestors. The report discovered instances in which the police
had targeted youths with long hair, called male protestors “queers,”
“fags,” and “cocksuckers,” ripped off the skirts of female protestors,
and kicked activists in the groin.¹³0
The personal appearance of student protestors informed the gen-
dered and sexual overtones of these police attacks. While the Walker
Report recognized that to “characterize the crowd . . . as entirely
hippie-Yippie, entirely ‘New Left,’ entirely anarchist, or entirely youth-
ful political dissenters is both wrong and dangerous,” the commission
conceded that “the stereotyping that did occur helps to explain the
emotional reactions of both police and public during and after the
violence that occurred.” The predominant image of the protestors in
the minds of both the police and the public was one of sexual and
gender transgression: “the long hair and love beads, the calculated
unwashedness, the flagrant banners, the open lovemaking and dis-
dain for the constraints of conventional society,” the Walker Report
explained.¹³¹ And the police were not alone in their negative reac-
tion to the student protestors; public opinion polls found that the
vast majority of Americans sided with the police’s actions at the
convention.¹³² While the assumption that protestors were violent
and unlawful certainly fueled public opinion against them, so too
did perceptions of protestors’ deviance in self-presentation. “I do
not think that the hippies and the yippies realized how much they
confused the police and madden them,” contributed one writer to
an editorial in the Chicago Defender. “The long hair, the clothes, the
nature of their protest, all conspire to make a policeman feel he is
dealing with people more menacing than Communists whom he

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 has never seen anyway.”¹³³ It was easy for the police and the public to
conflate the self-presentation of leftist activists with the actual polit-
ical content of their protests; according to the media, the fbi, and
conservative politicians, the student-led antiwar movement fueled
threats of communism and threatened notions of gender, sexual,
and social order by challenging middle- class respectability and tra-
ditional American values.
The violence provoked by social protests of the era can thus be
understood as part of a longer history of hostility toward changing
norms of self-presentation among youths and student activists. For
students and youth, conflicts over self-presentation were yet another
example of the problems of conformist, capitalist, and middle- class
America, in which masculine respectability was predicated on a
culture of warfare and militarism and feminine respectability was
determined by a culture of capitalist conformity and artifice. For
their opponents, the self-presentation styles of activists challenged
norms of gender, sexuality, and respectability, symbolizing the social
disorder caused by these movements more broadly. The politics of
self-presentation among social movement activists thus aided the
backlash that fomented against these movements by the end of the
1960s—movements that, to their opponents, seemed to threaten the
very fabric of America.

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 3 “ NO WO M A N CAN
B E F RE E  .  .  . U N T I L
SHE LOSES HER
FEMININITY”
The Politics of Self-Presentation
in Feminist Activism

In 1971 a woman writing in the Iowa City femi-

nist journal Ain’t I A Woman? described her decision to cut her hair
as the definitive experience of women’s liberation. Previously, her
hair “grew down to [her] waist,” and thinking of cutting it made her
stomach “contract in terror.” After she cut it extremely short, however,
she discovered a newfound self- confidence and independence. “In
classes I didn’t have to bother about how I was coming across,” she
explained. “When I walk through the commons, I feel much less on
display.” Refusing to look like, in her words, “an attractive female,” she
no longer had to worry about men’s unwanted stares and advances.
Most of all, by cutting her hair, she rejected the notion that her iden-
tity was tied to femininity. “So now when I look in the mirror I see a
person who really doesn’t look like a girl. She doesn’t look like a boy.
Really, what she looks like hasn’t been labeled yet. She looks like me.”¹

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 Cutting one’s hair was just one example of how some feminists in
the 1960s and 1970s rejected traditional standards of feminine beauty
as oppressive and objectifying of women. Criticisms of makeup, high
heels, and miniskirts by women’s liberation activists of the 1960s
have been well- documented by many scholars.² But this Iowa City
feminist illustrated how the self-fashioning techniques of women’s
liberationists were also, in some cases, part of the feminist quest to
reject gender binaries that strictly separated masculine and feminine
roles. By failing to look like a traditional woman, this activist chal-
lenged the notion that men and women were as different as socially
constructed roles of gender made them out to be.
While not all feminists cut their hair or rejected feminine beauty
culture, the politicization of hairstyles, dress, and self-presentation
became central to the cultural politics of the second-wave feminist
movement, widely discussed in feminist and mainstream periodicals
alike. Women’s liberationists and lesbian feminists borrowed from
popular cultural styles that challenged gender norms as well as from
the politicization of dress and hairstyles by hippies, New Left activ-
ists, and Black Power advocates. Women’s liberationists, however,
were the first 1960s activists to connect self-presentation styles to an
explicit politics of gender. Feminists did not reject makeup, dresses,
and high heels simply as expensive or objectifying accoutrements of
a female lifestyle; rather, they rejected normative self-presentations
of womanhood as part and parcel of socially constructed sex roles
that defined, marginalized, sexualized, and oppressed women. Dress
and personal appearance thus became an explicit part of some femi-
nists’ political goals of challenging broader conceptions of gender
and traditional femininity.
The study of self-presentation as a political tactic of women’s lib-
eration during the 1960s and early 1970s highlights some of the suc-
cesses, challenges, and divisions within second-wave feminism. The
politics of self-presentation became a contentious issue among fem-
inists and their observers, highlighting broader conflicts between
groups of feminists and the skepticism that some women and men
felt toward the movement. Within feminist circles, activists disagreed

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 over the meaning and efficacy of self-fashioning as a political state-
ment. While no opinion was monolithic within any one group, trends
emerged in feminist periodicals that illustrated specific divides that
formed among activist women, often (though not always) along lines
of age, sexuality, class, and race.
Debates on feminist gender presentation also revealed deeper con-
flicts among feminists and nonfeminists alike over the meaning of
female identity and womanhood. Did nontraditional, androgynous
or “masculine” self-presentations help to create a new feminist ver-
sion of womanhood, free from socially constructed gender roles? Or
did rejecting traditional feminine gender presentation signal that
feminists sought to abandon their heterosexual female identities?
Those who believed the former often embraced new forms of self-
styling; those who believed the latter often rejected politicized self-
presentation as further proof of the radical nature of feminist activism.
Antifeminists, most notably Phyllis Schlafly and opponents of the
Equal Rights Amendment, capitalized on these “unfeminine” self-
presentation styles to prove that feminists sought to destroy gender
distinctions that antifeminists believed were real and important. As
mainstream media focused on the hair and dress styles of feminist
activists and journalists derided women’s liberationists as “ugly” and
“unfeminine,” some Americans were led to believe that by failing to
“look like” traditional women, feminists hoped to destroy woman-
hood and gender difference altogether. Women’s dress, hair, and fash-
ion styles thus became the sites of cultural battles over the meanings
of feminism and womanhood.

WO M E N ’S L I B E R AT I O N I STS , L E S B I A N F E M I N I STS ,
AND THE POLITICIZATION OF SELF- PRESENTATION
The women’s liberation movement introduced itself to America in
1968, when a number of women’s liberation groups staged a mas-
sive protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. The protest
garnered the reputation of feminists as “bra-burners,” as the women
threw bras, along with cosmetics, girdles, high-heeled shoes, and issues
of Playboy and Cosmopolitan into a “Freedom Trash Can.”³ While the

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 FIG. 6. Protestors at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, 1968. AP Images.

media misrepresented the method of protest at the pageant—nothing

was burned—these activists sent a message that feminism rejected a
culture that defined women by how they looked. In a leaflet handed
out at the protest, the feminist group New York Radical Women com-
pared the pageant to a county fair, “where the nervous animals are
judged for teeth, fleece, etc., and where the best ‘specimen’ gets the
blue ribbon. So are women in our society forced daily, to compete
for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we our-
selves are conditioned to take seriously.”4
The Miss America protest was not the beginning of feminist activ-
ism in the 1960s; earlier in the decade, new visibility for feminist con-
cerns, and new organizations to fight for women’s rights, had emerged.

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 The publication of Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique in 1963
called for increased education and work opportunities for women,
and the book drew new attention to the plight of middle- and upper-
class housewives.5 In 1966 Friedan and other activist women, many
of whom had been active in women’s issues in the 1940s and 1950s,
formed the National Organization for Women (now), a civil rights
organization for women modeled after African American organiza-
tions like the naacp.6 The primary goals of now were legal and leg-
islative. Two years earlier, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had
been amended to ban employment discrimination based on sex as
well as race.7 When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion (eeoc), the government organization created to enforce Title VII,
refused to take seriously women’s claims of employment discrimi-
nation, now lobbied for the commission to carry out investigations
and file lawsuits based on women’s complaints and also pressured
the eeoc to restrict employers from specifying the preferred sex of
employees in job advertisements.8 Early “second wave” women’s orga-
nizations such as now thus focused their efforts on legal channels
to fight discrimination experienced by women in the workplace.9
At the same time that now and other women’s organizations were
focusing on legal and legislative change, a younger group of femi-
nists was emerging that would challenge the priorities and politics
of these older feminists. The women leaders of now were often older
and more experienced in legislative channels of political activism than
the younger women joining “women’s liberation” groups like the ones
that protested at the Miss America Pageant.¹0 Most of these latter activ-
ists had developed their political consciousness from their experiences
in civil rights and New Left activism earlier in the decade.¹¹ Many of
these women also adopted hair and dress styles that were popular
among the female counterculture; long hair, unshaved legs and under-
arms, and no makeup or brassieres were all considered symbols of a
more “natural” state of womanhood.¹² Indeed, one New Left periodi-
cal’s coverage of the protest of the Miss America Pageant identified
the protestors not as feminists but as “hairy women” and “hippies,”
not recognizing their self-presentation as a sign of their feminism.¹³

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 Women’s liberationists borrowed the notion, first developed by
New Left activists, that “the personal is political.”¹4 Early women’s
liberationists discussed the ways that personal relationships shaped
the roles of men and women in society; essays on housework, sexual
relationships, marriage, and motherhood appeared regularly in wom-
en’s liberation periodicals. Personal decisions such as changing one’s
last name upon marriage, they argued, held political ramifications
and consequences that needed to be addressed in American culture
just as much as codified forms of legal and economic discrimination
needed to be addressed through legislative channels.¹5 Indeed, some
women’s liberationists differentiated themselves from “mainstream”
women’s groups like now through their focus on personal politics. A
feminist in Kansas City, Missouri, explained that while now fought
for legislative change in “Congress and courtrooms,” her women’s
liberation group fought for a “cultural revolution” to “end traditional
notions of masculinity and femininity.”¹6
Examining cultural ideas of feminine beauty became a signifi-
cant aspect of the “personal politics” of women’s liberationists. At
first, these women focused on the sexism they experienced in New
Left organizations, such as being relegated to menial tasks such as
typing while men occupied decision-making roles. Moreover, they
complained, men in New Left organizations treated them like sexual
objects. They were “expected to look pretty,” one woman explained, to
“look [and] act feminine . . . and ugly women [were] scarce because
they [were] actively discouraged.”¹7 New Left women were particu-
larly enraged when a report on women’s liberation in the newsletter
of Students for a Democratic Society displayed a cartoon portraying
a woman “with earrings, polka- dot minidress, and matching visible
panties . . . holding a sign [that said] ‘We Want Our Rights and We
Want Them Now.’”¹8 Similarly, the leftist Ramparts magazine referred
to women’s groups as “the Miniskirt Caucus” and emphasized wom-
en’s clothes rather than their political demands. “It was obvious,” one
New Left woman complained, “that the playing up of fashions with
regard to women perpetuates their status as sexual objects, and this
is the basic form of oppression women must struggle against.”¹9 As

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 a result of these experiences, many women began leaving New Left
organizations to form separate women’s liberation groups.²0
These budding young feminists thus reacted to the era’s “sexual
revolution” in female dress differently than did many of the women
who had at first embraced miniskirts and other sexualized styles ear-
lier in the sixties. Rather than seeing miniskirts as a sign of “female
emancipation,” some women activists, although certainly not all,
instead decried these fashions as objectifying women and focusing
attention on their bodies rather than on their ideas. New Left men,
however, were far from the only ones to focus on women as sexual
objects. The American media was filled with sexualized images of
women, particularly when it came to makeup, hair, and dress. One
feminist explained that advertisements for cosmetics and feminine
beauty products were really “aimed more at men than women. They
encourage men to expect women to sport all the latest trappings of
sexual slavery— expectations women must then fulfill if they are to
survive. . . . One of a woman’s jobs in this society is to be an attrac-
tive sexual object, and clothes and makeup are tools of the trade.”²¹
Women felt compelled to buy a myriad of beauty products to attain
the standards of attractiveness and femininity that society required;
in this way, capitalism and social expectations of beauty culture went
hand in hand as mutually reinforcing the oppression of women.²²
“Makeup,” one San Francisco feminist wrote, “is merely a toy that
manufacturers have been pushing down our throats for years via tv
commercials and ads which skillfully convince us that this miracle
called makeup is the only way to ensure our success, love, and accep-
tance in this society.”²³ Women’s liberationists therefore based their
rejection of beauty culture in part on arguments against consumer
capitalism that the hippie counterculture had previously advanced.
Underlying these criticisms of consumer culture and sexualiza-
tion were deeper feminist critiques of existing standards of feminin-
ity and womanhood. Women’s liberationist Ellen Willis explained
this concept in a 1969 issue of Mademoiselle: “In the typical American
family,” she explained, “a girl is trained from babyhood to be what
the culture defines as feminine. . . . That means being preoccupied

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 with clothes and makeup—with how she looks instead of what she
does.”²4 Womanhood as defined in American culture, Willis thus
argued, was inextricably tied to clothes, makeup, and consumer cul-
ture. One women’s liberationist compared high-heeled shoes to the
tradition of foot-binding in traditional Chinese society; both fash-
ions, she argued, not only deformed women’s feet and restricted their
movement but also reinforced the concept that “feminine” feet were
small and dainty.²5 Makeup, similarly, not only concealed women’s
faces but also diverted women’s time, energy, and money from useful
pursuits like education and employment. “I was a slave to makeup,”
proclaimed one San Francisco feminist. “Always obsessed with my
appearance. . . . I really believed that with makeup I was ‘pretty,’ while
without makeup I wasn’t.”²6 Rejecting makeup, some women’s lib-
erationists contended, would help women to reclaim precious time
and money as well as their self- esteem. Women’s liberationists thus
argued for the rejection of traditional feminine beauty standards in
order to create their own definitions of female personhood through
new forms of self-presentation.
In rejecting feminine beauty culture, women’s liberationists also
claimed to discard patriarchal standards of female beauty. It was men,
women’s liberationists argued, who created traditional feminine fash-
ions and beauty culture as a means to keep women oppressed, steal-
ing their time and money and harming their mobility by forcing
them to wear expensive, constricting makeup and fashions. “Women
have been forced to dress as objects since the invention of patriar-
chy,” one woman explained. “Why are women forced to dress certain
ways? Because our clothes help keep us oppressed. They are a con-
stant reminder of our position.”²7 “Who is the Man?” another group
of feminists asked. “He values women according to our physical
appearance. He imposes his idea of womanhood on us, rewarding
us for being weak and defenseless.”²8 By rejecting patriarchal defi-
nitions of femininity, women’s liberationists claimed to advance an
ideal of womanhood free from the judgments of male expectations
of female beauty.
Lesbian feminists further articulated connections between patri-

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 FIG. 7. A flyer from a women’s liberation organization in Rochester, New York.
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

archy and traditional feminine gender presentation. These lesbians,

who often formed separate organizations in the 1970s because they felt
marginalized in so- called mainstream women’s groups, argued that
lesbianism was a political statement against traditional definitions of
womanhood.²9 Lesbians, they claimed, should not be afraid to shed

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 stereotypical feminine dress and gender presentation as part of this
statement. In the 1970 manifesto “The Women-Identified Woman,”
members of the organization Radicalesbians explained that lesbi-
anism provided women the ultimate escape from “male culture”
by rejecting all social definitions of what women ought to be—not
only that women were sexual objects at the service of men, but also
that women needed to look “feminine” in order to be desirable to
men.³0 Some lesbian feminists thus claimed to discard both social
expectations of heterosexuality, which bound women to men, and
cultural expectations of femininity, which bound women to look
a certain way for men. “I am in deeper and more righteous revolt,”
explained lesbian feminist Sally Gearhart, “against the exploitative
capitalistic economy which . . . tells me (as it does not tell a man)
that [my] body is an object of male pleasure on which I am expected
to expend thirty tubes of lipstick every year.”³¹ Lesbians could thus
reject feminine beauty standards since they had already eschewed
male- defined standards of heterosexual femininity.
Moreover, alternate styles of gender presentation visually chal-
lenged sex and gender roles. Earlier writings by anthropologist Mar-
garet Mead and psychologist John Money had introduced terms like
“sex roles” and “gender” to differentiate the biological manifestations
of sex from the social enactment of masculine and feminine behav-
ior.³² Women’s liberationists borrowed this terminology, using it to
argue that differences between men and women were socially cre-
ated, rather than natural components of biological difference, and
that gender inequality resulted from these socialized differences. “The
explanation [for women’s oppression] does not lie in ‘nature,’ that
scapegoat which has been used for eons to justify the subjugation
of all minority groups,” women’s liberationist Jo Freeman explained.
“Rather, the answer lies among the hazy myths about women and
the traditional beliefs of the proper sex-roles. . . . To be ‘feminine’ is
to be weak, gentle, submissive, emotional, and above all, sexual.”³³
Traditional fashions, feminists argued, exacerbated these sex roles:
high heels restricted women’s movement, makeup obscured wom-
en’s faces, and skirts left women cold, uncomfortable, and sexually

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 accessible to men.³4 Separate fashions for men and women, more-
over, perpetuated the false conception of women as naturally differ-
ent from men. Lesbian feminist Coletta Reid perhaps put it best:
“Female clothing, just like female hair styles . . . are all aimed at mak-
ing the differences between men and women readily apparent. If men
and women dressed and acted alike . . . how would men know who
to treat as inferior, who to hire as secretaries, who to rape?”³5 Some
feminists thus used dress and hairstyles to explicitly dispute gender
differences and conceptions of womanhood they saw as oppressive,
objectifying, and fallacious.
A number of feminists thus advocated a cultural politics of self-
presentation that rejected what they considered to be patriarchal
and socially constructed prescriptions of feminine dress. Feminist
consciousness-raising workshops included discussions of how much
time women spent on applying makeup and whether or not they
wore nylons and bras, asking them to consider the role of fashion
and beauty culture in their lives.³6 Women’s liberationist and lesbian
feminist writings encouraged women to discard their makeup, high
heels, skirts, and dresses, opting for the mobility and comfort pro-
vided by pants and blue jeans.³7 As one group of feminists explained,
“Clothing is a political statement. We have thrown off our former
mindless and painful conformity to fashion. We show what women’s
liberation is all about: The individuality of women showing through
in every facet of life, including the clothes we wear.”³8 Perhaps the
most controversial decision that some feminists made was to cut
their hair, ridding themselves of the long locks that defined both
traditional femininity (at least for white women) and membership
in the 1960s counterculture. “Hair is political,” proclaimed one New
York City lesbian feminist. “Short hair is a symbol of emancipation.
Long hair requires effort, time- consuming and frequently expensive
care. It is accepted, in fact, almost required by patriarchal culture.”³9
Cutting one’s hair was thus a symbolic escape from patriarchal stan-
dards of feminine beauty. Some feminist women also refused to shave
the hair on their legs and underarms, imbuing new political mean-
ing on a self-presentation tactic previously employed by countercul-

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 tural women. “A woman must shave her legs and armpits because
hairiness is ‘masculine,’” another woman explained. “But that hair is
part of Me, the Me I’ve finally begun to get in touch with. . . . Why
should I shave twice a week to satisfy someone else’s standards of fem-
inine beauty?”40
By adopting what would come to be known as an “androgynous
uniform” (or for lesbians, a “dyke uniform”)— often consisting of jeans,
button- down work shirts, and work boots, often without makeup and
bras, and sometimes with short hair—these women’s liberationists
and lesbian feminists visually displayed their political goal of creating
a society free of gender distinctions, defying expectations that men
and women ought to “look different” from each other.4¹ Some femi-
nists embraced the “masculine” connotations of their new appearance;
one Boston woman not only cut her hair, but also started wearing
men’s clothes, playing football, and told family and friends, “Don’t
call me Ellen; I’m Ellis,” thus connecting her new self-fashioning to
a traditionally masculine identity.4² A San Francisco lesbian femi-
nist explained her embrace of the “dyke uniform” in similar terms:
“True, many women fear having any labels attached to them which
may accuse them of being masculine, truck- driving, combat-boot-
stomping ‘Dykes.’ But many women are proud to be identified as
masculine, truck- driving, combat-boot-stomping ‘Dykes!’”4³
Other feminists imbued unisex styles, which had become increas-
ingly popular in American culture, with new political meaning.44
Some feminist writers advocated androgyny as an ideal (non)gen-
dered state of being. Carolyn Heilbrun most famously articulated the
“androgynous ideal” in her 1973 book Toward a Recognition of Androg-
yny: “Our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polar-
ization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual
roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen,” she
wrote.45 The hair and dress styles of some women’s liberationists visu-
ally accomplished this state of androgyny by eschewing traditional
feminine dress, adopting some aspects of masculine self-presentation,
and defying expectations that men and women ought to “look dif-
ferent” from each other. “Today’s fashions reflect the increasing con-

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 FIG. 8. Before and after photographs of the dress of two women’s liberationists,
1973. Jeanne Cordova for Lesbian Tide. Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender Historical Society.

vergence of men’s and women’s roles and recognize similarities long

ignored for the sake of exaggerated differences,” explained one femi-
nist. “It may be hoped that unisex fashions represent a move toward
equality in roles and responsibilities.”46 Unisex or androgynous fash-
ions were thus explicitly tied to the feminist project of erasing socially
enforced distinctions between the sexes that contributed to gender
inequality. As one activist succinctly explained in 1968, “No woman
can be free, as a person, until she loses her femininity.”47
Alternative styles of self-presentation also allowed women to iden-
tify themselves as members of women’s liberation and lesbian femi-
nist communities. One member of the San Francisco lesbian feminist
group Dykes and Gorgons initially cut her hair “after a man attacked
me and spun me around by my long hair because I repelled his
advances.” She soon discovered, however, that her short hair made
a “statement” of lesbian identity: “I cut my hair not just as a sym-
bolic gesture of no longer being a sex object for men but as a way of
aligning and identifying with other Lesbians.”48 Sharon Deevey of
the Furies, a lesbian separatist group in Washington dc, concurred:
“I cut my hair as a symbolic cut with my past, and because I wanted

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 to look like a ‘real’ lesbian.”49 Conversely, some feminists expressed
criticism of women who kept their long hair, makeup, and tradition-
ally feminine dress. “I’m slightly suspicious of women who dress the
way our culture has taught us to,” Liza Cowan, a lesbian feminist
in New York City, wrote. “I know how those clothes and makeup
make me feel and it’s hard to believe that they’re not affected too.”50
Rejecting traditionally feminine styles thus allowed some women to
claim solidarity with the feminist movement and with each other.
“The time has come to stop blending in with the ‘feminized’ masses
of women, to stop being that invisible minority,” proclaimed the les-
bian feminist group Dykes and Gorgons.5¹
Alternative styles of self-presentation thus allowed feminists to
reject the alleged discomfort of standard women’s clothes, freeing
them from stereotypes of submissive femininity that were reinforced
by traditional dress. “We wear what makes us feel strong on the streets,
gives us freedom of movement, and frees us as much as possible from
sexist attacks by men,” explained one member of Dykes and Gor-
gons.5² “I discovered the comfort and practicality of boots—men’s
boots with thicker soles and longer wear than women’s,” explained
another lesbian feminist. “Levis with all their pockets (purses were
an image of the sexual sell which I rejected) and shirts with long
tails (so they’d stay tucked in . . . women’s blouses are cut short and
it’s impossible, if you’re an active person, to keep them in). It wasn’t
a masculine image I was creating. It was convenience and practical-
ity.”5³ As Cowan concluded, “The clothes I wear help me to know
my own power.”54

NOW, CLASS, RACE , AND “ CHOICE ” : GENDER

PRESENTATION AND FEMINIST POLARIZATION
But not all women’s liberationists followed these tenets of personal
style. At one feminist rally in San Francisco in 1970, some women
wore dungarees and blue jeans, while others wore miniskirts and
high heels; some women wore makeup while others purposely did
not. One young woman told a reporter that she wore “heavy san-
dals, denim pants, and olive drab sweatshirt” because she feared that

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 men would otherwise see her only as a sex object rather than as a
“human being.” She admitted, however, that she missed her former,
feminine attire: “I’d like to dress up and look sexy,” she confessed.
Another “mini-skirted participant” explained that she could not get
a job unless she arrived to interviews wearing makeup and a skirt,
thus constraining her ability to participate in the feminist politics
of self-presentation. Other women simply maintained that they liked
dressing femininely. “It’s fun to put a scarf around your waist and
a cap on your head,” explained one participant from Sacramento. “I
like to wear makeup once in a while,” said another. This was fine,
she argued, as long as she was dressing to please herself, not men:
“It’s fun as long as it’s not controlling you,” she explained. “Clothes
should be an extension of yourself.”55
These discussions highlighted many of the conflicts that arose
among feminists in the 1970s over the politics of self-presentation.
Some began to debate precisely who, if anyone, was excluded from
the movement by these styles, while others questioned whether
women needed to dress in a certain way in order to be truly “liber-
ated,” or whether having the choice to dress as one wished was lib-
eration enough. Within feminist groups, women became divided
over the meaning, goals, and propriety of self-presentation politics,
often questioning the relationship between new styles of feminist
self-presentation and their personal understandings of womanhood
and female identity.
How did now, the largest and most famous organization of the
second wave, respond to these calls for new forms of personal pre-
sentation? Some now leaders and members, particularly in local
chapter settings, participated in these critiques of fashion and beauty
culture.56 But many now members continued to wear makeup, high
heels, and dresses.57 The national leadership of now was significantly
older than the members of many women’s liberation groups, and
some were wary of the self-fashioning tactics of women’s liberation-
ists. One organization leader worried that focusing on fashion and
dress would distract the movement from crucial legal battles. “I know
you, as I, have to steer interviewers away from critical topics like the

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 maxiskirt, hot pants, makeup, bras, and the shaving of legs,” she com-
plained in a letter to a fellow board member. “I cannot spend time nor
energy, nor can any of us,” on diversionary issues like fashion. In order
to “liberate . . . women where it counts,” she argued, now needed to
downplay issues of dress and fashion in order to remain focused on
legal changes that they believed were more important to the quest
for women’s equality.58
Other organization leaders feared that the self-presentation of
women’s liberationists would exacerbate stereotypes of feminism,
particularly that feminist women were “ugly” or “unfeminine.” As
older, middle- and upper- class professional women, early now orga-
nization leaders staked their reputations on respectable, conven-
tional self-presentation “to avoid becoming stereotyped in the public
eye.”59 In 1967 the New York now chapter described its members as
“articulate” and “attractive” professionals, implicitly basing the legit-
imacy of the organization on both the class status and traditional
femininity of its members.60 Some now leaders therefore balked
at the politicized self-presentation styles of younger activists. Betty
Friedan, now’s founder, criticized their tactics at the 1969 Congress
to Unite Women in New York City, when a group of young women
from Boston’s Cell 16, a radical feminist group, went on stage and
began to chop off each others’ hair. “The message some were try-
ing to push,” she lamented, “was that to be a liberated woman you
had to make yourself ugly, to stop shaving under your arms, to stop
wearing makeup or pretty dresses—any skirts at all.”6¹ The impli-
cation of Friedan’s horror over “ugly” feminists without long hair,
makeup, or dresses was that being attractive was part of a femi-
nine identity, and that “ugly” women’s liberationists were therefore
unfeminine. Friedan’s fears of “unfeminine” women were undoubt-
edly related to her initial stance that lesbian members were a liabil-
ity for now and the women’s movement.6² Long-held medical and
cultural beliefs that lesbians were gender deviants—unnaturally
“masculine” women, or perhaps men trapped in women’s bodies—
continued to shape the public image of lesbianism in the 1960s and
1970s.6³ Women’s liberationists donning men’s clothing and short

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 hair would exacerbate the belief that all feminists were both lesbi-
ans and gender deviants.
Self-fashioning styles also became implicated in ongoing dis-
cussions of racial and class politics within feminist groups. Many
working- class women and women of color felt alienated from now
and women’s liberation groups in the 1960s and 1970s, claiming that
the predominantly white, upper- class leadership ignored concerns
of race and class.64 As a result, feminists often vied over which types
of strategies and groups were most inclusive of working- class and
minority women. Some feminists argued that rejecting feminine
fashion styles allowed them to express solidarity with working- class
women who needed to wear masculine clothes to blend into predomi-
nantly male workplaces like factories. If “cheap, simple work-shirts . . .
are good enough for the oppressed working class of this country,
they’re good enough for me,” one lesbian feminist wrote.65 But other
feminists argued that androgynous dress excluded other groups of
working- class women who, as Robin Morgan put it, were “forced
to wear [women’s dresses] for survival.”66 “Women who work must
continue to dress traditionally,” one women’s liberationist acknowl-
edged. “Secretaries cannot go to work in blue jeans or slacks with-
out arousing hostility and often dismissal. Waitresses, restaurant
hostesses, [and] airline stewardesses have to wear uniforms which
are sometimes degrading and submit to personal appearance checks
whereby gaining or losing a pound can sometimes mean their job.”67
Nontraditional dress, this feminist argued, was simply not an option
for many working women. Other feminists, however, noted that the
upkeep of a traditionally feminine appearance was expensive and
thus prohibitive for those same women. “Androgyny isn’t a luxury
of the middle class; femininity is,” one feminist wrote.68
Other women chafed at cultural assumptions that ascribed unfemi-
nine identities to working- class or minority women. One woman of
color complained that “Third World lesbians” were often ascribed a
“butch” role by white lesbians due to racist assumptions about the
“animalistic,”“unusually strong,” and “unfeminine” nature of nonwhite
women.69 Similarly, one black lesbian argued that wearing dresses

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 and makeup were part of her quest for respectability in a society that
consistently made her feel inferior due to her race. Wearing a dress
simply made her feel good and empowered, she explained, in a soci-
ety that often made her feel like “black trash.”70 Of course, many non-
white, working- class lesbians found comfort in more masculine styles
of dress, which facilitated working in blue- collar jobs traditionally
reserved for men.7¹ But other feminists of color felt excluded by the
pressures they felt to eschew traditionally feminine dress. One Asian
female immigrant explained how she felt rejected from the San Fran-
cisco lesbian community because she carried a purse. “I wasn’t seen
as a lesbian. I was seen as an Asian woman.”7² Similarly, when one
Latina attended her first women’s lib meeting dressed in her finest
clothes, with makeup and jewelry, the other attendees told her that
she looked like a whore.7³
Especially for black women, the racial politics of self-presentation
made gender presentation a particularly sensitive issue. Afro hairstyles
were a hallmark of the Black Power movement in the latter half of
the 1960s, but for some women, the Afro presented an uncomfort-
able challenge to normative definitions of feminine self-presentation.
Some black activists used the Afro to redefine what natural beauty
and femininity ought to mean for African American women. Black
feminist Michelle Wallace, for example, recounted her struggles with
“white” definitions of feminine beauty and shed her “makeup, high
heels, stockings, garter belts, [and] girdles” along with her pressed
hair, as she discovered for herself a black feminist politics of style.74
But even at the height of the Afro’s popularity in the late 1960s,
many black women continued to straighten their hair in order to
look more traditionally feminine.75 In the context of these debates
on the Afro, it made sense that some black women might be wary of
the more explicit rejection of traditional feminine self-presentation
by some women’s activists.
A number of feminists of all classes and races, moreover, expressed
discomfort with self-presentation styles that appeared to be too
“unfeminine.” They worried that androgynous dress merely replaced
their feminine gender presentation with an equally oppressive mas-

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 culine one.76 “Perhaps I am in the minority,” one lesbian wrote, “but
those who advocate wearing men’s clothes should remember the
adage, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’”77 Other lesbian
feminists agreed that the androgynous “dyke” look was too dull, too
conforming, but most of all, too masculine for women. “I refuse to
look to the dull dead male and his dull dead clothes for my inspi-
ration,” one woman wrote. “I’m a gay woman, free and beautiful to
myself—I put bright new colors on my face and nails and body. . . . I
like long hair and makeup.”78 Beyond simply criticizing the alleged
conformity of feminist self-fashioning, complaints of discomfort with
androgynous dress also suggested that some women did not want
to choose between “feminism” and a “feminine” identity, and that
androgynous dress simply seemed too masculine for women. “The
‘Dyke look’ is representative of the male supremacy concept and
most Lesbians are repulsed by worshipping maleness,” one woman
charged. “I believe that Dyke-ism is a pattern of behavior that only
exemplifies the male is superior myth. . . . We do not need to dress
like male images.”79 Another woman complained of her feminist
androgynous dress, “When someone mistakes me on the street for a
boy, it freaks me out.”80
The butch-femme styles that had been popular in lesbian com-
munities of the 1950s exacerbated concerns about masculine styles of
self-presentation among lesbian feminists. In butch-femme relation-
ships, which most often occurred among lesbians in working- class
communities, the “butch” partner dressed in masculine clothes while
the “femme” dressed in traditional feminine attire. While some have
argued that butch-femme styles constituted a radical statement of
lesbian visibility and female sexual pleasure, the butch lesbian also
epitomized the supposed innate masculine nature of the lesbian, and
butch-femme relationships seemed to mimic heterosexual roles.8¹
Concerned that butch lesbian styles exacerbated stereotypes of lesbi-
ans as masculine, the Daughters of Bilitis (dob), a lesbian organiza-
tion that formed in San Francisco in the 1950s, instructed its female
members to wear dresses and to avoid “butch” styles of dress.8² Del
Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of dob, were among the first to

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 speak out against butch styles: “The Lesbian is attracted to a woman—
not a cheap imitation of a man,” they wrote.8³ Implicit in their cri-
tiques of butch styles was the notion that lesbians, as women, ought
to dress like women as well.
Butch styles became controversial among many women’s activists
of the late 1960s and 1970s. Some tried to downplay the prevalence
of butch styles: “The obvious lesbians, the ones who look boyish . . .
are a minority within a minority,” wrote two now leaders in 1971.84
Criticism of butch styles also became prevalent in the writings of
younger lesbians of the era. “Because we are conditioned for definite
man or woman roles, many Lesbians begin to question where they
are as women. After all, only men are supposed to turn on women,”
explained an essay by Berkeley Gay Women’s Liberation in 1969.
“Therefore, the logical solution to your identity crisis is to cut your
hair short, wear T-shirts (with a pocket to keep your cigarettes in),
flatten your chest, and wear tight Levis and leather boots. . . . Hope-
fully, we as Lesbians can become ‘liberated’ to the self and realize
that we have been co- opted into role-playing. Outward dress does not
make the woman, but it may conceal a woman from herself.”85 These
authors claimed that by rejecting butch styles, lesbians would find
their authentic female selves, unconditioned by the social concep-
tions of masculinity and femininity taught in heterosexual relation-
ships. Younger lesbians thus appealed to older lesbians to abandon
their butch-femme roles. “Feminism is breaking up roles in hetero-
sexual society,” explained one younger lesbian in 1971. “The new les-
bianism is breaking up role-playing in old gay life. The styles no
doubt came from heterosexual society. . . . New gays don’t follow
these roles, they’re creating a new style.”86 Another lesbian feminist
explicitly compared the dyke look to the butch styles of the previ-
ous era: “The new dykes are visually almost indistinguishable from
the ‘old dykes’ who used to haunt the bars before feminism made it
clear that a woman who wants a ‘man’ wants a ‘man’ and that roles
are definitely not good.”87 The implication of these criticisms was
that dyke fashions imitated masculine roles, which were simply too
masculine for lesbian women to accept.

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 Perhaps to downplay this discomfort with self-presentation styles
that seemed too masculine, a number of feminists appropriated the
language of choice in describing their fashion decisions. The concept
of “choice” emerged early in second-wave feminist rhetoric; now’s
statement of purpose, written in 1966, used the language of choice to
defend their legislative goals for women, arguing that the laws and
mores of contemporary society “prevent women from enjoying the
equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right,
as individual Americans, and as human beings.”88 While now’s state-
ment of purpose focused on expanding career choices for women,
the rhetoric of choice was most famously applied in the realm of
reproductive rights, as women activists sought to nullify laws that
restricted or outlawed abortion.89 Shirley Chisholm, at the first press
conference for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion
Laws (naral) in 1969, succinctly stated that each woman deserved
“to choose whether or not she will bear children.”90 By the mid-1970s,
the concept of “choice feminism” became a central tenet of liberal
feminist leaders, who argued that “choice” was the basic goal of the
women’s movement. As Robert Self explains, “Their central claim
was deceptively simple: women ought to be free to choose the con-
tent of their lives. Marriage and motherhood were choices. Women
could choose to have careers or become homemakers.”9¹ Perhaps as a
response to antifeminist forces of the 1970s, women’s activists main-
tained that allowing women broader choices in their lives—and not
necessarily mandating a certain lifestyle for women—was the ulti-
mate goal of feminist activism.
Feminist arguments that liberated women deserved a wider array
of choices in their careers and family lives also became applied to the
realms of dress and fashion. “Liberation” came not from the actual
clothes a woman decided to wear, but from the knowledge that the
choice was hers to make. Prescribed fashion choices “would simply
be substituting one restriction for another,” one women’s liberation-
ist complained in 1968. “The problem is not current fashion per se;
it’s the rigidity with which it is prescribed by the fashion industry.
We are not liberated unless we can choose [our fashions] freely,” she

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 concluded.9² “Play up the drag queen in you with a lavender ruffle,
or censor that sensuous body in a pair of overalls,” wrote a fashion
columnist in one feminist periodical in 1972. “It’s still a woman’s pre-
rogative to change her mind, and fashions this fall are swinging . . .
from the butch look to the femme and everything in between.”9³
Women adopting the language of choice thus implied that they could
embrace traditional conceptions of femininity in their dress and
hairstyles and still be liberated women. One feminist described her
slow transformation away from jeans, work shirts, and boots, toward
a more feminine style of dress: “I don’t have to be a sex symbol or
a male replica to wear clothing that is an extension of myself. I’m
discovering colors and pants that fit my body and don’t hide it. . . .
Someday I might even be comfortable in a dress,” she concluded.94
Another woman wrote of growing her hair long, and stated, “I feel
beautiful. I learned from this to make the choice to take back control
of my own body.”95 “I am not masculine or feminine, or masculine and
feminine; I am a person with myriad characteristics,” wrote another
feminist on her decision to re- embrace traditional feminine clothing.
“Now, at thirty- one, I wear jeans and yellow ruffled dresses, too.”96
Some lesbian feminists also used this language of choice when dis-
senting from the dyke look. “Having long hair doesn’t make one pas-
sive or ‘femme,’” one lesbian feminist wrote, “it makes one a woman
with long hair. . . . I do not have to take on or adopt a certain way of
dress, length of hair, style or approach in order to be validly me.”97 “I
am a woman. I like being a woman, wearing clothes fanciful or fan-
tastic, according to my caprice,” another lesbian explained. “I do not
wish to pontificate on how any of you should dress or behave; you
do your thing but let me do mine.”98 Even now leaders adopted the
language of choice when discussing the relationship between femi-
nism and fashion. In 1973, for example, the Task Force on the Image of
Women celebrated women’s newfound choice as a triumph of femi-
nism: “We have freed large numbers of women from the constraints of
‘fashion,’” proclaimed a task force memo, as “more and more women
are making a free choice of what to wear and how to look based on
what is uniquely suited to their personal style and individual lives.”99

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 The language of choice in dress, hairstyles, and fashion allowed
feminists to incorporate a more diverse array of women and styles
into the feminist politics of self-presentation. Yet some feminists
complained that the concept of choice allowed women to return to
traditional styles without fully realizing the political consequences.
Heather Booth and Naomi Weisstein lamented the return of femi-
nine fashions among women’s liberationists: “Now, the con goes, a
truly liberated woman can choose to do these things,” they wrote.¹00
Choosing feminine fashions, they suggested, was a form of false con-
sciousness among women. “When a [woman] says, ‘I think enough
of myself to dress how I please,’ I wonder, ‘Is she really sure that she
is dressing only how she pleases?’” another feminist asked. “How can
we be sure?”¹0¹
The politics of self-presentation thus created conflicts within the
second-wave feminist movement, often dividing women along the
lines of age, class, and race but also revealing differing concepts of
femininity and womanhood among activists. Did women have to
dress a certain way in order to be liberated? Was it possible to look
“feminine” and still be a “feminist”? Did politicized self-presentation
styles imitate masculinity and foster stereotypes of “masculine” femi-
nists and lesbians, or enable a lifestyle free from societal expectations
of gender? How did self-presentation politics affect the public image
of the women’s movement? Significantly, these questions were asked
not only by members of women’s groups but also by outside observ-
ers of the second-wave feminist movement. The different answers
given to these questions shaped the ways in which the public per-
ceived the meaning and goals of feminism.

THE MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC IMAGE

OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Friedan and other now leaders were not necessarily incorrect in their
concerns that women’s liberationists’ self-presentation styles would
exacerbate images of “ugly” and “unfeminine” feminists in the pub-
lic eye and distract attention from their legislative goals. Media cov-
erage of feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s often focused on

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 the hair and dress styles of younger feminist activists, often portray-
ing them as both unattractive and lacking in femininity. One Bos-
ton Globe article described Roxanne Dunbar of Boston’s Cell 16 as
having “dull” chin-length hair, “sallow skin and beaten- dead brown
eyes.” “She was the very portrait of her Liberated Woman,” the author
wrote with irony.¹0² The San Francisco Chronicle depicted another
feminist as “a slim girl in jeans, shades and baggy sweater who used
to dance in topless joints in North Beach,” implying that the former
dancer could have been attractive if she did not ascribe to the self-
presentation norms promoted by feminists.¹0³ While the mainstream
media also publicized “attractive” women’s liberationists like Gloria
Steinem and Germaine Greer, the typical feminist activist was por-
trayed as a dowdy, unattractive, unfeminine woman who was uncon-
cerned with how she looked.¹04
By the early 1970s, a number of journalists began to openly criti-
cize the feminist movement’s alleged assault on female identity. Femi-
nist styles of self-presentation played a central role in these popular
critiques. One female author in the San Francisco Examiner decried
that women’s liberationists had “lost their femininity . . . by devot-
ing so much time to defeminizing women, denouncing cosmet-
ics, [and] pretty clothes.”¹05 An author in Playboy in 1970 similarly
derided feminists for their “rejection of distinctly feminine clothing
and of the pursuit of beauty.” His main example of feminist extrem-
ism, pointedly, was the hair- cutting episode at the 1969 Congress to
Unite Women.¹06 A female author in Esquire was even more vicious.
“Demands for equal political and legal rights, for child- care centers
and equal pay for equal work are reasonable enough,” the author
wrote, “but these have been submerged in a hair-raising emotional
orgy . . . directed at love, marriage, children, the home . . . the penis,
the pill, false eyelashes, brassieres, [and] Barbie dolls.” The author
particularly derided feminist rejections of makeup and beauty cul-
ture: “Women enjoy using makeup, trying out new kinds, playing
around with it,” she claimed, “primarily to make themselves desirable
to men (a goal which is anathema to Lib members) and, secondarily,
for the sheer pleasure of self-adornment.” Women who did not care

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 about looking good, either for themselves or for men, were missing
an essential component of womanhood, she concluded: “These are
not normal women. I think they are freaks.”¹07
These journalists were not alone in equating feminism with being
“unfeminine.” Some American women, influenced by these media
images, expressed discomfort with the women’s movement not
because they disagreed with its legislative goals, but because they
believed that women’s liberation meant renouncing womanhood and
femininity. An informal poll conducted by the San Francisco Chroni-
cle in 1970 asked a group of women whether or not they planned to
join the women’s liberation movement; they all said no. “Indepen-
dence is very important to me but I think you can be independent
without losing your femininity,” one woman explained. Another
woman said, “No. I don’t want to be the same as men.” “No. I like
being a girl,” another woman echoed. “If all women wanted to be
the same as men, women would become masculine and men would
become feminine,” a fourth woman concluded.¹08 Opinion polls in
the 1970s came to similar conclusions, finding that the majority of
American women “favor efforts to improve women’s status” but were
still “unsympathetic to women’s liberation groups,” and found the
actions of activists to be “unwomanly.”¹09
These surveys suggest that a significant number of women per-
ceived the feminist movement to be rejecting femininity altogether,
an identity that for many women reflected their important and real
differences from men. It was also an identity that, for some women,
afforded significant privileges: the ability to be a homemaker, free
from the pressures of the workforce, and to be provided for finan-
cially by a husband.¹¹0 While many women might have agreed with
the tenet that they had the right to choose what they wore— dresses
or skirts, makeup or none, short hair or long—feminists that seemed
to eschew traditional feminine dress entirely also seemed to reject the
notion that they were different from men. But if men and women
were innately different in some ways, as many women believed, ought
they not look different in some ways as well? For these women, fem-
inist criticisms of female beauty culture and adoption of androgy-

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 nous dress symbolized a rejection of femininity in which they had no
interest, and perhaps even seemed threatening to what they believed
to be a woman’s privileged position. While women might deserve
equality under the law and choices in their work and personal lives,
these critics contended, they were still different from men.
It was this fear of feminism erasing gender differences entirely that
antifeminists used in their successful fight against the Equal Rights
Amendment. Led by Phyllis Schlafly and other groups aligned with
the growing conservative New Right, antifeminist women and men
waged a campaign against the era, which had become the leading
legislative goal of now and other women’s rights organizations in
the 1970s. Although the era—which stated simply that “equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of sex”—was originally introduced
to Congress in the 1920s, it was not until 1972 that both houses of
Congress, after intense lobbying by now, passed the amendment.
Within a year, thirty states had approved the era, and the amend-
ment seemed destined for ratification. But a number of grassroots
organizations, most famously Phyllis Schlafly’s Stop era, mounted
campaigns against the amendment that halted its further ratifica-
tion; even a three-year extension by Congress in 1979 failed to make
any gains for the amendment at the state level. By 1982, the amend-
ment was dead.¹¹¹
Schlafly and other grassroots activists against the amendment
staked their arguments on the notion that the era would “promote
a ‘gender-free,’ unisex society”—significantly, borrowing the phrase
used to describe the gender-bending fashion styles of the 1960s.¹¹²
Activists argued that the era would eliminate sex-segregated bath-
rooms, legalize same-sex marriage, and—particularly poignant in
the Vietnam War era—force the government to include women in
the draft. Anti-era activists thus argued that the amendment would
erase gender distinctions in the law that antifeminists believed were
important and real differences between men and women, and afforded
women certain legal privileges in recognition of those differences.
Implicit in their concept of feminism, then, was the idea that femi-

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 nists sought to erase gender distinctions in society. “I am absolutely
certain that a major motive force behind the feminist movement is
a search for an identity and role which permits them to live out a
pseudo-male identity,” wrote one era opponent, implying that femi-
nists really wanted to be men.¹¹³
Traditionally feminine gender presentation was a significant,
though rarely explicitly discussed, aspect of antifeminists’ lobby-
ing strategies. Recognizing that “looking feminine is important” to
defeat the era, Schlafly instructed anti-era activists to wear dresses
and makeup when they went to their state capitols.¹¹4 Other groups
of anti-era activists became known as the “Pink Ladies” for the pink
dresses they wore when lobbying.¹¹5 These strategies of dress and gen-
der presentation, along with the home-baked cookies and pies that
these women often brought with them to give to state legislators, pro-
vided symbolic reminders that anti-era women were real women—
and implied that feminists, with their antimarriage, antichildren,
and antifeminine dress stances, might not be.
The specific focus on dress and hairstyles among antifeminists and
anti-era activists suggests that some of the backlash against femi-
nism in the 1970s was fostered by the cultural politics of women’s
liberation just as much as by the political goals of feminist activ-
ism. While many women and men expressed agreement with the
concepts of legal equality for the sexes and choice in women’s lives,
feminist activism that seemed to ignore differences between men
and women—including androgynous dress styles that obscured gen-
der distinctions—seemed to push feminist reasoning too far for
some would-be supporters of the movement. “Millions of Ameri-
cans . . . deplore the practice of paying women less just because
they are women, or denying women equal rights to the ownership
and disposition of property,” wrote one era supporter in 1973. “But
what has the urgent need to erase these discriminations got to do
with whether women wear bras?”¹¹6 Legal equality between men and
women, in other words, seemed reasonable to many Americans; but
cultural challenges to gender differences seemed to take the princi-
ples of feminism too far. Capitalizing on these doubts, antifeminist

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 activists argued that the era would do more than merely guarantee
women equal rights; rather, they argued, the amendment would erase
gender distinctions entirely. The traditionally feminine dress styles
of anti-era lobbyists, alongside public derision of feminist androg-
yny, provided subtle reminders of the concepts of womanhood that
antifeminists believed were at stake. Self-presentation thus became
a symbol of deeper cultural debates over the meaning of feminism
and its challenges to traditional womanhood.

FEMINISM, WOMANHOOD, AND THE

POLITIC S OF SELF- PRESENTATION
These debates over the meaning of particular styles of feminist self-
presentation—among women’s liberationists and lesbian feminists,
among middle- class and working- class feminists and women of color,
and among the media and antifeminist lobbyists against the era—
illustrate how the politics of self-presentation, for both its advocates
and its dissenters, implicated deeper questions about femininity and
womanhood in the context of feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s.
For some women, new styles of self-presentation eschewed patriar-
chal definitions of femininity and created a new model of liberated
womanhood, in which women could claim freedom of choice in their
dress. For others, shedding traditional feminine dress and hairstyles
suggested a form of womanhood at odds with their cultural concep-
tion of gender. For these individuals, the politics of self-presentation
symbolized their interpretation that feminists sought to erase gender
differences between the sexes that were widely considered to be real
and important. What was liberating for some women—to declare
one’s lesbianism, to avoid marriage, to choose to end a pregnancy,
or to cut one’s hair—was for other women an abhorrent rejection of
their personal conception of womanhood. Debates over the politics
of self-presentation thus reflected deep disagreements both inside
and outside of feminism on the central question of what it meant
to be a woman in the era of women’s liberation.
These debates continue today, whether in media discussions of
Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and Sarah Palin’s “fashionable” styles and

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 high heels during the 2008 presidential campaign, or critiques of the
popular television show Toddlers & Tiaras. Despite the legal and cul-
tural gains of the second-wave feminist movement—including the
acceptance of women in the workforce, as athletes, and as political
leaders—for some Americans, the assumption still remains that to
be a feminist means giving up one’s femininity. And dress remains
a potent symbol of the challenges that feminists face. Even as two
women seriously contended for the highest political offices in the
United States, their choices of dress were scrutinized and politi-
cized as signs of their femininity and allegiance to feminism.¹¹7 The
current incarnation of “third-wave” feminism, and the emphasis on
feminine dress for some of its participants, highlights the ways that
self-identifying feminists continue to debate the implications of self-
presentation styles. Not unlike second-wave feminists who champi-
oned women’s “choices” in self-fashioning, third-wavers argue that
women can adopt traditional feminine accoutrements such as makeup
and jewelry and appropriate these as signs of their personal inde-
pendence and sexual freedom, arguing that women’s liberation is
strengthened when women can reclaim femininity as part of their
individuality.¹¹8 The fashion politics of third-wave feminists high-
lights how choices in self-fashioning remain a politicized and con-
tentious issue among feminists and women into the twenty-first
century. This chapter has demonstrated one of the origins of these
modern debates—the self-presentation politics of the second-wave
of feminism, and their implications for broader understandings of
gender. These debates did not end in the 1960s or 1970s and continue
to shape the world that second-wave feminism has made.

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 4 “ W E A RI NG A D R E S S I S A
REVO LUTIONARY ACT ”
Political Drag and Self-Presentation
in the Gay Liberation Movement

In 1971 Frank Hartin, a member of the Berke-

ley Gay Liberation Front (glf), decided to attend his organization’s
meeting in unconventional attire. He put on pantyhose, a blouse,
and a brown velveteen skirt. He felt strange walking down the
street with the wind hitting his legs “more sharply than I’m accus-
tomed to,” and at the meeting he felt even more uncomfortable.
While one member, Mike Silverstein, welcomed him “with open
arms,” other attendees averted their eyes. Another member, Tom
Peel, became angry and yelled, “A dress is a prison cell.” When Har-
tin left the meeting, his friend walking beside him seemed uncom-
fortable, “paying close attention to how other people are reacting
to me,” Hartin noted. But his friend insisted that it “really doesn’t
make any difference, just another set of clothes, maybe like a pair
of crimson pants.” Even though Hartin was “freaking out” on the

91

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 inside, he tried to brush it off: “So what if I look like a Vassar girl
with a beard,” he decided.¹
Hartin’s account, printed in the Bay Area gay periodical Gay
Sunshine, failed to explain why he decided to attend the Berkeley
glf meeting in women’s clothes. At first glance, Hartin might have
appeared to be “coming out” as a male-to-female transsexual; how-
ever, a transsexual would rarely cross- dress with a beard. Hartin was
more likely engaging in a political tactic that some gay activists at
the time called “gender fuck,” in which “elements of both male and
female dress were worn together in order to confuse the gender sig-
nals given by those pieces of clothing.”² By dressing in drag, these
activists were not attempting to pass for women; since Hartin had
a beard, his appearance still signaled maleness. Rather, these activ-
ists hoped to challenge gender norms of masculinity through their
dress and outward appearance. By wearing women’s clothes and
refusing to look like a “typical” man, Hartin perhaps hoped to chal-
lenge the societal expectations of masculinity to which he himself
had become accustomed.
Just as women’s liberationists and lesbian feminists defied soci-
etal conceptions of femininity through their dress, Frank Hartin’s
appearance in drag epitomizes how gender transgression in dress
became a political tactic for some gay liberationist men of the late
1960s and early 1970s.³ Many of these activists emerged from the
political milieu of leftist social activism in the 1960s and had used
popular hair and dress styles to protest concepts of American con-
formity and “respectability” just as hippie, antiwar, and New Left
activists had done. But some radical gay liberationist men, simi-
larly to some women’s liberationists, recognized the implications
of self-presentation styles for protesting gender norms and made
gender-bending dress an explicit part of their political activism. A
closer exploration of the uses of self-fashioning as a political tac-
tic among gay liberationists reveals how critiques of gender norms
played a significant ideological role in the politics of the early gay
liberation movement.
However, gay liberationists also had to contend with popular

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 stereotypes of homosexuals that made gender transgression a risky
political endeavor. Historically, homosexuality and gender devi-
ance have long been intertwined in both medical and cultural
discourse. As the category of “homosexual” appeared in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early sexologists such
as Richard von Krafft-Ebing defined homosexuality as a form of
“gender inversion,” denoting that a person of the opposite sex was
trapped in the wrong body.4 Homosexual organizations in the
1950s and early 1960s took measures to separate their sexual identi-
ties from concepts of gender deviance. But images of “effeminate”
homosexual men, as well as “mannish” lesbians, still commonly
characterized homosexuality.
Because of this longstanding cultural connection between sex-
ual and gender deviance, gender transgression held particularly
complex meanings for the gay rights activism that emerged in
the late 1960s. While some gay liberationists wished to challenge
gender norms as part of their multi-issue leftist politics, other gay
activists believed that these gender-bending styles were a politi-
cal liability that exacerbated stereotypes of homosexuality and, as
feminist critics argued, of women. Debates on self-presentation,
moreover, raised questions about who belonged among the con-
stituents of gay liberation, as transvestites, drag queens, and trans-
sexuals attempted to carve out a place for themselves within the
movement. While drag remained a marker of gay community
at pride parades and events throughout the 1970s, proper self-
presentation in everyday dress remained hotly contested within
the gay movement. Perhaps most significantly, drag and gender
transgression in dress became political liabilities for the gay move-
ment as antigay activists—most notably, Anita Bryant—used gen-
der nonconformity as an argument against affording gays equal
rights and protection from discrimination. With legal gains seem-
ing to hang in the balance, voices in favor of gender transgression
were drowned out by those who advocated gender normativity,
alleging that gays, in their dress and everyday lifestyles, were “just
like everyone else.”

“ WEARING A DRESS IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT ” 93

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 COUNTERCULTURAL DRESS, DRAG , AND THE
POLITICIZATION OF GAY GENDER TRANSGRESSION
It remains a popular misconception that the gay rights movement
began at the June 1969 rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York
City.5 While the Stonewall Rebellion certainly marked a turning
point in the growth of the modern gay movement, historians have
illustrated how homosexual activists first began forming “homo-
phile” organizations to fight for their rights in the 1950s.6 For these
early homophile groups, combating stereotypes about gender- deviant
homosexuality became one of their primary goals. Dress codes requir-
ing suits for men and dresses for women at official functions of the
Mattachine Society, a nationwide homophile group established in the
1950s, underscored how gender-normative presentation was a central
tactic in their quests for rights and respectability.7 New homophile
organizations, such as the Society for Individual Rights (sir) in San
Francisco, grew and became increasingly militant in the 1960s, as did
some chapters of the Mattachine Society; but these organizations
remained committed to maintaining “respectability” in their dress,
mirroring the personal presentation tactics of civil rights and sds
activists of the early 1960s. When the Mattachine Society chapters of
Washington dc and Philadelphia held pickets in front of the White
House and Independence Hall in the late 1960s, they still required a
strict dress code of suits, ties, and neatly cut short hair for men and
dresses for women.8
By the late 1960s, a new group of gay activists began to emerge
out of the same political and cultural milieu as the New Left, Black
Power, and anti–Vietnam War movements, forming new organiza-
tions such as Vanguard (1966) and the Committee for Homosexual
Freedom (1969) in San Francisco, and the Gay Liberation Front (1969)
in New York City. These activists were often younger than the mem-
bers of the Mattachine Society or sir, and many of them had been
involved in New Left organizations and antiwar protests. In contrast
to older homophile leaders, who fought for the rights of homosexu-
als to serve in the military, young gay men, like their younger straight

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 counterparts, criticized the Vietnam War and the conventional mark-
ers of masculinity that went along with military service. They also
borrowed “revolutionary” rhetoric from their New Left and Black
Power counterparts, “display[ing] a distinctly countercultural style at
odds with the staid decorum and liberal nationalism of the homo-
philes,” according to Justin Suran.9
Hair and dress were significant aspects of the “distinctly countercul-
tural style” of these new gay activists. Many young gay activists adopted
the long hair, blue jeans, and unconventional attire of the hippie coun-
terculture.¹0 As (mostly male) leaders of these new gay organizations
began to emerge in the public eye, the media often focused, as they
did with the hippies, on their long hairstyles. In November 1969, when
the San Francisco Chronicle covered the court hearing of gay activists
who were arrested after a public demonstration, it could not help
but comment on the “long blond hair” of twenty-four-year- old Pat-
rick Brown, who made a point of “sweeping back his . . . hair” when
speaking to the judge.¹¹ Other newspapers commented on the “hip-
pie” styles of young gay activists who often kissed in public, illustrat-
ing their nonconformity to both sexual and self-presentation norms.¹²
These new styles of self-presentation created conflicts with the
older generation of homophile leaders, many of whom still wanted
activists to follow “respectable” modes of dress during public pro-
tests. The clash became apparent at a 1969 demonstration organized
by the Mattachine Society in Philadelphia. Occurring just days after
the Stonewall Rebellion, a new crop of young gays from New York
City came down to join in the march. Previous participants “noticed
immediately the difference” between the 1969 protest and the pick-
ets of previous years. What had normally been a crowd of ten or fif-
teen people had ballooned to 150, and younger participants did not
follow the dress code; women and men both arrived in jeans, and
many of the men wore their hair long and unkempt. At one point,
one participant remembered, Washington dc activist Frank Kameny
“almost [had] a cardiac” when two female participants held hands.
But it was “the new attire” of the young gays that garnered the most
whispering among older activists in the picket line.¹³

“ WEARING A DRESS IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT ” 95

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 FIG. 9. Two gay activists at a rally in Albany, New York, 1971. Diana Davies.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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 These new, younger gay liberationists had their own complaints
about the staid attire and policies of older homophile activists. Being
gay, according to these new activists, meant automatically rejecting
social norms of sexual respectability; arguing that the old guard activ-
ists were too accommodating to the norms of the so- called Estab-
lishment, these newer activists rejected the politics of respectability
espoused by the older generation, including their dress codes. Gay
activists Karla Jay and Allen Young remembered being turned off
by the dress requirements at the demonstration in Philadelphia and
therefore turned away from the homophile movement, declaring that
“it seemed irrelevant to our goals” as gay liberationists.¹4 Another gay
activist wrote in 1970 that he was “tired of being a department store
faggot: well dressed, cut your hair, shine your shoes,” alluding to the
attire that defined the “respectable” personal presentation espoused
by homophile organizations.¹5 Instead, gay liberationists called for
militant activism that allowed them to be “blatant” in their noncon-
formity and their rejection of conventional American values and life-
styles. As Bay Area gay liberationist Charles Thorp explained, “It will
not be until what straights call ‘blatant behavior’ is accepted with
respect that we will be in any way, any of us, free.”¹6
Gay liberationists’ embrace of nonconformist attire and long hair-
styles allowed them to deride homophile groups for their conformity
in personal presentation, which they believed perpetuated discrimi-
natory class, gender, and racial norms. Photos in the San Francisco
Free Press of liberationists burning their sir membership cards were
accompanied with a piercing indictment of sir’s aesthetic politics:
“The Society for Individual Rights, also known as the Society for
Idle Rap, is a goodgrey organization dedicated to total integration
within the establishment and to the proposition that, with a little
help from a haircut and a suit and tie, all men can look equal. Passing
for straight is sir’s ideal, and ‘Really? You don’t look it’ the highest
compliment it can receive.”¹7 Younger gays thus derided sir and other
homophile organizations for maintaining a middle- class image that
allowed their members to “pass” as straight. sir, perhaps in response,
attempted to change this perception of its members’ looks by featur-

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 ing longhaired white and black men on the cover of their monthly
newsletter in 1970, projecting a younger and less traditional image
of their membership.¹8
Nonconformist hair and dress styles also allowed gay liberation-
ists to make explicit their political challenge to gender as well as
sexual norms. Some gay activists connected traditional gender roles
to stereotypes that fostered discrimination against homosexuals. The
New York Gay Liberation Front, which formed immediately after
the Stonewall Rebellion, argued in the very first issue of their news-
letter Come Out! that homosexual oppression was “based on sex and
the sex roles which oppress us from infancy,” borrowing language
from women’s liberationists who analyzed the social construction
of gender roles as the cause of women’s oppression.¹9 Another group
of Chicago gay liberationists explained the links between socialized
gender roles and the stigmatization of homosexuality in their 1971
manifesto “Gay Revolution and Sex Roles.” In order “to maintain
sex roles,” the manifesto explained, “heterosexual standards had to
manufacture artificial definitions of male and female. A ‘real man’
and ‘real woman’ are not so by their chromosomes and genitals, but
by their respective degrees of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ and by
how closely they follow the sex-role script.”²0 Heterosexuality, the
manifesto thus argued, was reinforced by societal concepts of mascu-
linity and femininity that were assumed to be biological and “real.”
Another gay liberationist concurred with this notion that gender
and sexual roles were socially constructed rather than biologically
determined: “Masculinity and femininity are artificial categories,
as are heterosexuality and homosexuality, exaggerations of biologi-
cal differences.”²¹
These authors not only recognized that biological sex was not deter-
minative of social and cultural norms of gender—a cornerstone of
feminist theory—but also that gender roles were inextricably linked
to the social construction of heterosexuality as the norm for proper
sexual behavior. Heterosexuality was part and parcel of society’s defi-
nition of what it meant to be a man or a woman, they claimed: “Het-
erosexual ‘normality’ demands all- or-nothing outlines of ‘masculine’

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 and ‘feminine,’” explained the Chicago activists.²² Another glf mem-
ber wrote in a subsequent issue of Come Out!, “The straight world
has told us that if we are not masculine we are homosexual, that to
be a homosexual means not to be masculine.”²³ In order to combat
society’s disapproval of homosexuality, gay males needed to challenge
social constructions of masculinity, which were just as harmful to
men as were constructions of femininity for women.²4
One strategy to challenge social conceptions of gender, libera-
tionists argued, was through one’s personal presentation. Echoing
women’s liberationists, gay activists argued that dress standards were
inextricably linked to socialized sex roles. New York glf member
Martha Shelley identified the “unease” that heterosexuals felt when
faced with a “person whose sex is not readily apparent”—the “flam-
ing faggot or diesel dyke” who failed to look like a “proper” man or
woman. Shelley argued that these non-gender-normative gays and
lesbians were actually performing a political and educative function:
“We want you to be uneasy, to be a little less comfortable in your
straight roles,” she wrote.²5 Some gay liberationists therefore argued
that gays (and lesbians) could break down socially enforced mascu-
line and feminine roles through alternate self-presentations in their
dress and outward appearance. “I hope,” Berkeley glf member Bill
Miller concluded in his editorial in Gay Sunshine, “my barriers against
femininity and especially queens can be broken down. . . . Maybe
one way to break down these barriers is to go in drag occasionally—
something I’ve never done and which would freak me.”²6
This was the origin of the “gender fuck” tactics adopted by some
gay liberation activists in the early 1970s. An issue of Life magazine
publicized this tactic in 1971, prominently displaying “three bearded,
outlandishly dressed homosexuals parading through the streets of
Hollywood” (with a “perplexed housewife” looking on). These men,
the caption explained, “are not transvestites. They are demonstrators
who claim they are trying to cultivate a life-style which will free men
and women from the dictates of sharply defined ‘sex roles..’ . . They
argue that the liberation of homosexuals will also free heterosexu-
als to adopt aspects of the less restrictive homosexual life-style. This

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 includes the freedom to dress as one pleases, either as a man or a
woman or both.”²7
Previously, homosexual men dressing in drag had been considered
a festive aspect of gay culture or “camp”; the drag balls sponsored by
homophile organizations such as sir, however, were considered to
be private events for attendance solely by the gay community.²8 In
contrast, gay liberationists appropriated the gay cultural tradition
of drag for a public, political purpose, using gender-transgressive
dress to explicitly question and protest norms of gender and sexual-
ity. As opposed to traditional drag attire, activists wearing political
drag were not attempting to pass as women; indeed, the presence of
beards and facial hair on many men in political drag easily signaled
their true biological gender. Rather, political drag was used to protest
culturally constructed gender norms. As one New York glf mem-
ber wrote, wearing makeup or dressing in drag allowed gay activists
to “surrender [their] male privilege”: “Together we are shedding the
levis and leather jackets that secured us in our closets, and with them,
our fear of being recognized as ‘faggots.’”²9 Political drag not only
allowed some homosexuals to be “blatant” about their sexuality, but
also provided a symbolic protest of conceptions of masculinity that
excluded homosexuality from its definition of normative gender.
For some gay liberationists, political drag often became a promi-
nent mode of personal presentation at meetings, public protests, and
demonstrations. Some male activists dressed in drag when attend-
ing gay organization meetings, arriving sporting unshaven beards
and women’s dresses.³0 “Wearing a dress is a revolutionary act,” pro-
claimed glf cofounder Jim Fouratt, an item which he sometimes wore
to organization meetings.³¹ Gay liberationists also sometimes wore
political drag to marches and pride parades.³² During the American
Psychiatric Association’s meeting in San Francisco in 1970, gay activ-
ist Konstantin Berlandt wore a “bright red dress” when he and others
interrupted the meeting to protest the inclusion of homosexuality
among the organization’s list of psychiatric disorders.³³
The use of political drag by gay activists also provided another
means for some gay liberationists to critique the older generation

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 FIG. 10. A poster advertising political drag at the University of California,
Berkeley. Charles Thorpe Papers, Folder 26, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender Historical Society and the San Francisco Public Library.

of homophile activists. When gay liberation groups picketed the San

Francisco Tavern Guild’s annual Halloween Ball in October 1969,
they argued that such events not only promoted the capitalist exploi-
tation of the gay community but also perpetuated gender oppres-
sion in the everyday world; drag was allowed only at private events

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 “on these one or two special occasions per year” but discouraged as
an everyday practice. “Gays who dig Drag don’t need drag balls to do
their thing,” wrote one group of gay liberationists in a flyer. “Do it
in the road, in the streets, where the life is!” At the picket, liberation-
ists held signs proclaiming, “Do it in the streets!” and “Wear your
gown all year round,” and demonstrated their support of political
drag with their own gender theater. One activist mimicked “going
down” on a woman wearing short hair wig and a dildo, another drag
queen flashed the crowd with her “very real bosom,” and a number
of participants dressed in drag but refused to shave their beards or
legs. By protesting the drag ball with political drag, these gay activ-
ists decried the alleged conformist tactics of the older gay movement,
while defending their own version of gender-transgressive dress as
part of their liberation: “The Gay Establishment is doing as much
to delay our Freedom as a thousand repression laws on the statute
books,” the activists concluded.³4
While some gay liberationists embraced political drag and gender
transgression in dress, other gay activists questioned whether such
methods were appropriate political tactics for the gay movement.
Some worried that these tactics exacerbated societal stereotypes that
homosexual men were effeminate. Allen Young, a member of the
New York glf, advanced this argument when criticizing drag in a
1970 issue of Gay Sunshine: “It is straight society which tells us that
to be Gay is to be womanly (read: inferior). Our fight to reject sex
roles, and to reject heterosexual male chauvinism, is to reject termi-
nology and humor which reinforces . . . those same straight roles.”³5
Bay Area activist David Bertelston concurred that drag allowed the
gay community to be “ensnared by stereotypes”: “What at first may
appear to be defiant nonconformity is really only a more subtle form
of enslavement,” he wrote.³6 These authors implied that political drag
catered to oppressive stereotypes about homosexual men that activ-
ists should work to reject.
By combating stereotypes of “effeminate” homosexuality, gay lib-
erationists could perhaps form alliances with other radical groups.
Scholars have recognized the masculinist undertones of New Left and

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 Black Power organizations and how the activism of these movements
was often predicated on the rhetoric of masculine power and man-
hood rights.³7 Particularly, the use of the term “faggot” by Students for
a Democratic Society (sds) and the Black Panthers as an “all-purpose
insult” against their enemies revealed not only their gendered bias
against homosexuality but also the masculinist assumptions of their
political militancy.³8 When gay liberationists joined sds brigades to
Cuba in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they encountered homopho-
bic slurs from other activists, evidence of the homophobic tensions
that simmered under the surface of New Left organizations.³9 It is
no small wonder, then, that some gay liberationists adopted tradi-
tional masculine rhetoric and presentation to combat this image of
“weak” and “unmanly” homosexuals.
The Committee for Homosexual Freedom in San Francisco was
one gay liberation organization that embraced masculinist rhetoric
in its 1969 pickets of businesses accused of firing openly gay work-
ers. “Join our [picket] line and declare yourself openly,” its newsletter
commanded, and “proclaim yourself a man,” by fighting for rights as
a homosexual face-to-face with the world.40 One protestor explained
his decision to leave sir and join the chf pickets by asking himself,
“Bravery, manhood— do I possess them? Are my bravery and man-
hood involved in the States Lines confrontation? I concluded that
they were, and they are what I had never committed to my belief in
homosexual freedom.”4¹ This language of masculine militancy not
only aligned these activists with the political rhetoric of other radi-
cal groups like the Black Panthers but also implicitly challenged
the stereotype of homosexuals as “weak” and effeminate by assert-
ing their manhood as the basis of their rights claims. But combating
stereotypes of “weak” homosexuals with the rhetoric of masculine
militancy left little room to include gender transgression in the poli-
tics of gay liberation. Unlike the gay activists who embraced politi-
cal drag tactics at the 1969 picket of the Tavern Guild’s Halloween
Ball, the Advocate reported that other liberationists “opposed the ball
because it perpetuates the faggoty stereotype of homosexuals . . . and
harms the cause of gay freedom.”4² For these gay liberationists, drag

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 FIG. 11. Two activists in drag at a rally in Albany, New York, 1971. Diana Davies.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

furthered stereotypes of effeminate homosexuality that some activ-

ists were desperately trying to combat.
Male gay activists thus disagreed over the meanings of gender
transgression in dress. Did political drag challenge norms of gender
that helped to free gays from the norms of heterosexual society, or
did political drag exacerbate stereotypes of homosexuals as effemi-
nate? The answers to these questions were not always clear, and new
groups of constituents in the gay movement would further compli-
cate the issue of drag as a politicized style of self-presentation.

ST R E E T Q U E E N S , T R A N S S E XUA L S , A N D F E M I N I STS :
DIVISIONS OVER GENDER TRANSGRESSION
The gay liberation movement included many various groups of con-
stituents; within these groups, gender-transgressive modes of self-

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 presentation took on varied meanings, often dividing activists over the
propriety of politicized forms of personal style. A significant complica-
tion for some gay liberationists was the potential confusion between
gays dressed in drag (whether for political or cultural purposes) and
transvestites or “street queens.” These individuals transgressed gender
boundaries in their everyday dress as a statement of their individual
identities, rather than solely for festive occasions or political protest.
While street queens participated in the Stonewall Rebellion, some
gay activists remained unsure as to whether transvestites ought to be
included in their advocacy, citing studies that many transvestites were
in fact heterosexual.4³ But even for transvestites who clearly claimed
a homosexual identity, confusion abounded about the role of these
individuals in the gay movement. Indeed, some street queens created
their own organizations, such as the Queens Liberation Front (qlf)
and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (star), claiming they
felt excluded from gay liberation organizations.44
Some gay liberationists, following in the footsteps of their homo-
phile predecessors, worried that the inclusion of street queens exac-
erbated stereotypes about homosexuality. In 1967 members of sir
debated the propriety of biological men dressing as the opposite
gender in public. While many members argued that drag should be
tolerated, explaining that “anyone should be able to dress anyway he
wishes,” other sir members pointed to the damage that public drag
could do to the reputation of homosexuals. “Our public behavior is
of supreme importance,” wrote one member. “Drag as a comedy in
stage productions . . . is acceptable to the majority of our community.
However, the homosexual who dresses as a woman for the purpose
of solicitation or to declare his femininity should be rejected by sir”
Another member decried the stereotypes of homosexuals that drag
exacerbated: “While a small minority of sir members enjoy dressing
in women’s clothes, the majority . . . prefer to walk like men, talk like
men, and dress like men.” Overall, a majority of the surveyed mem-
bers agreed that drag ought not to be tolerated in public, and that
drag was “detrimental to the homophile community.”45
In the 1970s, some gay liberationists echoed these concerns. “Trans-

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 vestism oppresses Gay men by perpetuating society’s stereotypes
of us,” wrote members of a gay organization at Hunter College in
New York City. “These are the portrayals we see in movies, on news
reports, and in magazines. Our oppression must end with our own
Gay community before we can expect it to end in the minds of oth-
ers. . . . Transvestism is a remnant of the ghetto and the first symbol
of Gay oppression,” they concluded.46 “Whenever I am forced to
endure a couple of screaming queens doing their best to embarrass
or offend people around them, I am positively ashamed to be gay,”
wrote another individual in the Advocate. “Such unpleasant stereo-
types can only strengthen prejudice, not help to alleviate it.”47 Other
gay liberationists, of course, disagreed with this opinion, arguing that
the gay community needed to be inclusive of all types of homosexu-
als. “Prejudice against transvestites divides us against ourselves in a
way that plays into the hands of those who want to oppress all Gays,
whether transvestites or not,” one gay activist countered.48
Class differences perhaps provided another reason for some
gay activists’ concerns about transvestites. In San Francisco, many
(although certainly not all) street queens lived in the Tenderloin, a
neighborhood inhabited by immigrants and racial minorities and
stricken with poverty. Many of the individuals who lived in the Ten-
derloin engaged in prostitution or hustling in order to survive, fur-
ther increasing the lifestyle divides between them and middle- class
gay activists.49 One president of Vanguard, an organization for street
queens and adolescents in the Tenderloin that briefly existed in the
late 1960s, wrote in a statement to homophile organizations that
Vanguard was “composed of the other 1 percent of homosexuals in
this country. We are the hustlers, who are bought and paid for by the
same people who will not hire us to a legimate [sic] job.”50 In New
York City, many gender-transgressive individuals also lived on the
streets, often kicked out of their homes by their families who dis-
approved of their homosexuality. Middle- class gay activists did not
always recognize the poverty of street queens as part of the gay lib-
eration struggle; when Sylvia Rivera, a drag queen who participated
in the Stonewall Rebellion, begged at a gay pride rally for activists

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 to remember their gay brothers and sisters in jail, some members of
the mostly middle- class crowd did not want to listen, shouting at
Rivera to leave the stage.5¹
For other gay liberationists, the class oppression of street queens
was precisely the reason to include them in the movement. Seeing all
forms of oppression— class, racial, gender, and sexual—as intercon-
nected within the complex matrix of power relations in the capital-
ist state, some gay activists made a point of including street queens
in their protests and marches to illustrate their acceptance of gays
regardless of their class or racial backgrounds.5² When various gay
organizations in San Francisco banded together to hold an “Anti-
Thanksgiving” rally and march in 1969, they invited “Tenderloin
‘undesirables’” to join with them. The San Francisco Free Press reported:
“Along the way two beautiful Queens in full drag were cheered by
the throng as they came into the street to join the march. During the
rest of the journey they walked, liberated, at the head of the line.”5³
Beyond enacting their commitment to racial and class inclusion,
street queens helped contribute to the commitment that some gay
activists had made to challenge gender norms through dress and
outward appearance. Mike Silverstein, a leader of the Berkeley glf,
argued that street queens played an important political and ideologi-
cal role through their appearance, which destroyed the masculine-
feminine binary that contributed to gay oppression: “When a Street
Queen walks down the street, she’s a one-person rebellion, her
being an affront and attack on the straight world around her. . . . The
Street Queen denies the reality of the whole structure of Masculine-
Feminine roles. She refuses to be either a man or a woman, and that
is the most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage
in.”54 In this statement, Silverstein explicitly placed street queens at
the heart of gay liberation. Drag queens were not only homosexu-
als, but actually epitomized the rebellion that gay liberation hoped
to achieve in challenging gender roles and norms of masculinity.
Other gay activists argued that street queens challenged the mis-
guided goal of “respectability” that the earlier homophile movement
had sought, and to which some gay activists still subscribed. “I ques-

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 tion whether respectability is a respectable goal for the Gay Move-
ment,” New York gay activist Arthur Evans wrote in the Advocate. “Gays
have always been told that it’s respectable to dress like straights, love
like straights, and not be noisy (that is, be invisible). It’s ‘bad taste’
to hold hands in public, wear clothes that express who we really are,
and hold big noisy demonstrations. . . . Transvestites are saying that
straight role-playing is not respectable. They say that straight role-
playing makes people deny their full humanity. . . . When we stop
and think about it, isn’t that what the gay movement is all about
anyway—the right to be ourselves?”55 The inclusion of transvestites
and street queens in the gay movement, for these gay activists, pro-
vided another challenge to the concept that gays and lesbians needed
to conform to straight society in order to be respected.
Underlying these debates about the inclusion of street queens and
transvestites, however, lurked an additional question: Were trans-
vestites and street queens actually gay? Awareness of transsexuality
increased in the 1960s and sex- change surgeries became more readily
available at major research hospitals, signaling a new form of cross-
gender identity that psychiatrists attempted to differentiate from
homosexuality.56 Some number of former street queens and trans-
vestites began to identify themselves, not as gay, but as transsexual.
One article in Vector, sir’s monthly magazine, was written by a “Ten-
derloin Transsexual,” who described her shifting identity from homo-
sexual to transsexual. While she had for years “live[d] constantly in
the clothes of a woman” despite being a “biological male,” she only
recently had embraced her transsexual identity and identified as what
she truly was—“a woman.” “Not long ago I didn’t know who I was,”
she lamented. “Now I know.”57 Gender transgression, in this case, was
no longer a sign of homosexuality; rather, it was a marker of inner
gender identity. Other “street queens” read about transsexual surgery
in newspapers and discovered doctors who prescribed hormones for
transsexual patients, putting a new name to their identities.58
Although many gay activists were welcoming of transsexuals,
some were not. “Transvestites and particularly transsexuals are still
another breed apart, and I have little patience for them,” wrote one

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 individual in the Advocate. “If a man dresses as a woman for a gag,
or because he just plain enjoys it, that is one thing . . . but if he is
actually convinced that he is a woman, then I cannot help believing
that he is in serious, serious trouble.”59 Some lesbian feminists also
criticized transsexuals, whom they saw as biological men attempt-
ing to invade women’s spaces and usurp their movement by claim-
ing to be women. In 1973 controversies arose when Beth Elliott, a
male-to-female transsexual, tried to join the San Francisco chapter
of Daughters of Bilitis (dob), a lesbian organization; many lesbians
expressed anger when Elliott performed later that year at the West
Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles (although other lesbians
vocally defended her).60 Whether transsexuals ought to be included
in the gay and lesbian movement, thus, was a hotly contested ques-
tion. For some activists, gender-transgressive dress seemed to confuse
homosexual and transsexual identities in ways that made some gay
activists uncomfortable.
Feminist and lesbian critiques of drag, transvestism, and trans-
sexualism also complicated conceptions of drag as a political state-
ment. Drag queens, feminists argued, portrayed a “hyper-feminine”
image at odds with the feminist goal of deconstructing stereotypes
of womanhood. “I cannot continue to be amused by men who
think that the essence of a woman can be caught in the costume
of high heels, wigs, falsies, and make-up,” wrote one lesbian femi-
nist. “They present this ridiculous figure and say, ‘this is a woman—
that is all she is.’”6¹ Another lesbian feminist argued that drag was
“a mockery and put- down of women. They dress up in clothes that
no woman would wear and then make women out to be all of the
stupid things that society ever said we were.”6² Men who dressed in
women’s clothes, these feminists claimed, were demonstrating their
ignorance of women’s oppression. “When men do women’s drag
they are making a joke out of the roles women have been forced
into,” one feminist explained.6³ Feminists thus criticized female
impersonation as a cultural affront to women that mocked and ste-
reotyped womanhood and thus projected normative gender roles
onto them. As women’s liberationist Robin Morgan stated in 1973,

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 “We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface; the same
thing is at work when men wear drag.”64
Some gay liberationist men also recognized this feminist critique
of drag. Mike Silverstein, the Berkeley glf proponent of drag, noted
how its practice could easily perpetuate stereotypes about feminin-
ity that were harmful to women. “When a woman presents herself
as essentially frivolous and trivial,” he wrote, “concerned with noth-
ing except clothes and hair-style, make-up and other aspects of her
appearance, when she acts child-like and unserious . . . she’s playing
out an oppressed role . . . when a Drag Queen acts in the same way,
she’s acting out the same oppression.”65 Bob Kohler, a member of
the New York glf, agreed: “The Drag Queen,” he wrote, could easily
be interpreted as “a caricature of the exploited woman.”66 Other gay
liberationists, who called themselves “effeminists” and aligned them-
selves with the feminist movement, argued that drag was offensive to
women and to effeminate men. Nick Benton, an effeminist activist in
Berkeley, explained that drag was “a straight man’s trip, and therefore
oppressive to women and Gay people,” because it exploited “those
bearing the feminine qualities naturally—women and effeminate
(young) men,” and made these groups subject to “the domination of
the . . . straight male.” Gays in drag, Benton thus argued, “perpetuat[ed]
their own oppression.”67 New York effeminists Steve Dansky, Ken-
neth Pitchford, and John Knoebel also criticized gay male drag in
their writings. Drag, they argued, was based on the “sexist molecule
of reciprocal role stereotyping” that oppressed both women and
effeminate men by “allow[ing] [them] no alternative beyond the rigid
roles it promotes.”68 These gay activists thus argued that drag, rather
than deconstructing gender norms, actually reinforced stereotypi-
cal feminine roles that were harmful to both women and gay men.
For all of these reasons—fears that cross- dressing men perpetuated
stereotypes of “effeminate” homosexuality, suspicions of transvestites,
street queens, and transsexuals, feminist criticisms of drag—gender
transgression in dress became a point of contention among gay activ-
ists. Conflicts arose in various settings. In San Francisco, Leo Laurence,
the founder of the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, threw a

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 fit when drag queens performed at a joint gay and women’s libera-
tion meeting; at another gay liberation meeting in the Bay Area, a
transvestite was verbally attacked and accused of “castrating gay men”
through his dress and makeup.69 Del Martin, the longtime San Fran-
cisco lesbian activist and founder of dob, issued a public statement
in 1970 on her reasons for leaving the male- dominated gay liberation
movement, including her criticism of gay male drag: “Goodbye to
the Hallowe’en Balls, the drag shows and parties. It was fun, while it
lasted. But the humor has gone out of the game. The exaggeration
of the switching (or swishing) of sex roles has become the norm
in the public eye. . . . It is time to stop mimicking the heterosexual
society we’ve been trying to escape.”70 In New York City, effeminists
boycotted the 1972 Gay Pride Parade, arguing that the presence of
drag queens illustrated the “anti-womanism” inherent in the “male-
supremacist” march.7¹ And in 1973 Sylvia Rivera was derided onstage
at the Gay Pride Rally in New York City by both gay men and les-
bian feminists who objected to drag queens in the movement, until
Lee Brewster, the president of Queens Liberation Front, mounted
the stage to defend her.7² During the rally, a number of lesbian fem-
inists walked out, citing the sexism of the male- dominated event in
which female impersonation allegedly went unquestioned by most
of the participants.7³
These debates on drag, drag queens, and transvestites illuminate
the complications of gender-transgressive self-presentation as a polit-
ical tactic of gay activism. While drag continued to play a cultural
role in the gay community, its place within the politics of gay rights
activism remained ambiguous—at times a marker of the commu-
nity’s acceptance of diversity, at times a political symbol against the
constraints of gender at the root of homophobia, at times a per-
petuator of stereotypes against women and homosexuals, and at
times a political liability for the “respectability” of the movement.
But perhaps the most poignant cause of conflict over drag and gen-
der transgression in dress arose due not to these internal divisions
within the movement but from an outside source: the rise of oppo-
sition to gay rights.

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 GAY RIGHTS ORDINANCES AND THE POLITICAL
LIABILITY OF GENDER TRANSGRESSION
One of the main legislative goals of the growing gay movement was
to gain legal protections from discrimination. Modeling legislation
passed in the 1960s that protected African Americans from discrim-
ination in employment, public accommodations, and housing, gay
organizations in the 1970s began to advocate for laws on the local,
state, and national levels that would outlaw discrimination against
gays and lesbians in these same areas. In some cities, these initiatives
were successful: city councils in Washington dc, Detroit, Minneap-
olis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco passed ordinances in the 1970s
that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination in employment.
But gay activists experienced significant defeats in New York City as
well as in statewide campaigns for laws in Massachusetts, Oregon,
and California. Moreover, the rise of a national movement in oppo-
sition to gay rights laws, led most famously by Anita Bryant, fostered
voter initiatives that repealed laws in Dade County (Florida), Wich-
ita (Kansas), Eugene (Oregon), and St. Paul (Minnesota) which had
been passed earlier in the decade.74
Multiple factors explain the turn against these initial gay rights
gains in the 1970s: the rise of antihomosexual religious evangelical-
ism, increased political power of the conservative New Right, anti-
feminist backlash against the era, and cultural fears that openly gay
teachers would introduce children to homosexuality. But in debates
about antidiscrimination legislation, another concern continually
arose: Would employers be forced to hire, as legislators or citizens
often put it, “a man in a dress”? While some critics of antidiscrimi-
nation legislation asked this question merely to foil its impending
passage, they implicated broader societal concerns about homosexu-
ality as a form of gender deviance and identified how dress and self-
presentation were central to this image.
The issue first arose in New York City, when Intro 475, a bill to
protect homosexuals from discrimination in employment, housing,
and public accommodations, was proposed in the General Welfare

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 Committee of the city council in 1971.75 The bill was highly sought
after by the Gay Activists Alliance (gaa), a powerful gay organiza-
tion in New York City in the early 1970s, and became the corner-
stone of their legislative advocacy for the next few years. However,
despite multiple hearings and incarnations of the bill from 1971 to
1974 and a large, politically active gay population in New York City,
the law never passed. Opponents of the bill questioned the advisabil-
ity of “forcing” the city to hire homosexual firefighters and police
officers (who would be working in close quarters with heterosexual
men, they argued) and teachers (who would exert significant moral
influence on children, they claimed), illustrating how stereotypes
of homosexual deviance remained a formidable barrier to the bill.76
But another issue that arose in debates about the bill was its alleged
protection of transvestites. During the first hearing on the bill held
by the committee that was in charge of approving the bill before the
full council vote, Assemblyman Olivieri, a supporter of the bill, was
heavily questioned as to whether there might be “any circumstances
in which . . . discrimination might be justified” against homosexuals.
“After much hesitation,” he finally “admitted” that there was one cir-
cumstance that might fit: the case of employers hiring transvestites.77
At the second hearing, Congressman Michael De Marco of the Bronx,
an ardent opponent of the bill, further pursued the issue of whether
the law would include protections of transvestites, pointing out the
presence of transvestites at the hearing by derisively questioning the
“people coming out of the men’s room, who I assume are men.” The
transvestites allegedly responded by engaging in a screaming match
with De Marco and seating themselves in the front row.78 At the third
hearing—which was also attended by a number of drag queens (and
also included Jim Fouratt, one of the founders of the glf, “wearing a
purple miniskirt over his blue jeans”)—De Marco once again raised
the question: Would employers be forced to hire transvestites under
the law?79 Ultimately, the committee failed to pass the bill. Coun-
cilman Saul Sharison stated publicly on the bill’s defeat that they
“could not vote for a bill that might allow cross- dressing in public
office employment.”80

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 The issue of transvestism and gay rights became a major conun-
drum for the gaa as its members debated the proper course of action
to defend the bill. Previously, the gaa had attempted to be inclusive
of transvestites as part of its overall mission to defend “fundamental
human rights for all”; its mission statement claimed that “no member
may be discriminated against because of personal appearance, style of
behavior, or sexual taste,” and the group included among its political
goals the repeal of laws against cross- dressing and the end to police
harassment of transvestites.8¹ But as transvestism became an issue at
the Intro 475 hearings, gaa members became divided as to whether
or not they should defend the inclusion of transvestites in the bill’s
protections. Some members began to question whether transvestites
were members of the gay community; after all, some members asked,
weren’t most transvestites heterosexual? Other members argued that
“the issue of transvestism is a hot potato” that should be dropped
before it destroyed the bill. gaa member Ted Rauch, however, wrote
a scathing criticism of these attempts to exclude transvestites in the
organization’s newsletter. “Are we so grateful for a scrap of protective
legislation that we are about to sell out our own sisters and broth-
ers, the transvestite gays?” he asked. “All gay people including trans-
vestites are entitled to the same rights of employment, housing, and
public accommodation as straight people. . . . Gay liberation implies
liberation for all people.”8²
Other New York City gay organizations, however, agreed that the
presence of transvestites at the hearings exacerbated concerns that the
law would protect “men in dresses” from discrimination in employ-
ment. The Mattachine Society of New York wrote in their newslet-
ter that they had “nothing against drag queens,” but that “there is a
time and a place for everything—and we . . . believe that for trans-
vestites, in drag, to enter the rest room at City Hall during the City
Council hearings on Intro. 475 was neither the right time nor the
right place.”8³ And after the uproar caused by the transvestites at
the second hearing, gaa member Ted Rauch seemingly changed his
mind in an article draft that went unpublished by the organization.
“The presence of ‘drag queens’ . . . at the hearings couldn’t help but

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 to prejudice the minds of the legislative body,” he wrote. “Transves-
tites and other disruptive forces at the hearings merely confirm their
worst fears about faggots.” Rauch also advocated that the gaa should
“accept any amendment to the bill which is proposed. If the Coun-
cilmen want to exclude transvestites from the bill, so be it. They only
make up a small portion of the community anyway, and a number
of them are straight to boot! Why should the majority of homosexu-
als suffer because of a small and dissident minority?” Finally, Rauch
suggested that “everyone attending the next hearings should come
in suits and ties (except women) . . . to counteract the bad impres-
sion made last time,” explicitly rejecting alternative styles in favor of
a return to traditional “respectability” in dress.84
Transvestites, of course, complained that any exclusion of them
from the bill was blatant discrimination on the part of gay activists.
Queens Liberation Front founder Lee Brewster, in a meeting after
the second hearing, accused the gaa of “offer[ing] [transvestites]
up as a political sacrificial lamb” and “pointed out that it had been
transvestites and queens who had turned on New York police at the
Stonewall [Rebellion] in June 1969.” “To be denied our rights by some
straights is to be expected, but intolerable by our own community,”
Brewster concluded.85 Indeed, the gaa in its official policies decided
to stand by the inclusion of transvestites in the bill, claiming that it
would “withdraw its support if the bill is amended to exclude any
portion of the community.” But gaa members continued to debate
whether this was the correct stance for the organization to take.86
And the issue of protection for transvestites continued to haunt the
bill every time it was brought to the General Welfare Committee in
subsequent years. In 1973, during the third vote on the bill, oppo-
nents once again raised the issue of whether or not the law would
“permit transvestites to seek employment in schools and the Police
and Fire Departments.” While a lawyer assured them “that the bill
excluded transvestites,” opponents claimed that they were still not
“satisfied with the answers,” and the bill was once again defeated.87
It was not until an amendment was added to the bill that explicitly
excluded “attire or dress codes” from protection—an amendment

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 that was supported by the newly formed National Gay Task Force
(ngtf) and opposed by the gaa—that the bill was passed by the Gen-
eral Welfare Committee.88
The debates in New York City over the protection of transves-
tites in antidiscrimination laws foreshadowed similar issues that
arose in fights for gay rights laws across the country. In Minnesota,
in 1975, radical activists demanded that transvestites and transsex-
uals be included in a state bill protecting gays and lesbians from
employment discrimination. The Democrats who introduced the
bill opposed the addition of transvestites and transsexuals, argu-
ing that “the inclusion of language regarding gender identification
would absolutely doom the chance of passing gay rights legislation.”
When Republicans introduced an amendment to include transsexu-
als and transvestites in the bill, the Democrats convinced the House
to vote it down. But the issue of transvestism continued to be raised
by representatives during debates on the bill; one “elderly statesman”
continued to ask “whether his wife would have to share ‘lavatories’
with ‘men dressed up like women.’” Twenty representatives who had
previously supported the bill changed their minds, and the bill lost
by an eighteen-vote margin.89 In Oregon, gay rights groups built a
coalition with drag queens and lesbian feminists to pass a law ban-
ning discrimination in housing and employment, but after intense
debate, the bill lost by one vote.90 In Massachusetts, one legislator
“fretted that passage of a bill would have drag queens infesting the
state house bathrooms.” The bill was voted down in the Senate after
intense debate in the Massachusetts House of Representatives over
the transvestite issue.9¹ Overall, of the nine state legislatures consid-
ering gay rights bills in 1975, not a single one passed.9²
Anita Bryant also exploited public fears of transvestism in her
famous campaigns against gay rights in the 1970s. Bryant, a former
beauty queen turned evangelical Christian, became a leader of reli-
gious conservative backlash against the gay movement in the late
1970s. Bryant’s successful campaign to rescind a gay rights ordinance
in Dade County, Florida, also inspired the repeal of similar laws in St.
Paul, Wichita, and Eugene.9³ Concerns about gender transgression

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 played a significant role in her antihomosexual rhetoric. When dis-
cussing the hiring of homosexual schoolteachers, Bryant’s assertion
that “men in dresses” would be teaching in public schools became
ubiquitous in her speeches.94 Television commercials against the
ordinance showed clips from the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade,
focusing on men “wearing dresses and makeup” and other “bizarre
elements of the parade,” stressing both the alleged sexual and gender
deviance of homosexuals.95 In the end, Dade County voters repealed
the ordinance by a two-to- one margin.96 A survey of Dade County
voters after the referendum found that the majority of antigay respon-
dents feared homosexuals because they were “effeminate or lack mas-
culinity.”97 Concepts of gender transgression were therefore crucial
in aiding the antigay backlash that harmed the legislative goals of
gay activists in the 1970s.
In the face of growing opposition to gay rights initiatives, gay orga-
nizations in the mid- to late 1970s increasingly promoted strategies
that emphasized gender and sexual normativity. The National Gay
Task Force, formed in New York City in 1973 as an “American Civil
Liberties Union for gays,” hoped in their advocacy to “convince main-
stream Americans that most gays were not that different—they were
not all mannish women or Nellie men.”98 In 1977, for example, the
ngtf led a campaign against the abc sitcom Soap, which portrayed a
gay man cross- dressing in his mother’s clothes and claiming to desire
sex- change surgery.99 The qlf accused ngtf officials of standing in
front of drag queens at the New York City pride parade in order to
prevent the media from photographing them.¹00 Other gay and les-
bian media-watch organizations that formed in the mid-1970s, such
as the Los Angeles Gay Media Task Force, sought to “eliminate inac-
curate portrayals” of gays and lesbians in television shows, including
depictions of homosexual men as drag queens.¹0¹
Gay organizations began to publish educational materials that
focused on the gender-normative appearance of homosexuals. “Are
Gay Men Effeminate and Lesbians Masculine?” asked a pamphlet
distributed by Eugene Citizens for Human Rights in Oregon. “No,”
the pamphlet answered. “Most homosexual persons dress and act

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 like everyone else. . . . The important thing to remember is that a
person’s sexuality has nothing to do with whether he or she appears
to be more typically masculine or feminine.”¹0² A pamphlet by the
Dallas Gay Political Caucus made similar arguments, assuring read-
ers that “Homosexuals Persons” did not “Want to Be Members of the
Opposite Sex.”¹0³ While these arguments sought to clarify the differ-
ences between transsexuality and homosexuality, they also implied
that gays and lesbians, as men and women who were “comfortable”
with their biological sex, would also choose to look like members of
their sex, without transgressing gender boundaries in appearance.
In their efforts to prove the gender conformity of homosexuals,
some gay organizations in the mid-1970s began to stress the impor-
tance of gender-normative dress in public appearances. David B.
Goodstein, a wealthy gay activist, urged gays and lesbians to “wear
Establishment clothes” and “not confirm stereotypes” when acting
as community representatives and placed particular blame on the
“radicals who affect bizarre costumes” for doing so—an implicit jab
at the gender-bending dress tactics of gay liberationists and trans-
vestites.¹04 In 1974, when gay activists in San Jose, California, lobbied
the city council for the inclusion of gays in antidiscrimination laws,
the leader of a local organization wore a “conservative suit” to the
press conference; similarly, John Campbell, a gay rights leader in
Dade County, dressed “conservatively in double-knit suits” in pub-
lic appearances.¹05
In the same vein, Campbell “discouraged public participation by
transvestites” in the Dade County campaign, fearing that such indi-
viduals would further exacerbate the stereotypes that Bryant’s rheto-
ric invoked.¹06 “Those gay men who insist on dressing up as women
and parading themselves in public do nothing but create a ‘negative
image’ so far as the ‘straight’ community is concerned,” wrote one gay
man in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The drag queen—but a small
minority within our community, by the way—merely gives fuel to
the fire, recently rekindled by St. Anita, which enflames the myth
that we are all a bunch of ‘freaks of nature.’”¹07 After the referendum
in Dade County, some gay activists specifically requested that drag

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 queens not attend the upcoming pride parades that June. “Anita Bry-
ant’s forces will have photographers at the Gay Pride Week parade,”
activist Harvey Milk wrote in an editorial in the San Francisco Senti-
nel. “Each of us has to decide just what kind of image we will pres-
ent to the photographers during the Gay Day parade.”¹08 While Milk
did not explicitly single out drag queens, his message was implicitly
understood. At the pride parade in Atlanta in 1977, marchers yelled
at a television reporter who attempted to interview a man in drag;
similarly, at the 1978 San Francisco parade, a “middle-aged marcher
dressed in conservative casual clothes” told a reporter, as a drag queen
on roller skates passed by, “Damn, I hope you don’t focus on people
like him . . . most people here aren’t like that, but you’ll look at the
tv and see nothing but the freaks.”¹09
Not all gay activists agreed with this dissent against transvestites,
drag queens, and gender transgression in dress. Indeed, drag queens
as cultural performers continue to be included in annual gay pride
parades in cities across the country.¹¹0 But activists who wore political
drag and publicly embraced street queens became increasingly politi-
cally marginalized. In 1976 one activist wondered, “What happened
to the gender confusion that used to be so strong on Christopher
Street, in Piedmont Park, on North Clark Street, Westheimer, Castro?”
He concluded, “Is personal liberation dead? Because if it is dead, so
is gay liberation.”¹¹¹ In some ways, gay liberation was dead; many of
the original gay liberation organizations that had formed in the late
1960s had disbanded.¹¹² By donning suits, ties, and gender-normative
dress, gay activists might have hoped to signal their willingness to
work within established political channels, rather than portraying
themselves as countercultural outsiders with long hair and unconven-
tional attire. But the new mood of conservatism among gay activists
by the mid-1970s also reflected the real challenges that gay organiza-
tions had faced in effecting legal change. As gender transgression in
dress—whether as a political statement, a cultural production, or a
marker of one’s inner identity—became a political liability for the
gay movement, “mainstream” gay organizations responded by mut-
ing gender politics and promoting an image of gender conformity.

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 In place of political drag, a new aesthetic emerged among gay
men in the mid-1970s: the “macho man.” Also known as the “gay
clone” look, the macho-man image was epitomized by “mustached
men with bulging biceps and hairy chests” that became ubiquitous
not only among gay men themselves, but in advertisements in gay
newspapers.¹¹³ Sociologist Martin Levine elaborated on the macho-
man aesthetic in his study of gay male culture in the late 1970s: “The
clone was, in many ways, the manliest of men. He had a gym- defined
body; after hours of rigorous body-building, his physique rippled
with bulging muscles, looking more like competitive body build-
ers than hairdressers or florists. He wore blue- collar garb—flannel
shirts over muscle T-shirts, Levi’s 501s over work boots, bomber jack-
ets over hooded sweatshirts. He kept his hair short and had a thick
mustache or closely cropped beard. There was nothing New Age or
hippie about this reformed gay liberationist.”¹¹4
The clone look attracted its share of dissenters in the late 1970s,
with some arguing that the style uncritically promoted stereotypical
masculinity and a new form of conformity.¹¹5 But the macho-man
aesthetic was also a product of its time: an era in which countercul-
tural fashion and politics were losing their appeal among many gay
men, and in which the gay movement shifted its tactics away from
gender-transgressive dress and moved toward promoting gender nor-
mativity in one’s personal appearance. Indeed, the macho-man look
was not dissimilar from the styles adopted by many straight men of
the 1970s, when mustaches became widely popular and a new inter-
est in personal fitness among all Americans encouraged a more ath-
letic aesthetic.
The macho-man style, however, perhaps held particular political
implications for the gay community in the second half of the 1970s.
Levine argued that the “masculinization of gay culture” arose from
a psychological need among gay men “to challenge their stigmati-
zation as failed men, as ‘sissies.’”¹¹6 Jacques Morali, the creator of the
Village People, a macho-styled disco group that gained a large follow-
ing among gay men in the late 1970s, explicitly revealed the political
implications of the macho-man style for gay men: “I made a group

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 FIG. 12. Cover of the magazine of the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), The Insider,
in 1975. Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

that shows the world what gay is now—not this bullshit Anita Bry-
ant says.”¹¹7 Morali thus implied that the macho aesthetic provided
a political statement against Anita Bryant and the antigay backlash
of the era, as well as against the public perception of homosexuality
as a form of gender deviance.

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 Both gay men at the time and scholars today have recognized how
the macho-man style was itself a form of gender performance.¹¹8 But
the macho-man aesthetic could be read by observers of gay culture
as a sign of the gender normativity of gay men, in stark contrast to
the political drag and public transvestism of the earlier gay libera-
tion era. Dress and personal appearance remained political, but the
message of the gay movement had shifted from challenging gender
norms to upholding gender conventions. While gender-bending
styles and drag never disappeared from gay styles or gay culture, the
overall direction of the mainstream gay movement moved toward
an adoption of gender conformity. This overview of the gay libera-
tion movement has thus demonstrated the contentious nature of self-
presentation in the politics of gay activism, as gender transgression
in dress was liberating for some gays who wished to dispute norms
of gender and constricting for others who believed that gender non-
conformity was a liability in their quest for equal rights.

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 5 “ EVERYONE SHOULD
B E ACCUSTO ME D TO
S E E I NG LO N G HAI R
O N M E N BY N OW ”
Style and Popular Culture in
the Late 1960s to 1970s

In the late 1960s, the Clift Hotel in San Fran-

cisco enacted a policy banning longhaired males from their Redwood
Room cocktail lounge. At first, the rule only affected the growing
numbers of hippie youths congregating in the neighborhood near
the hotel; by 1971, however, the policy made the front page of the
Wall Street Journal when a lawyer from a “prestigious New York law
firm” with “hair [that] extended below his shirt collar” was barred
from meeting his clients in the lounge. “[The hotel’s] policy proba-
bly would be little noticed if only a few stray hippies were involved,”
the reporter explained, “but it has barred the doors of the Redwood
Room to stockbrokers, lawyers, businessmen and the like from the
U.S. and around the world.” One “put- off” business executive, a vice
president at a manufacturing company, complained that the rule
was “insulting” and that many “very important people” were being

123

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 driven away from the hotel. The American Civil Liberties Union,
moreover, filed a lawsuit claiming that the policy was an “arbitrary
denial of service in [a] business establishment” and therefore illegal.
The hotel’s management, however, argued that they had the right to
regulate the grooming of their clients, and claimed that most people
supported the policy.¹
But in 1974, the hotel relented and eliminated its hair-length pol-
icy (as well as its ban on women in pantsuits). “The transformation
was brought about by a simple economic fact of life,” the Los Ange-
les Times explained. “The Clift needed the longhairs more than vice
versa, especially after male members of the Establishment such as
young stockbrokers, lawyers and physicians adopted the hair styles.”
Continued “adverse publicity” of the hotel’s policy as more and more
longhaired clients were turned away had “cost the hotel dearly in loss
of business.” Moreover, the previous owner of the hotel had passed
away; the new president, who wore his hair below his shirt collar,
did not seem interested in the old hair-length policy.²
The demise of dress and grooming regulations at the Clift Hotel
in San Francisco epitomized how new trends in hairstyles, dress,
and self-presentation had become ubiquitous by the 1970s. Long
hairstyles on men, pants on women, and unisex fashions were no
longer restricted to baby-boomer youths or social movement activ-
ists; rather, Americans of all ages, classes, and political persuasions
began to adopt these styles. The media and popular culture played
a central role in promoting the ubiquity, if not acceptance, of these
styles. American corporations and fashion producers aided in co-
opting styles once seen as countercultural and marketed them to the
mainstream, cashing in on alternative styles and promoting them to
enhance business profits.³ Movies, television shows, Broadway musi-
cals, and musicians also displayed these styles to a national audience.
Popular culture helped to shift the meaning of these styles from
symbols of political and cultural conflict to playful and fashionable
choices for Americans of all backgrounds.
Other changes at the end of the 1960s facilitated this shift. As male
consumers became increasingly important to maintaining the con-

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 sumer spending that had fueled the American economy in the post-
war era, advertisers promoted the consumption- oriented male as an
acceptable form of masculinity. As Thomas Frank has shown, the
counterculture became both fashionable and profitable for American
corporations.4 Another factor was the aging baby-boom generation.
Young men and women who, just years earlier, had been hippies, anti-
war activists, or Beatles fans were now young adults entering the work-
force. Some individuals, once they had the power to do so, changed
policies with which they disagreed, as the new longhaired president
of the Clift Hotel had done. Other adults persuaded employers and
colleagues to embrace what had previously been seen as youth styles,
as new modes of self-presentation became popular among adults.
Finally, as the power of radical social protest movements of the
1960s began to fade, so did the political implications of these styles.
As the Black Power movement eclipsed nonviolent civil rights tac-
tics in the late 1960s, fears of violence cramped the strength of black
activism amidst riots in urban areas across the country.5 In the after-
math of the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention
in Chicago, the power of sds eroded, as members of the organization
splintered into radical organizations, like the Weather Underground,
which met with little success.6 As the previous two chapters have
shown, the radical activism of women’s and gay liberation groups
of the late 1960s was overshadowed by a more mainstream brand of
leaders into the 1970s, as these movements met increasing opposition
from the growing conservative movement. As leftist social movement
activism faded in the 1970s, the media helped to reframe the mean-
ings of styles of self-presentation formerly seen as “radical.” While con-
flicts over various modes of self-presentation never dissipated entirely,
the seeming ubiquity of these styles began to overshadow the politi-
cally charged conflicts surrounding them, at least in popular culture.

HAIR AND STYLE IN POPULAR CULTURE

In 1968 the musical Hair debuted on Broadway. A melodious portrayal
of the freewheeling, drug- enhanced hippie counterculture that had
captured the attention of Americans nationwide, the musical received

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 rave reviews from the New York Times and a horrified reaction from
Strom Thurmond, the Republican senator from South Carolina. What
the New York Times called “so likeable, so new, so fresh, so unassum-
ing,” Thurmond called “deprav[ed]”: “There is something utterly per-
verted with our society’s standards of art and entertainment if these
examples . . . in any way actually reflect the temper of our time,” he
concluded.7 While Thurmond was primarily concerned about depic-
tions of drugs and sexuality in the show—particularly the famous
“nude scene” at the end of the first act—much of the controversy sur-
rounding the musical was symbolized by the long hair of the show’s
hippie men. “My hair like Jesus wore it, Hallelujah, I adore it!” pro-
claimed Berger, one of the main characters of the show, in defiance
of cultural norms of masculine gender and respectability. And in the
opening scene, in which Berger and Sheila cut a lock from the hair
of Claude, the main protagonist, hair length provided a symbol of
the two lives between which Claude would choose: the carefree life
of the hippies who promoted freedom from social conventions, or a
traditional masculine life of military service in Vietnam.
While Hair predominantly focused on the political and cultural
conflicts of the era—the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution, race
relations, and the hippie counterculture—the title of the musical
signaled that hair itself had become a popular symbol of these con-
flicts. Nor was the subject matter of Hair an anomaly; by the end of
the decade, numerous movies and television shows began to portray
changing self-presentation styles to a broad audience. Also addressing
popular and controversial issues like the hippie counterculture, racial
politics, and the Vietnam War, these films and television shows both
reflected and shaped national sentiments on these styles. Illustrat-
ing the concerns that unconventional styles raised and the ideas of
those who defended them, popular culture perhaps played its most
important role in promoting the ubiquity of these styles.
Easy Rider, one of the highest grossing movies of 1969, was the first
film to portray the styles and lifestyle of countercultural youth to a
broad audience.8 Starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (and intro-
ducing Jack Nicholson in a supporting role for which he received his

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 first Oscar nomination), the movie tells the story of two young men
traveling by motorcycle through the western United States, osten-
sibly to sell drugs but also to experience the “freedom” of the open
west. Billy (played by Hopper) and Wyatt (played by Fonda) reflected
popular stereotypes of teenage male youths, who rejected traditional
jobs to embark on a cross-country journey, which included using and
selling drugs. Their personal presentation symbolized their rejection
of traditional American culture. Wyatt wore long sideburns and hair
that covered his ears, and Billy had shoulder-length hair and a long
mustache.
The long hair of these characters became a point of contention
in scenes throughout the film. At the beginning of the film, when
Billy and Wyatt are looking for a place to spend the night, a motel
owner takes one look at them and slams the door, quickly changing
his sign to “No Vacancy.” The film thus reflected a concern raised by
some hippies that individuals with long hair were rejected by society
solely on the basis of their outward appearance. Later in the film, in
a small, unidentified town, Billy, Wyatt, and George (played by Jack
Nicholson, who joins their journey after they all meet in jail) walk
into a restaurant and are immediately greeted by stares, whispers,
and taunts. The older men in the restaurant refer to “the one with
the long hair” as “she” and joke that they would need to put him in
the “women’s cell” in prison, thus emphasizing the challenges that
their appearance presented to norms of masculinity. Other com-
ments addressed their sexuality: “I saw two of ’em one time,” one of
the men remarks. “They were just kissin’ away. Two males! Just think
of it.” And as the three protagonists left the restaurant, the older men
refer to them derisively as “Yankee queers.” While this scene suggested
that regional and class differences were at play in perceptions of long
hair—pitting working- class Southerners against middle- class urban
youths—the scene also illustrated how gender and sexual norms pro-
voked criticisms of long hair on men. Violence toward individuals
with nontraditional styles of self-presentation was darkly portrayed
in the film. Indeed, two of the three main characters are murdered
in acts of violence directed at their hippie styles and outlooks. The

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 working- class men from the restaurant hunt down the three travelers
in the middle of the night, killing George and badly injuring Wyatt.
The film’s ending also highlighted violent reactions to the symbol-
ism of long hair: two men in a pickup truck pull up alongside Billy
and Wyatt and shoot them, asking before they do, “Why don’t you
get a haircut?”
This shocking end underscored the film’s deeper criticism of soci-
ety’s treatment of unconventional individuals. Throughout most of
the film, Wyatt is called “Captain America,” a reference to the Amer-
ican flag decals that decorate his motorcycle and his leather jacket.
The film thus portrays Wyatt as a symbol of American ideals that the
film suggests are under attack. Moreover, the concept of freedom was
emphasized as a major theme throughout the film. In one scene, when
Wyatt and Billy stop at a farm for gas and lunch, Wyatt admires the
freedom of the farm owner: “It’s not every man that can live off the
land, you know,” he explains. “Do your own thing in your own time.
You should be proud.” Later in the woods after their experience in
the restaurant, George explains that the taunts weren’t really about
their hair, but about the freedom that their hair and lifestyles repre-
sent. “What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man?” Billy asks. “That’s
what it’s all about.” George replies, “But talkin’ about it and bein’ it,
that’s two different things. . . . But don’t tell anybody that they ain’t
free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you
that they are.” George thus identified long hair as a symbol of the
freedom that was prized in American culture but rarely fully real-
ized. Drugs and sexual encounters were similarly portrayed as forms
of freedom that the protagonists could seize for only brief amounts
of time. At the end of the film, notions of freedom and American-
ism were symbolically highlighted one final time, when Wyatt wraps
Billy, who is bleeding and dying from the gunshot wound, with his
American flag jacket.
Easy Rider illustrated a quiet but unsubtle editorializing by the
media in promoting the value of unconventional styles to a broad
audience. A few years later, these styles were promoted with a sig-
nificantly different tone. All in the Family, a sitcom that premiered

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 on cbs in 1971 and remained a television hit throughout the decade,
focused its plotlines on generational, class, gender, and racial conflict.
The main character, Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Conner),
was a working- class, middle-aged white man who faced conflicts in
each episode with his daughter, Gloria (played by Sally Struthers),
and her husband, Mike (played by Rob Reiner), over liberal politics
and changing social norms. Episodes in the first season addressed
controversial issues such as race relations, feminism, the sexual rev-
olution, and homosexuality. Throughout these episodes, Archie is
portrayed as the disgruntled, working- class elder who is dismayed
and worried about these social and cultural changes, while Gloria
and Mike represent the younger generation’s embrace of change and
dismay at Archie’s outdated modes and ideas.9
Hair and dress styles were frequently portrayed in the sitcom’s first
season as symbols of these cultural and generational conflicts. In the
very first episode, Gloria is shown wearing a miniskirt and reading
Cosmopolitan magazine. Archie complains that the skirt is too reveal-
ing, and muses, “What the hell is it nowadays . . . girls with skirts up
to here, guys with hair down to there? I stopped in [the men’s bath-
room] the other day, [and] there was a guy in there with a ponytail.
My heart nearly turned over in me, I thought I was in the wrong ter-
minal.” Archie thus identified changing hair and dress styles as sym-
bols of the cultural changes surrounding him and echoed the famous
complaint of the era that one “couldn’t tell the boys from the girls.”
In response, Michael asks, “Why do you fight it? The world’s chang-
ing,” reflecting how clothing styles symbolized the conflict between
traditional and modern social standards. In a later episode during the
first season, conflicts over self-presentation again arose when Mike’s
“hippie” friend Paul comes to visit, donning long hair and outland-
ish clothes. When Archie opens the door to the house to greet him,
he immediately turns to Mike and asks, “Who and what is this, and
why is it here?” By referring to the male as “it” rather than “he,” Archie
seemed to deny the humanity, or at least the clear gender identity, of
the individual. When Archie learns that Paul had attended Gloria and
Mike’s wedding, he expresses shock: “This is that nice boy with the

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 combed hair and a pressed suit?” Archie laments how Paul dropped
his engineering major: “He used to dream about building bridges
and banks. Now he looks like someone who wants to blow ’em up!”
In response, Mike chides, “There you go again, labeling people. Why
can’t you forget what Paul looks like and accept him for what he is?”
Archie’s character thus symbolized the traditionalists of the older
generation whose views would be overshadowed by those of their
children. In the opening credits of each episode, Archie and his
wife Edith sit at a piano, playing and singing the song “Those Were
the Days.” The song memorialized the “good old days” gone by and
implicitly lamented the changes that had occurred in society and
culture, including a reference to the “welfare state” that had grown
large in the 1960s due to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Soci-
ety programs. Another lyric recalls how, in the past, “girls were girls
and men were men,” a reference not only to changing sexual mores
and women’s roles but also to hairstyles and fashions that defied
traditional gendered styles. In later seasons, the lyrics of the open-
ing song were changed to make these concerns about hair and dress
styles even more explicit: “Hair was short and skirts were long . . . I
don’t know just what went wrong!” they sing. All in the Family thus
used various styles of personal presentation to symbolize the broader
changes in American society—such as gender roles, sexual mores, race
relations, and political values—that seemed concerning to Ameri-
cans who lamented these societal shifts.
There is no doubt that All in the Family was meant to be contro-
versial; the first episode was aired on cbs “with a special announce-
ment about the potentially shocking contents of the show . . . while a
battery of temporary telephone operators were in place to field com-
plaints about the controversial show they were about to see.”¹0 How-
ever, the genre of the situational comedy (sitcom) served to couch
these changes in humor and jest, rather than serious political con-
flict. Jefferson Cowie notes that All in the Family “served as a sort of
national therapy session” in the post-1960s era, using a unique com-
bination of comedy and conflict to bring “the generations, the races,
the genders, and the classes” together.¹¹ Audience laughter after many

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 of Archie’s statements implied that these conflicts were humorous,
and de- emphasized any fundamental seriousness of his claims. While
the show discussed controversial political and social issues, each sce-
nario was couched in humor rather than in serious conflict. Unlike
Easy Rider, rarely was real violence a part of the plot; indeed, many
episodes end with Archie showing sympathy for opposing views or
alternative lifestyles, even if he does so grudgingly. All in the Family
thus seemed to call for an end to the harsh conflicts surrounding
the politically charged issues of the 1960s, including conflicts over
personal presentation. Archie and Mike could agree to disagree on
these issues, and the social order would not explode.
The contrasts between Easy Rider and All in the Family suggest a
shifting vision in popular culture over styles of personal presenta-
tion, one that de- emphasized the political nature of fashion choices
and instead portrayed these styles as choices upon which reasonable
people could disagree. While conflicts remained, fights over personal
presentation and other political issues could end with a laugh rather
than a riot. As self-presentation trends of the 1960s became more
ubiquitous in the 1970s, popular culture reframed styles with mes-
sages that denied their political edge.

MEN’S STYLES AND THE POPULARIZATION

OF THE PEACOCK
In 1971 a teenager wrote to advice columnist Ellen Peck in the Chi-
cago Tribune asking for help with her brother. “My father insists that
my brother Jim get a haircut,” she explained. “My father makes Jim
wear our big sister’s clothes around the house. First it was just her
dresses. Now it’s her lipstick, too. . . . What can we do to convince Jim
to stop being so stubborn and get a haircut?” Peck replied that the
problem was not with her brother, but with her father. “In my opin-
ion, your brother deserves no punishment at all,” she wrote. “Your
father should understand that men’s (especially young men’s) hair-
styles change over the years, from long to short to crew cut to slicked-
back long, and a parent should not feel threatened by a style change.
Long hair on young men today certainly should not be regarded as

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 girlish or feminine. After all, men’s long hair represented virility—
remember Samson?”¹²
Peck’s response to Jim’s long hairstyle became the norm in popular
culture rather than the exception. Journalists, letters to the editor, and
interviews with ordinary citizens expressed increasing acceptance of
long hair on men and no longer automatically questioned the mascu-
linity, propriety, or cleanliness of men who adopted longer hairstyles.
Abigail Van Buren, the author of the syndicated advice column Dear
Abby, best summarized the emerging attitude: “It seems to me that
everyone should be accustomed to seeing long hair on men by now.
If it’s clean and well cared for, what is there to criticize?”¹³ The media
also portrayed longer hairstyles on men as a growing national trend:
“From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, more and more men at
home in the culture of the nation’s heartland are succumbing to the
siren call of the hair stylist and his panoply of grooming aids,” wrote
the New York Times in 1970. Across all ages, classes, and professions,
the media claimed, longer hairstyles became increasingly common.¹4
Helping the acceptance of long hair on men was the gradual incor-
poration of peacock fashions into standard middle- class male ward-
robes. The media and clothing designers marketed bright patterns and
bold colors to business professionals.¹5 “Men of all ages have broken
out of the white shirt, white collar picture,” an article in the Los Ange-
les Times explained in 1970. “And for fall you are going to find even
peach and orchid offered for leisure wear.”¹6 One wife complained
tongue-in- cheek about her husband’s new clothing styles, “My red
lace dress clashes terribly with his mauve shirt.”¹7 Even Herbert Klein,
the White House director of communications and “guardian of Pres-
ident Nixon’s sober image” was seen in 1971 wearing a “yellow shirt
and bright blue-and-striped, tab pocketed suit.”¹8 Growing ubiquity
of these clothing styles among men in the professional world sig-
naled a redefinition of middle- class respectability in dress; for men,
the business executive’s image was no longer defined by the white
shirt, dark suit, clean shave and crew cut of the past.
But the media took pains to differentiate these styles from those
of hippies or radical activists. By the 1970s, as the social movements

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 FIG. 13. A cartoon from the New Yorker, in 1972, illustrating the ubiquity of long
hairstyles on men. Condé Nast.

of the previous decade dissipated, long hairstyles on men no longer

signified a commitment to radical politics. Indeed, differentiating
themselves from “hippies” became important for many of the wearers
and designers of these new styles. One twenty-two-year- old construc-
tion worker explained that, despite his “cascading hair” and “flow-
ered shirt, flared jeans and a string of love beads,” he was still against
drugs and in support of the war. “I’m just changing with the times,”
he claimed. “Girls like my long hair.”¹9 Other individuals noted that
long hair should not necessarily define a person as a “hippie.”²0 The
media helped to combat this image of longhaired males as hippies
or radicals by focusing on politically conservative young men who
adopted these styles. In 1972 the Washington Post profiled a twenty-
year- old, longhaired, male Nixon campaign volunteer. “One thing
that really bothers me is the idea that McGovern people are the only
cool ones, the only ones with long hair,” he stated. “I can think of

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 two Nixon volunteers, guys, with hair to their waist. McGovern has
no corner on the counterculture.”²¹ The Los Angeles Times similarly
profiled a “long of hair and mod of dress” thirty-year- old campus
organizer who was hired to attract younger voters to the Republican
Party.²² The upscale nature of men’s peacock styles, moreover, were
differentiated from the “grubby” styles of hippies: it was still “far-
fetched to imagine the head of a successful firm, directing activities
in blue jeans, a grubby shirt, battered boots, long hair and a beard,”
one journalist wrote.²³
The media also promoted styling and grooming techniques for
men’s longer styles, which helped to differentiate mainstream long-
hair wearers from “hippie types.” While the “real short cut of the
1950s” was out, “the new look is neater and slightly shorter” than the
long hippie styles of the 1960s, explained one Chicago barber. “No
longer than the shirt collar” became some barbers’ catch phrase to
describe the haircuts.²4 Other barbers described the most popular
styles as “full” haircuts or “radial styles” in which “the hair is the same
length all over: it’s a short haircut that looks long.” While layered,
styled, and coiffed hairstyles reflected the demise of the crew cut as a
popular men’s style, these longer hairstyles were different from those
of longhaired women; as one barber concluded, “Real long hair is
going out.”²5 These styles also helped to differentiate masculine long
hair from feminine hairstyles. “Longer hair lengths are for women,”
explained a Los Angeles hairdresser.²6
Moreover, male adopters of long hair and peacock fashions pro-
moted the masculinity of their fashion choices. Some men explained
their decision to grow their hair as an assertion of their rights to free-
dom of choice and self- expression, adopting the arguments of defend-
ers of long hair in the 1960s. “I feel like less of a man when I am told
I have to wear my hair short,” explained one individual. “It’s an indi-
vidual’s decision.” Another longhaired individual concurred: “It’s a
basic freedom that a man can wear his hair as he chooses.”²7 While
adopting the reasoning that long hair was symbolic of the right to
self- expression at the core of the American creed, they also portrayed
long hair as an assertion of masculine autonomy, implying that “real”

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 men treasured their “freedom” above all. Others argued that long hair
on men represented a more natural version of masculinity, borrowing
the reasoning of some hippie advocates of long hair. One individual
told the Chicago Tribune that long hair was “a more masculine look.
A more natural look.”²8 Another explained that long hair was “sym-
bolic of a sophisticated cave man,” the epitome of original masculin-
ity.²9 Advertisements for peacock fashions and products stressed the
sensuality, sexuality, and masculinity of their wearers.³0 Defenders
of new styles for men thus asserted the masculinity of their choices,
stressing the value of personal liberty in their fashion decisions. It
was the act itself of exercising the choice to wear one’s hair short or
long that allowed an individual the freedom to be a man.
Shampoo, one of the highest-grossing films of 1975, reinforced this
popular perspective of the “peacock” male as a fun-loving, apolitical
individual, firm in both his masculinity and his heterosexuality. The
central character is a thirty-something, philandering male hairdresser
named George (played by the handsome and equally sexually adven-
turous Warren Beatty). With hair to his collar, sideburns, medallions
around his neck, and ruffled shirts, George epitomized the Peacock
Revolution in men’s fashion from the late 1960s and early 1970s. His
multiple sexual partners, moreover, signified his participation in the
“sexual revolution,” in which sexual relationships outside of marriage
were not only acceptable, but also served to symbolize George’s virile
masculinity. Despite his longer hair and peacock fashions, George’s
rampant masculine heterosexuality was emphasized in the film. In
one scene, George confesses his love of women—all women: “I go
into that [hairstyling] shop, and they’re so great-looking. . . . I’m doing
their hair, and they feel great, and they smell great . . . and that’s it!
It makes my day. . . . It makes me feel like I’m going to live forever.”
With this explicit statement of his attraction to women—along with
his multiple sexual encounters with women throughout the film—
George’s long locks and stylistic fashions belie any indication that
either his masculinity or his heterosexuality might be questioned.
Shampoo defined long hair and peacock fashions not only as com-
patible with heterosexual masculinity, but also as divorced from politi-

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 cal activism. The film takes place, significantly, on the day of Nixon’s
win over Humphrey and Wallace in the 1968 presidential election.
But politics is not the focus of the movie; indeed, George is unable
to pay any attention to politics amidst his own self- destructing per-
sonal life. While the film makes the impending election obvious,
with climactic scenes taking place at two very different election-night
parties—a black-tie affair for Republican supporters, and a gathering
of “hippie”-style youths involving pot smoking and public nudity—
George not only fails to fit into either crowd, but is seemingly obliv-
ious to it all. Significantly, George does not seem to care that he is
attending a Republican gala, implying that his longish hair would
not preclude him from siding with the Republican candidate. But
George also does not seem to fit in with, or even notice, the long-
haired hippies and their escapades at the second party, signifying
that his long hair did not automatically align him with this group of
activists, either. Indeed, the film never reveals who George (or any of
the other characters) voted for in the election— or if he voted at all.
The implicit message of the film epitomized the prevailing message
in popular culture on men’s long hairstyles and peacock fashions in
the 1970s: that these styles were predominantly cultural, not politi-
cal, and bore no significance for the masculinity, heterosexuality, or
political views of their wearers.
Men’s long hair and peacock fashions, which had inspired so much
anxiety and contention in the 1960s, thus became promoted in the
1970s as a valid style of masculine self-presentation. Long hair grew
increasingly ubiquitous, as men adapted these styles to fit into a
framework of masculinity that was no longer threatening to con-
cepts of gender, cleanliness, or respectability. As the social activism
of the 1960s faded, so too did connotations of long hair on men as a
symbol of rebelliousness, radicalism, or effeminacy.

WO M E N ’S ST Y L E S A N D “ FASHION FEMINISTS ”
In 1970 fashion designers introduced a new line of skirts for women
ranging from mid- calf to ankle lengths. These “midi” and “maxi”
skirts were meant to replace miniskirts in women’s wardrobes; design-

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 ers touted the longer styles as a return to femininity and sensuality,
spurning the hypersexualized miniskirt. But while some women in
the 1970s embraced the midi, many women rejected these longer skirt
lengths; they argued that the midi was a ploy by manufacturers to
increase their profits by arbitrarily declaring the miniskirt to be out
of style and forcing women to buy the midi as a replacement. More-
over, women complained that the longer-length skirts were “dowdy,”
“ugly,” and old-fashioned. Women across the country formed protest
groups against the midi, arguing that fashion designers were dictat-
ing to women rather than listening to their fashion desires. Skirt sales
plummeted, and clothing boutiques quickly promised to bring back
shorter skirts. By 1971 miniskirts were back in stores to the delight of
many female clients (and their male admirers).³¹
The mini-midi controversy highlighted the growing acceptance
of shorter skirt styles for women. In the 1960s some commentators
had derided the miniskirt as unfeminine for its attention to female
sexuality rather than traditional modesty. But while designers in
1970 claimed that the midiskirt was a return to femininity, most
commentators disagreed, arguing that it was the midiskirt that was
unfeminine.³² “Won’t women look less feminine” in midiskirts, jour-
nalists wondered, “and won’t men resent the absence of the flash of
legs and thighs that seem to enlighten every subway ride?”³³ Thus,
the ubiquity of miniskirts suggested that the public was becoming
more accepting of sexualized imagery in women’s fashions. Moreover,
journalists in 1970 portrayed the mini-midi controversy as emblem-
atic of changes in women’s consciousness due to women’s libera-
tion. Women, journalists claimed, were now too independent—too
emancipated—to blindly follow the whims of fashion designers. Just
as women deserved to choose their own careers and sexual partners,
they also deserved to be able to choose their mode of dress—some
of the basic tenets of the growing women’s liberation movement.³4
Increasing acceptance of women’s pantsuits signaled an even more
significant change. By the fall of 1970, pants had come into their own
as a popular mainstream fashion for women. A survey in the Los
Angeles Times in September 1970 found that 84 percent of women

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 FIG. 14. In 1970 a protest group called Fight Against Dictating Design-
ers (FADD) featured a woman cutting off the bottom of a long skirt to
create the preferred midiskirt. Bettmann/Corbis /AP Images.

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 planned to wear pants that fall, including 97 percent of the teenage
females surveyed. “To us, this is the fashion revolution,” the Times con-
cluded.³5 Both fashion marketers and the media were crucial in pro-
moting pants as an acceptable fashion for women. “The pantsuit, for
both daywear and social dressing, has achieved enormous popularity
and ready acceptance,” claimed a retailer quoted in the Los Angeles
Times.³6 Pants on women began to show up “everywhere,” according
to Business Week in 1971, “from offices to formal parties.” Photographs
in the magazine revealed that pants were now worn by women of
all ages, from young women on motorcycles wearing jeans to older
women in elegant pantsuits.³7
Institutions that had balked at women’s pantsuits in the 1960s
began to change, gradually accepting these styles. School districts
that had previously forbidden female students from wearing pants or
jeans began to modify their dress codes in the 1970s, allowing pants
to be worn as everyday school attire.³8 Fancy restaurants began to
allow female patrons in pantsuits, and Hollywood celebrities began
appearing in pantsuits at industry events.³9 “The pantsuit is no longer
controversial,” one journalist concluded in 1971. “It is now accepted
at any social gathering, has become almost a uniform for offices and
certainly is the most comfortable, practical garment in any woman’s
wardrobe.”40 By 1975 the New York Times asserted that “nobody raises
an eyebrow anymore” to pants on women.4¹
Newspapers and magazines often portrayed the growing popular-
ity of pantsuits and miniskirts as indications of the spread of feminist
values among mainstream American women. Syndicated columnist
Art Seidenbaum argued that pants-wearing women were not the
“karate choppers or even dues-paying members of the movement,”
but that their adoption of pants was evidence that they “hear[d] mili-
tant complaints loud and clear” and agreed with some of the tenets
of feminist politics.4² Some women concurred with this assessment,
linking their choice to wear pants to their growing awareness of the
need for women to assert their right to dress as they wished.4³ As one
pantsuit wearer, Mrs. Olin Wellborn III, told the Los Angeles Times,
“I stand for freedom of choice.”44 Another supporter of “freedom of

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 choice” in dress, seventy-year- old Mrs. Harold M. Stern, sent money
to one of the anti-midi protest groups “with a note that she wants to
help them defend the right of American girls to dress as they please.”45
Even some fashion designers recognized the broader claims of these
fashion battles: “It seems to me that your fight is more than just for
length,” one designer stated. “It’s for a way of life. You want to be
able to choose.”46 Growing societal acknowledgement of the right
of women to wear pants or miniskirts thus illustrated how feminist
concepts of choice— despite the controversial nature of the “choice”
argument for women’s abortion and reproductive rights—had in fact
gained some mainstream acceptance by the 1970s. Alongside increas-
ing acceptance of a new range of choices for women in their work
and personal lives, the right of women to choose their own styles of
dress became commonly acknowledged.
But many journalists and pants-wearing women carefully distin-
guished wearing pants from feminism. While some women saw their
dress styles as reflecting their adherence to the values of women’s lib-
eration, many women and their media advocates claimed that there
was nothing political about the decision to wear pants. “Pants do not
have to march militantly in a feminist parade to prove that they can
stand on their own two feet,” explained an article in the Los Angeles
Times in 1970.47 One twenty-three-year- old engineer wore pants and
cut her hair short to make herself comfortable as she biked to work,
but explained that her style had nothing to do with women’s libera-
tion “because I already feel liberated.”48
Moreover, some women and journalists maintained that the deci-
sion to wear pantsuits did not mean that they would forever eschew
skirts or traditional feminine attire. Indeed, the mini-midi controversy
and subsequent return of miniskirts to the racks of fashion retailers
revealed that many American women were not planning to give up
skirts anytime soon. “The Spring ’71 woman,” according to the Los
Angeles Times, wore pants, skirts, and jeans as part of her “new picture
of femininity.”49 Women adopted pantsuits alongside skirts and dresses
in their wardrobes; “I want clothes that are understated and classic
without being masculine,” one woman explained.50 These “fashion

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 feminists,” as some journalists labeled them, stood up for “choice”
in women’s clothing within the confines of a feminine identity that
was not overtly political. “The 1971 Fashion Feminist suits herself in
many individual ways,” described the Philadelphia Tribune. “She is free
to select pantsuits with any of the new and exciting pants looks” or
“skirts that move with the rhythm of the body.”5¹ “All-in-all, the fash-
ion feminist goes her own way,” wrote an article in the Los Angeles
Times. “She uses her own special style to give her clothes meaning.
She’s all woman.”5² “Fashion feminists” could choose to wear pants
or skirts, but never gave up their feminine identities; in other words,
they could be “liberated” but still be “women.”
Fashion designers and women pants-wearers also described how
their particular styles allowed them to maintain a feminine look
while wearing pantsuits. Designers made pantsuits look feminine by
showing them with ruffled blouses and long tunics, making the styles
“pretty,” “soft” and “tasteful” even for the most feminine of women.5³
Accessories were another way to feminize the pantsuit style. “For
daytime wear, these suits look best with casual leather shoes, a scarf
at the neckline, a turtleneck, or a gold chain,” instructed a fashion
columnist for the Chicago Tribune. “At night, change the look with
higher, dressier shoes, pearls instead of casual chains, a pretty blouse
instead of the more formal, tailored shirts and sweaters.”54 Paired
with the correct blouse, colors, and accessories, there would be no
reason for a female in a pantsuit to project a masculine image. While
designers in the 1960s had also attempted to promote women’s pant-
suits as feminine, the growing ubiquity of women’s pants provided
new acceptance for these claims that pants and femininity were not
mutually exclusive. One seventy-four-year- old woman explained of
her recent decision to buy a pantsuit, “With a color that suits you
best, plus a necklace and earrings, it really is feminine.”55
The growing acceptance of miniskirts and pantsuits signaled
changes in societal definitions of womanhood, allowing for sexual
independence and a new range of choices for women in their fash-
ion decisions. However, women’s fashions remained tied to feminine
identities that weren’t overtly political. The popular film Annie Hall

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 epitomized this message about the meanings of new fashion styles
for women. The main character, Annie (played by Diane Keaton, who
won an Oscar for the role; the film also won the Academy Award for
Best Picture of 1977), was characterized by her nontraditional fash-
ion choices. In the pivotal scene in the film in which she first meets
her love interest, Alvy (Woody Allen), Annie wears a stereotypical
men’s outfit: vest, tie, khaki pants, and a black full-brimmed hat. “I
love your outfit,” Alvy remarks as a sign of approval. While her attire
in this one important scene became her trademark, Annie’s dress
during the rest of the film is “quirky,” but rarely explicitly gender
bending; often, her outfits include feminine pants, long skirts, and
dresses. Moreover, Alvy and Annie’s relationship in the film rarely
exhibits any hint of relaxed gender boundaries, nor is Annie por-
trayed as either a feminist or as a woman willing to step far outside
the bounds of normative womanhood. Annie may be a free spirit,
but she is resolutely heterosexual and feminine in her mannerisms;
even at her first meeting with Alvy, despite her potentially masculine
dress style, Annie’s demeanor is shy and nervous, trying to make a
good impression for her love interest.
Nor is Annie portrayed, at least at first, as an independent woman.
Instead, through most of the film, Annie is dependent on and highly
influenced by Alvy, who convinces her to take classes and to see an
analyst to work through her insecurities. In one scene, Annie calls
Alvy to come over to her apartment in the middle of the night because
she is scared of a spider in her bathroom. By the end of their rela-
tionship, and through the help of her analyst, Annie does grow more
independent, eventually breaking up with Alvy when he becomes
jealous of her singing career, and moving to Los Angeles with a new
lover. But even at the end of the film, when Annie refuses to accept
Alvy’s marriage proposal and move back to New York with him,
she frames her decision in terms of the support he gave her in their
relationship: “You’re the reason that I got out of my room, and that
I was able to sing. . . . And get more in touch with my feelings and
all that crap.” While Annie may have become more independent by
the end of the film, it was through her relationship with a man that

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 she gained her autonomy. Annie is not a feminist, nor does she ever
reject heterosexuality, men, or an expressly feminine identity; the film
remains focused on the lessons of heterosexual relationships rather
than on feminism or women’s independence.
It was ironic, perhaps, that changes in women’s fashions impli-
cated some of the key values of the women’s liberation movement at
the same time that the movement fell under criticism in the Ameri-
can media. The difference, however, was one of interpretation. The
broader public often conceptualized popular styles such as pant-
suits and miniskirts as “choices” for women; this rationale did not
go beyond a growing consensus that women deserved equal legal
rights to challenge deeper concepts of gender difference. Pants and
miniskirts were options for women alongside dresses and makeup,
and it was the choice itself that allowed women to be liberated. But
styles of self-presentation that were explicitly political, intention-
ally challenging gender differences, seemed to take the principle of
choice too far. Popular culture portrayals of women’s fashions in the
1970s thus allowed women to be “liberated” in their fashion choices,
as long as they remained “feminine” in doing so.

A F R I CA N A M E R I CA N ST Y L E S A N D
AFROS IN POPULAR CULTURE
One of the most popular films of 1971 was Shaft, today considered
the epitome of blaxploitation films of the 1970s. The film begins
with the main character, Shaft, walking around the streets (and in
the streets) of New York City with a long leather jacket, natural hair,
and a mustache. He is the quintessential black “cool cat,” introduced
by a narrator in the film’s opening minutes as follows: “Who’s the
black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks?” Two years
later, Pam Grier graced the silver screen in Coffy, another blaxploi-
tation film, with a large Afro. Both films focused on the sex appeal
and street smarts of their characters, with little hint of black politics
in their overall message. The presence of natural hairstyles in these
widely viewed films demonstrates how, by the 1970s, the Afro had
moved into the mainstream.

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 By the end of the 1960s, the Afro became widely recognized as a
style among African Americans. The New York Amsterdam News wrote
in 1969, “Afro wearers are multiplying in areas where once there was
criticism and scorn toward the natural hair wearer. . . . Middle- class
women, doctor’s wives, professional entertainers, white- collar work-
ers, school teachers, social workers, and students alike are wearing
the Afro.”56 A number of male African American celebrities, such
as Bill Cosby, Sammy Davis Jr., and James Brown, adopted natural
hairstyles, as did African American actresses, models, and some can-
didates and winners of the Miss Black America Pageant.57 As Susan-
nah Walker concludes, “By the late 1960s and early 1970s . . . the Afro
was as fashionable as it was political.”58
The “fashionability” of the Afro was promoted by the black beauty
industry, which had traditionally focused on hair-straightening prod-
ucts and techniques in their marketing to African Americans. By the
late 1960s, capitalizing on the idea of “Black Is Beautiful,” the black
beauty industry began to promote natural hairstyles and products
that they claimed would enhance these styles. As Walker explains,
“Advertisements for Afro products frequently invoked black pride,
particularly when the company producing them was owned by Afri-
can Americans.”59 “Afro-Sheen, Soul Brother, Mr. Natural, and Duke”
were just some of the names of new lines of beauty products that
“reflect[ed] the wave of black pride,” according to the Los Angeles
Times.60 “The natural offers a new-found freedom to Black women,”
wrote an article in the first issue of Essence, a magazine targeted to
African American women. “But please, since your natural does so
much for you, why not do something for it,” the article pleaded, as
it advertised shampoos and sprays that women allegedly needed to
maintain their Afro styles.6¹ Thus, the beauty industry helped to
commodify the Afro, which “transform[ed] the style from political
statement to fashion commodity” in helping the fashion to move
into the mainstream.6²
In response to the growing popularity of the Afro and the beauty
industry that developed to support it, some African Americans
became critical of the style. Some black activists decried the Afro

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 “fad” as “part of a cultural invasion from imperialist and capitalist
America.”6³ One black newspaper criticized, “Your black pride dol-
lars go to white manufacturers. All of your Afro picks, cakecutters,
sprays and other embellishments that allow your hair to be wooly,
are manufactured by white companies.”64 The Black Panthers also
began to denounce the commercialization of Afro styles, which they
claimed fed capitalistic profit and ignored the true political and eco-
nomic problems facing African Americans. “Not one stitch of false
hair or manufacturer thread will contribute anything to Black free-
dom,” wrote one party member in 1968.65 Other Black Power intel-
lectuals agreed that the media’s attention to black self-presentation
styles might obscure true political progress. “These are the symbols of
the new awareness,” wrote Black Power philosopher Charles V. Ham-
ilton, “[but] they do not necessarily relate to the substance of what
the struggle is all about.”66
Indeed, as Afros began appearing as a common black style in mov-
ies and television shows, scriptwriters attempted to strip them of their
political meanings. In the first episode of All in the Family, Lionel,
Mike’s African American friend, sports an Afro hairstyle and is por-
trayed as a quick-witted and insightful young man who gently prods
Archie into implicitly recognizing some of his racist views. Lionel’s
attitude, however, is portrayed as one of ironic reconciliation, rather
than one of political militancy or activism. “What’s new on campus
with you angry white social Democrats?” Lionel asks Mike, implying
that Mike’s radical activism is not shared with Lionel. Then, Lionel
explains how Archie bugs him by making him explain his choice
of career—“I want to be a ‘lectrical engineer!” Lionel practices, in
a derogatory imitation of a Southern black accent. Mike expresses
outrage that Lionel would say this to Archie. “Give the people what
they want, man,” Lionel explains. “How else am I going to become an
electrical engineer?” In this exchange, Lionel implies that accommo-
dation and acceptance of politically incorrect attitudes, rather than
militancy or angry provocation, is the correct tactic for achieving
his goals. Despite Lionel’s Afro hairstyle, he does not preach explicit
Black Power politics or hint at militant goals.

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 Another popular show of the 1970s, Good Times, also portrayed
these nonmilitant versions of the Afro. The show, one of the most
popular of the 1970s, centered on a poor African American family
and their economic and familial struggles. In an early episode that
was originally intended as the show’s pilot, one of the main char-
acters, Thelma (played by Bern Nadette Stanis), opens the episode
with a large Afro hairstyle, cooking breakfast for her siblings as her
mother recovers from surgery. Two jokes about the Black Power
movement are made in the first five minutes of the episode. When
Thelma serves her little brother his food, he cries, “Black is Beauti-
ful, Thelma, but not when it’s oatmeal!” A few minutes later, their
mother comes into the living room while the children are bicker-
ing, and the children freeze. Their mother quips, “It’s comforting to
know there is still some respect for Black Power around here.” While
other aspects of the episode suggest poking fun at militancy—jokes
about Michael, the little brother, receiving mail from the naacp and
other political organizations and playing “cops and militants” with
friends—the sitcom nature of the show defies any serious political
discussion. Thelma’s Afro is portrayed as a fashion statement, not as
an emblem of political militancy.
Along with these attempts to depoliticize the Afro, new styles
began to emerge among African Americans that were promoted by
the black beauty industry. Braids and cornrows, borrowed from West
African female hairstyles, started to gain popularity in the 1970s.67
While both men and women adopted the styles, long braids and
cornrows allowed African American women to express their racial
pride while also wearing their hair “longer,” and thus closer to tra-
ditional feminine styles.68 New forms of “relaxed” hair also became
publicized. “Relaxed and partially relaxed hair is coming back,” the
Los Angeles Times claimed in 1972. One black stylist explained, “Ninety
percent of my black clients here are having their hair at least partially
relaxed. They may wear it short and curly—but far from frizzy. Many
never wore the Afro and always had their hair completely relaxed
in order to follow any style they like.”69 “Partially relaxed” hair was
thus portrayed as a compromise between the strictness (and per-

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 haps militance) of the Afro and a relaxed style that was marketed
as more versatile.
Others in the media were more explicit in describing how some
African Americans abandoned their Afro styles in the 1970s. “Critics
of the ‘Afro’ say that too much time is required to maintain it, that
it is too impractical or just plain boring,” wrote one black newspa-
per.70 Voices in the media claimed that straight hair gave women
more “variety” in choosing among hairstyles. The Afro “wasn’t ver-
satile enough,” explained a Chicago stylist. “It limited the female as
to what she could do with her hair.” Processed hairstyles, in contrast,
allowed African American women to adopt “soft and fluid” hairstyles
that appeared to be more traditionally feminine.7¹ For women who
maintained natural hairstyles, stylists and African American fashion
magazines advocated ways for women to “soften” their overall look.
“Society says you’re feminine if you have long pretty hair,” explained
one Afro-wearing woman in 1975. “But when you cut it all off, you
have to give them femininity in other ways like wearing lipstick,
eyelashes, or eye shadow.”7² Magazines targeted to African Ameri-
can women promoted makeup, scarves, and hair- care products for
women to use and wear along with their natural hair, aimed at mak-
ing them appear more traditionally feminine.7³ African American
magazines also promoted “milder relaxers” to give short hairstyles “a
more curly,” and therefore more feminine, effect.74
The rhetoric used by the African American media also promoted
choice in hairstyles as the true path to racial independence. “The cool
breezes of this season and the next bring with them a special mes-
sage for the black woman,” wrote one African American journalist.
“Freedom—it says, do your natural thing, chocolate woman. Wear
your hair in the style that’s natural for you. Wear it long, short, or
somewhere in between; wear it straight, curled, bushed or waved.”75
Just as white “fashion feminists” could choose their own style, African
Americans could now choose to wear their hair in different ways—
straightened, braided, or natural—and it was the choice itself that
offered them racial freedom and pride, rather than the particular style
of the Afro. “Not every woman who has gone natural is a Black Power

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 advocate and not every Negro who has ignored the trend is without
racial loyalty,” wrote one article in the Los Angeles Times. “To many it
is just doing your own thing.”76 One African American woman stated
that she had always “been proud of my heritage, and I don’t think
I have to change the way I wear my hair or my clothes now that it
has become the chief thing to do.” Another woman wrote, “Black
women should be able to feel pride in themselves without having
to wear African robes. . . . If you feel proud inside, it doesn’t matter
what you wear.”77 An advertisement for a hair-relaxing cream agreed
with these sentiments that it was the choice in styles that mattered
the most: “You can change your hair style as easily as you change
your mind—with Ultra Sheen Permanent Crème Relaxer. After all,
isn’t that what doing your own thing is all about?”78
By the 1970s, then, natural hairstyles had become popularized as
fashions at the same time that they began to lose their political mean-
ing. The Black Power movement also faded in the 1970s, as groups like
the Black Panthers disintegrated and black activism shifted from civil
rights activism to municipal and state electoral politics.79 As Ayana
Byrd and Lori Tharps conclude, “The Afro had become a hairstyle,
plain and simple. It was no longer a matter of what your ‘fro stood
for but of how high your ‘fro stood.”80 While natural hairstyles never
totally lost their political roots, Afros became just one choice in a
range of black hairstyles that all signaled the “black pride” of their
wearers—a pride that was increasingly divorced from the political
activism of the previous decade.

UNISEX FASHIONS, GLITTER ROCK, AND

“ CO M P L E M E N TA R I T Y ” IN FASHION
As peacock fashions for men and pantsuits for women became more
popular, unisex styles exploded in the early 1970s. Designers contin-
ued to show unisex fashion lines in their shows, and clothing stores
nationwide increasingly marketed the styles. These fashions were not
reserved solely for upscale fashion boutiques and designer clothes;
stores that catered to middle- class Americans, like Montgomery Ward
and Sears, also began to advertise unisex outfits.8¹ Even in stores that

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 did not officially sell unisex fashions, women and men shopped with
an eye toward unisex style. At upscale Saks Fifth Avenue in New York,
women raided the new “men’s boutique” section to find belts, hats,
and shoulder bags for their own closets. “Some of the most popu-
lar items” in the new boutique, the New York Times explained, “are
unisex, and although a good many of them weren’t intended to be
that way, they are being worn by both men and women.”8² A similar
phenomenon ensued at Yves Saint Laurent’s specialty store for men.
“It’s not unisex, but that won’t stop women from picking up shirts,
sweaters, and even blazers for themselves. . . . The shirts are colorful,
the sweaters patterned, and the blazers—well, everybody knows Saint
Laurent put them on the fashion map for women.”8³
Some designers in the 1970s attempted to take unisex styles to
new, more daring levels. One designer introduced “black and white–
striped unisex bikinis” for both males and females.84 Other designers
advertised high heels, dresses, jewelry, and makeup for men.85 In some
crowds, particularly among teenagers and young adults, these daring
styles caught on. The Chicago Tribune described one young fashion
scene in 1971: “The young men are seen dancing . . . in old dresses, jew-
elry, and high-heeled boots, with their long hair and beards, all worn
with blue jeans. Their girl friends are often in pants and shirts. . . .
Other young men are wearing rhinestone-studded shirts, necklaces,
and assorted bracelets. It’s sometimes hard to tell who’s the male in
this new fashion mixup,” the article concluded.86
Popular musicians who participated in the “glam rock” or “glitter
rock” culture of the 1970s mirrored these fashions. Borrowing styles
and techniques from the counterculture and from the shock tactics
of many popular 1960s musicians, self-presentation became a means
by which some musical acts in the 1970s attempted to gain publicity
for themselves with “outrageous” dress styles and behavior. Rocker
Alice Cooper and his band (of the same name) were some of the
first popular musicians to adopt such tactics. “With chest-length hair,
makeup, and dazzling lamé, silk and velvet, the Coopers’ opening
tactic is to confuse their audiences as to their sexual identity,” wrote
the Los Angeles Times in 1970. “Alice himself often appears in flashy

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 miniskirts over his skin-tight trousers.”87 Even Cooper’s name, the
press often noted, paid homage to gender nonconformity—“Yes,
Alice is a boy,” the Washington Post snarked.88 Iggy Pop was another
musician who “flounced onstage in a weird winter wonderland flash,
his face, torso and chest covered with specks of icicle glitter, his hair
thickly dusted with silver.”89 British rocker David Bowie became the
“central figure” of the glitter rock scene, whose “sequined, gleam-
ing suits, spiky hair, and high-heeled boots” (and open bisexuality)
made him the “showbiz standard-bearer for the gay and drag scene
in London,” although his music and shows attracted mainstream
audiences as well.90
These singers and groups, along with many others—the Mothers
of Invention, Parliament Funkadelic, Rod Stewart, the New York
Dolls, and Queen, just to name a few—brought gender “theatrical-
ity” to a large audience.9¹ And indeed, these rockers attracted sig-
nificant mainstream attention, fame, and fans. But even with their
broad attraction, the press portrayed these rock stars as outside of
the mainstream. The Chicago Tribune in 1971 wrote that Alice Cooper
and Iggy Pop were part of the “outer fringes” and “kinky spectacles”
of current pop music, implying that they were outsiders in popular
rock; the New York Times used the label “freak rock.”9² “Transvestite
rock” was another term used to describe these stars, calling attention
to their gender-bending tactics and their potential “deviance” within
the mainstream rock scene.9³ Some radio stations even refused to
play the music of the New York Dolls due to their extreme gender-
bending styles.94
Female rock musicians, such as Joan Jett, Suzi Quatro, and Patti
Smith, also transgressed boundaries of femininity by participating in
the male- dominated rock scene of the 1970s. Joan Jett’s leather jack-
ets and Patti Smith’s aggressive style, which one journalist described
as similar to Mick Jagger’s in that it “tend[ed] to erase gender,” epito-
mized a “toughness” among some female rock stars that defied the ste-
reotypical femininity and sensuality of female singers.95 Few of these
female musicians, however, attracted as much attention for challeng-
ing gender boundaries in their self-presentation as did male glitter

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 rockers. One reason was that the dress of many female rockers—jeans,
button- down shirts, and blazers—had become acceptable attire for
women by the 1970s, as opposed to the miniskirts and makeup that
some male rockers donned. For example, Patti Smith appeared on the
cover of her 1975 hit album Horses “posed a la Frank Sinatra, stand-
ing with a suit jacket thrown over her shoulder”; but the New York
Times interpreted this image as a sign of Smith’s “parody” of stardom
and her Sinatra-level potential, rather than as a sign of her potential
masculinity or gender deviance.96
Female rockers themselves, however, were also wary of pushing
gender boundaries in their self-presentation. Jett described the para-
dox of the female rocker in 1978: “It’s kind of phony to act feminine
on stage, because rock is like sports—it’s aggressive and rough,” she
explained. “But just because rockers have traditionally been men
doesn’t mean women rockers have to act butch.”97 Female rockers
in the 1970s might not have “dressed up sweetly,” as Jett put it, but
they were careful not to pose too much of a challenge to gender
norms in their self-presentation. The Los Angeles Times described the
Runaways, Jett’s all-female rock band, as “young, female [and] fun”;
a photograph of all five band members with long hair and makeup
implicitly illustrated some of the ways that women maintained their
femininity within the male- dominated rock scene.98 Even Smith,
despite her aggressive musical style, was featured in the Washington
Post wearing a feminine scarf and mentioning her dream to be on
the cover of Vogue, a testament to her interest in feminine fashion.99
The challenges posed by glitter rockers and their portrayals in
popular culture suggested that the American media, and perhaps
the broader public as well, were not quite ready to abandon gender
distinctions in personal presentation. As unisex styles increased in
popularity in the 1970s, the media began to describe the styles in ways
that emphasized, not sameness, but difference in men’s and women’s
fashions. As one designer put it, these clothes were “not Unisex,” but
rather were “complementing” styles for men and women: “They are
His and Her garments and they are different.”¹00 One Italian designer
explained his unisex line of evening wear as follows: “In the evening

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 [a man] can wear a brilliantly coloured jacket, shirt, and ascot all in
the same detailed paisley print with black trousers, while [a woman]
wears a more fitted version of the jacket, matching paisley weskit and
trousers and a black silk ascot hat. Often her outfit resembles his only
in that it is made out of the same fabric.”¹0¹ Oscar de la Renta’s line
of unisex taffeta blazers also exhibited different styles for men and
women. “The plain taffeta takes on a masculine look for the men and
a soft feminine look when worn by women,” one journalist explained.
“The cut is changed slightly to accommodate the full-chested female
figure.”¹0² When Ralph Lauren introduced a line of polo shirts for
women in 1972, he used the same fabrics as his men’s shirts, but pro-
vided a more “feminine” fit: “The neck is smaller, the sleeve slim-
mer, armhole cut high, the body trimmer.” As a result, “There’s no
hint of unisex or a matched his-and-hers look” in the shirts, claimed
the Chicago Tribune.¹0³ Lauren’s “expanded” line featured “soft” and
“trim” tailored shirts, jackets, and pants for women (but “no ties
for women, no toughness”), with a result that was “decidedly femi-
nine.”¹04 When gray flannel pantsuits became popular among both
men and women in 1973, women could “soften any mannish look”
of the outfits “with fluffy angora sweaters, flower-printed silk shirts,
silver fox jackets . . . or argyle sweaters,” differentiating their outfits
from similar suits for men.¹05
This shift toward complementary rather than identical fashions
made sense in the context of continued fears about unisex styles in the
1970s. Particularly, as anti-era activists claimed that the amendment
would force the government to outlaw sex-segregated bathrooms,
“unisex” became the buzzword for a society in which differences
between men and women could no longer be acknowledged. “Com-
bined men’s and women’s toilets to go along with unisex clothes and
dormitories,” was how one journalist described the fears that some
Americans harbored toward the amendment.¹06 It was perhaps not a
coincidence that by the mid-1970s, as anti-era activism began to sty-
mie the amendment’s ratification, some media commentators began
to reject unisex clothing styles as a lasting trend. In 1973 the Los Ange-
les Times reported that in the fashion world, “the bosom is back, the

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 waistline has been recovered and the nation’s clothes-makers have
learned what the margarine commercial knew all along: You can’t
fool Mother Nature.”¹07 “Clothes are once again showing their gen-
der,” the New York Times concurred in 1974. “Unisex is happily fad-
ing away and all over the city men who like to look at women are
pleased.”¹08 By 1974 newspapers claimed that “the unisex look” was
“out” and that “unisex fabric[s] [are] all that’s left of last year’s idea
of the happy couple dressing like identical twins.”¹09
Unisex fashions, of course, never totally went out of style; through-
out the 1970s and beyond, women continued to appropriate men’s
suits, pants, ties, and clothing for their own fashions, and men have
never returned to the white shirt, dark suit hegemony of the 1950s.
But the media portrayed unisex styles as maintaining gender distinc-
tions between men and women. Unisex clothes for men and women
were “complementary,” but never identical; the biological sex of the
clothing wearers remained obvious to the outside world, media com-
mentators in the 1970s claimed. Maintaining gender distinctions in
unisex fashions despite their growing popularity provided a means
for fashion designers and the media to implicitly counter any remain-
ing fears that they were perpetuating the rise of a “unisex society.”

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CHANGING

SELF- PRESENTATION IN THE 1970S
By the 1970s, American styles of fashion had changed, perhaps per-
manently. Fueled by the growing commercialization of “hippie” styles
and the aging baby-boom generation, long hairstyles and facial hair
for men; miniskirts, jeans, and pantsuits for women; and natural
hairstyles for African Americans became ubiquitous as options for
self-fashioning. This chapter has shown how the media and popular
culture helped to garner new acceptance for these styles. In doing
so, the media helped to erase the political messages that had defined
these styles in the 1960s. Styles came to be portrayed as fashionable,
fun, and modern; popular culture largely rejected the messages of
militancy, rebelliousness, feminism, or gender deviance that these
styles signified in the previous decade. These styles were portrayed

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 as “choices” among an array of fashion and grooming styles, rather
than as political statements that fueled the conflicts of the previous
decade. And, as the radical political activism of the previous decade
subsided, more Americans were willing to believe these new mes-
sages about the styles.
But not all. Conflicts over self-presentation never completely dis-
appeared in the 1970s; throughout the decade and even today, con-
flicts can be seen in various pockets of American society over men’s
long hair, natural hairstyles for African Americans, and short skirts
and pants on women. As the last chapter will show, workplace con-
flicts over styles of self-presentation illustrate how the questions of
the 1960s never totally dissipated, even as popular culture widely
promoted broad acceptance of these styles. Styles were still contro-
versial when they seemed to push the boundaries of gender, sexual,
or cultural norms too far.

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 6 “ OURS SHOULD NOT BE
AN EFFORT TO ACHIEVE
A UNI S E X SO CI E T Y ”
Legal Regulations of Personal
Presentation in the Workplace

On March 5, 1975, the Ohio Supreme Court

ruled that the city of Columbus’s 127-year- old ordinance against
cross- dressing in public was unconstitutional. The defendant in the
case, John Terry Rogers, was a preoperative transsexual who had
been arrested in 1973 while wearing a “curly wig, a flowered blouse,
a pullover sweater, a bra, and bellbottoms” in public. Rogers’s attor-
ney argued that the ordinance had been used to subject gay men in
drag, transvestites, and transsexuals to police harassment. The court,
however, did not overturn the law based on the burgeoning move-
ment for gay, lesbian, and transsexual rights. Instead, it based the deci-
sion on a different historical development: the ubiquitous wearing
of “unisex clothing” by men and women across the country. Judge
O’Neill, writing unanimously for the court, noted, “Modes of dress
for both men and women are historically subject to changes in fash-

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 ion. At the present time, clothing is sold for both sexes which is so
similar in appearance that ‘a person of ordinary intelligence’ might
not be able to identify it as male or female dress. In addition, it is not
uncommon today for individuals to purposely, but innocently, wear
apparel which is intended for wear by those of the opposite sex.” As
a result of these “contemporary dress habits,” the law was deemed
“void for vagueness,” in that it was no longer specific enough to be
enforced without violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee
of due process of law.¹
While Rogers’s conviction was overturned in part based on chang-
ing styles of fashion and dress, another pants-wearing individual was
not so lucky. In 1974, the year after Rogers was arrested for “cross-
dressing” while wearing women’s pants, Data La Von Lanigan was
fired from her job as a secretary when she wore a pantsuit to work, a
violation of her company’s dress code. Lanigan sued, claiming that
she was the victim of employment discrimination due to her sex, a
violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Men were allowed
to wear pants in the office, so why not women? Despite the ubiquity
of pantsuits as office attire for women by the 1970s, the U.S. District
Court ruled against her. Title VII, the court explained, protected
against discrimination based on “immutable” characteristics like sex
or race; the ability to wear pants or skirts was not an “immutable”
trait and thus did not bar her from employment. The policy, the
court ruled, was not “sexist” nor “chauvinistic,” as Lanigan claimed,
but rather was part of a legitimate right of employers to set standards
of attire for their employees, even if those standards were different
for males and females. “Employment decisions . . . based on either
dress codes or policies regarding hair length,” the court explained,
“are more closely related to the company’s choice of how to run its
business rather than to its obligation to provide equal employment
opportunities.”²
The judges in these two court cases reached seemingly contradic-
tory conclusions: one recognized changing styles of dress for men
and women as reason to strike down a law, while the other upheld
gendered regulations of dress in the workplace. The disagreement

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 in these cases mirrored the conflicts that remained in American
society in the 1970s over changing styles of personal presentation.
Court cases such as these provide an interesting window into these
conflicts. Some judges acknowledged that new styles—long hair on
men, pants on women, and unisex clothing— outmoded old regula-
tions on gendered dress for individuals in public spaces and in the
private workforce. Other judges were hesitant to rule against these
regulations, recognizing the fears of both private employers and of
some Americans more broadly if men and women crossed certain
boundaries in their personal presentation. Legal decisions thus pro-
vide examples of how self-presentation was viewed by jurists when
these styles became the subjects of scrutiny in courts of law.
This chapter will focus on court cases from the 1970s that chal-
lenged workplace regulations of the hair and dress styles of employ-
ees. These cases have inspired numerous articles by legal theorists
trying to understand why the courts have continued to uphold gen-
dered dress codes in workplaces even into the twenty-first century.³
Many of these legal scholars have noted the historical circumstances
surrounding the precedent-setting cases in these areas, particularly
the battles of men with long hair in many employment discrimina-
tion cases. But no scholarship thus far has considered the broader
historical context of changing mores of gendered self-presentation
at the time that these cases were being filed in American courts.
These cases thus provide a culmination of the previous chapters of
this book, illustrating what happened in courts of law when social
movement activists and individuals wanting freedom of choice in
their self-presentation confronted American cultural anxieties over
changing styles of dress.
While the decisions in these court cases often revolved around
questions of law and legal precedent—what qualified as discrimi-
nation based on sex or race, or as an unconstitutional restriction of
freedom of expression—judges and lawyers were not immune to the
changes in society and culture around them. On the one hand, many
judges recognized that modes of self-presentation had changed; on
the other hand, some judicial decisions reflected societal anxieties

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 over gender, sexual, and racial norms that remained strong in the
1970s—particularly, fears about the Equal Rights Amendment and
antidiscrimination laws that included gays and lesbians, as discussed
in chapters 3 and 4. Some jurists believed that striking down work-
place regulations would exacerbate homosexuality, gender deviance,
and the “unisex society” that anti-era activists decried. These fears,
for some jurists, trumped arguments about the right to freedom of
expression or the need to combat outdated stereotypes based on old
modes of gendered dress. These court decisions, therefore, reflected
continued ambivalence about changing dress and hairstyles into the
1970s despite their ubiquitous spread in popular culture.

CHANGING STYLES OF PERSONAL

PRESENTATION IN THE WORKPLACE
“The old order—in personal appearance— changeth,” wrote an arti-
cle in the Christian Science Monitor in 1969. But in the workplace,
these changes were not so easily accepted: “In these ‘mod’ times,
overabundance of hirsuteness is apparently a deterrent to getting
hired.” According to a survey of 150 companies, “nearly 80 percent . . .
regarded a male applicant’s beard as a reason not to hire him. . . . And
about three-fifths of the firms thought a miniskirt to be a negative
factor with a woman applicant. . . . Ninety percent of the firms still
objected to long hair and ‘mod’ attire on males. But sideburns can be
long, and ‘Afro’ hair styles are okay for black applicants.”4 This arti-
cle demonstrated the challenges and contradictions of new modes
of self-presentation in the workplace at the start of the 1970s. In the
1960s, employers expressed vehement objections to many new or
politicized styles: numerous workplaces placed restrictions on hair
and beard lengths that cost some men their jobs.5 Although many
of these styles became increasingly ubiquitous in the 1970s, employ-
ers did not necessarily let up their criticism. Opinion polls in the
early 1970s found that a significant majority of employers still dis-
approved of long hair on men, and many individuals continued to
be fired from their jobs (or were refused employment) because of
their long hair, mustaches, and beards.6 Similar controversies ensued

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 over Afro hairstyles or women who attempted to wear pantsuits or
miniskirts to work against their employer’s regulations.7 One Cali-
fornia judge made headlines when he chastised a female attorney
for wearing a pantsuit in his courtroom in 1971, threatening to find
her in contempt of court and send her to jail for five days if she did
not “change into more appropriate clothing.”8
However, many of these workplaces began to change their policies
as new styles of self-presentation became more difficult to restrict.
Some businesses worried that grooming codes would make them
lose desirable employees; with increased societal attention to racial
and sex discrimination in the workplace, moreover, some employ-
ers were fearful of claims that restrictions on long hair, Afros, or
other politicized styles would constitute a violation of their work-
ers’ civil rights.9 One employer decided to allow an African Ameri-
can employee to wear a dashiki to work because “it might project to
minority applicants that we’re an open-minded, tolerant organization,”
he explained.¹0 In Hartford, Connecticut, controversy ensued when
an African American police officer was fired for not cutting his Afro
hairstyle. Black and white police officers banded together to protest
the hair-length regulations, which they argued were a violation of
their civil liberties.¹¹ Eventually, the department relented, reinstating
the officer and revising their grooming regulations to “reflect current
community standards.”¹² In similar fashion, other workplaces across
the country changed or eliminated their grooming regulations to
appease increasing numbers of male employees with long hair.¹³ By
1975, the New York Times claimed, “long hair and beards are in [at the
workplace] as long as they’re clean and neatly trimmed.”¹4
Similar changes helped women’s styles to find new acceptance in
the workplace. Some employers began to accept short skirts as accept-
able office attire, with some even vocally approving miniskirts over
the “dowdy” fashion of longer skirts.¹5 Pantsuits had gained “limited”
acceptance in some workplaces in the late 1960s, but by the 1970s the
number of women wearing pants to work and challenging workplace
dress codes that forbade pants became too numerous for employ-
ers to ignore.¹6 Nurses at a Los Angeles hospital “petitioned for and

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 were granted permission to wear pantsuits to work,” successfully con-
vincing the hospital to allow them to order a pantsuit uniform that
matched the previous one with a skirt.¹7 Business firms, insurance
companies, law firms, restaurants, and banks across the country also
gave the nod to women’s pantsuits as acceptable office attire.¹8 Even
some airlines began to allow female stewardesses, who had tradition-
ally been promoted as the epitome of feminine sensuality, to wear
pantsuits as part of their uniforms.¹9 By late 1970, a survey of Atlanta
businesses found that 83 percent of local businesses allowed women
to wear pants to work.²0
But not all workplaces or social institutions accepted pantsuits as
attire for women. Some employers continued to implement dress
codes that prohibited women from wearing pants, arguing that such
styles were not “business-like” or “suitable” for women.²¹ In 1972 the
New York Times reported on the controversy at the offices of Revlon,
which forbade its female employees from wearing pantsuits. While
no woman had officially protested or quit over the policy, many
female employees objected to the rule as “‘awful,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘ridiculous,’
‘archaic’ and ‘old hat,’” and the article noted that no other major cos-
metics company had such restrictions on their female employees’
attire. Regardless, the company stood by its dress code, with one cor-
porate vice president explaining, “We felt pants are just simply not
good business attire.”²²
Employers such as Revlon might have belonged to a minority of
employers who “held the line” against changing fashion styles in the
workplace. And as the New York Times article suggests, those employ-
ers who did not relent were sometimes threatened with quitting
employees, public ridicule, or lawsuits. When United Airlines fired a
black flight attendant due to her natural hairstyle, black organizations
threatened to boycott the company and filed a complaint with the
Illinois Fair Employment Commission. The airline relented, rehired
her and paid her back wages.²³ Similarly, in 1975, women participated
in a national boycott of sexist workplace practices, organized by the
National Organization for Women (now); a number of the women
protested workplace regulations that forbade pantsuits.²4 Over time,

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 long hair, beards, and pantsuits became increasingly accepted in many
workplaces, rendering such protest tactics unnecessary.
But those individuals whose employers maintained restrictions on
modes of self-presentation found themselves with a choice to make.
Some men decided to cut their hair and shave their mustaches and
beards rather than face an employment drought; particularly in the
downturned economy of the 1970s, some prospective employees felt
they could not ignore the adage that “long hair means no job offer.”²5
Other men and women filed lawsuits against employers who restricted
their styles.²6 It is impossible to know precisely how many lawsuits
arose in the 1970s; some cases were settled, some were dismissed, and
many cases heard in smaller state or municipal courts never garnered
opinions that made it to the national public record. But a number
of cases from the 1970s can be found among the opinions issued in
state and federal courts of appeals as well as in U.S. district courts.
And when lawsuits over workplace dress codes did make it to court,
jurists grappled with the extent to which employers could regulate
the personal appearance of their employees while on the job.

EMPLOYMENT REGULATION OF HAIR

AND CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOM
OF PERSONAL APPEARANCE
Of the court cases that are readily available in the public record, nearly
all were brought to court by white male plaintiffs who had been
denied employment over their long hair or facial hair. In deciding
these cases, courts often looked to precedents set by high school hair-
grooming cases, even though these cases usually dealt with minors
rather than adults.²7 In turn, the courts applied the precedents set
by these cases to other groups, such as women and African Ameri-
cans. The courts, thus, needed to consider the fundamental ques-
tion: Did employers have a legal right to restrict the grooming and
attire of their employees, or were these restrictions discriminatory
and unconstitutional?
One early case grappled with the multiple potential answers to this
question. In Ramsey v. Hopkins (1970), a federal district court in Ala-

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 bama reprimanded a school district for firing an African American
male teacher for refusing to shave his mustache. The court rejected
any evidence of racial discrimination, however, noting that “the per-
son who took Ramsey’s position and [a] teacher who has been per-
mitted to continue wearing a mustache are both of the same race as
Ramsey’s.” Instead, the opinion argued that the rule against mustaches
was “an arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious regulation,” which was
unevenly enforced at the school. There was no clear reason, the court
stated, that wearing a mustache needed to be restricted: “There must
be some showing of justification for the rule related to the legitimate
purposes of the institution,” the court concluded. The implication,
however, was that a “justifiable” rule with a “legitimate purpose”
could be considered legal. But what reasons for restricting mustaches
might be considered legitimate? The court in the Ramsey case gave
a few suggestions: evidence that mustaches caused “disruption or
disturbance,” “health or sanitation problems” associated with facial
hair, or “difficulties of any sort with mustaches.”²8 Whether this last,
broad category included cultural norms against alternative groom-
ing styles, the court did not say. The Ramsey case thus left open the
possibility of upholding grooming restrictions if the reasons were
considered to be “legitimate” by the court.
To defend the right of employees to choose their grooming styles,
some jurists gravitated to the right to freedom of expression implied
in the Constitution. These arguments were only applicable to pub-
lic employers, such as state agencies or public schools, which were
required to follow constitutional limitations on employee regula-
tion. In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and Cohen v. California (1971),
the Supreme Court had accepted some forms of outward personal
appearance as protected freedom of speech, upholding the right of
high school students to wear black armbands in protest of the Viet-
nam War and allowing a man to wear a shirt with slurs against the
draft printed on the front.²9 But not every hair or dress style repre-
sented a particular philosophy or idea, and the courts were divided as
to whether or not hair and dress styles in themselves deserved consti-
tutional protection as part of one’s “fundamental right” to freedom

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 of expression. Even if personal appearance was deemed to be a fun-
damental right, however, the question remained whether hair and
dress styles were constitutionally protected in the workplace. If an
employee voluntarily chose to work for a state employer, could that
employer set regulations that violated the employee’s constitutional
rights, or did the concept of freedom of expression limit the rules a
state employer could set?
Some courts ruled that the hair and dress styles of employees did
deserve constitutional protection as a fundamental freedom and
could not be subject to a state employer’s rules. In 1971 the Supreme
Court of New York ruled that the fire department could not restrict
a volunteer firefighter from wearing long hair. Finding that personal
appearance was a constitutionally protected fundamental liberty,
absent any evidence that the hair-length regulations were necessary
to protect the safety of volunteer firefighters, the fire department
could not restrict the plaintiff’s hairstyle. “Neither [the plaintiff’s]
oath of office nor the nature of his work subjects him to indiscrimi-
nate regulation of his hair style,” the court explained.³0 In 1973 the
U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit ruled similarly that a
police department’s regulations on hair length were unconstitu-
tional, finding that only a “legitimate state interest” could justify a
restriction on individual liberty. “A policeman does not . . . waive his
right to be free from arbitrary and unjustifiable infringement of his
personal liberty when he elects to join the force,” the court wrote.³¹
In 1975 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that a
teacher at a public community college could not be fired for his hair
length, quoting an earlier decision in concluding that “the adult’s
constitutional right to wear his hair as he chooses supersedes the
State’s right to intrude.”³² Significantly, many of these decisions still
noted the possibility that “legitimate” rationales for restricting hair-
styles might exist; in these cases, however, the courts found that the
constitutional freedoms inherent in the right to choose one’s style
outweighed the arguments presented by employers.
Some courts recognized the political implications of particular
grooming styles as additional reason to uphold their constitution-

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 ality as an aspect of freedom of expression. In 1969 a federal district
court in Florida ruled that the firing of an African American school-
teacher with a goatee was unconstitutional since “the wearing of a
beard by a teacher has been held to be a constitutionally protected
liberty.” Moreover, in this particular case the court deemed that the
beard “is worn as ‘an appropriate expression of his heritage, culture,
and racial pride as a black man’” and was thus a form of protected
expression under the First Amendment. The school showed “an intol-
erance of ethnic diversity and racial pride” in their regulation of the
teacher’s goatee, which the court found to be unreasonable: “No evi-
dence has been presented . . . which would indicate that the wearing
of a goatee by [the teacher] might reasonably be expected to cause
a disruption . . . or to encourage inappropriate dress by its students.”
This ruling thus implied that political or cultural messages reflected
in one’s hair or grooming were constitutionally protected forms of
speech. It acknowledged, however, that “reasonable regulations” of
grooming styles would be accepted if evidence was presented that
there was a legitimate reason for their restriction.³³
Other courts, however, took the opposite view, ruling that there
was no fundamental right to choose one’s personal appearance, par-
ticularly when it came to voluntary employment. In Schneider v. Ohio
Youth Commission (1972), an Ohio Court of Appeals ruled that it was
not unconstitutional for an employee to be fired from his job in the
juvenile justice system for refusing to abide by hair-length regulations.
“Unless there is specifically shown to be such an expression of phi-
losophy, idealism, or point of view through a style of one’s hair,” the
court explained, hair length was not protected as freedom of speech
under the First Amendment. Moreover, the court wrote, “the Con-
stitution does not establish an absolute right to a free expression of
ideas. Such constitutional right may be infringed by the state through
law or administrative rule or regulation if there are compelling rea-
sons to do so.” In the case of an individual acting as a “role model” to
delinquent youths, the court argued, the agency’s request that male
employees keep their hair short as an “example” to their clients was
“reasonable.” Finally, any potential constitutional right to wear one’s

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 hair as one wished was superseded by the right of state employers to
regulate employee conduct: “One may have a constitutional right to
wear his hair as he wishes free of state control, but there is no corre-
sponding right to work anyplace that he might desire while adorned
in a hirsute style of his choice.”³4 Similar reasoning was invoked in
other court decisions.³5
Some of these rulings were hotly contested, producing strong dis-
senting opinions from judges who disagreed with the majority. In
Akridge v. Barres (1974), the Supreme Court of New Jersey narrowly
upheld a police department’s hair regulations in a four-to-two deci-
sion. In two separate dissenting opinions, the disagreeing judges
decried the majority’s conclusion. Justice Pashman, a well-known
advocate of free speech and the “rights of the underdog,” wrote in his
dissent, “It is a gross injustice to determine the merit and character
of a person by his appearance alone.”³6 Hair-length regulation, in his
opinion, was an abuse of power on the part of employers who simply
did not like long hair and had nothing to do with a long-haired indi-
vidual’s performance on the job: “Our differences in life-style are as
distinct as our differences in religion and politics, and . . . we should be
able to hold and express such without undue interference.” The other
dissenting opinion, by Justice Clifford, was even more forceful in his
critique of the majority decision as he quotes the “uncompromising
libertarian” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in linking an
individual’s choice of hairstyle to the fundamental freedoms upon
which the nation was based: “I suppose that a nation bent on turn-
ing out robots might insist that every male have a crew cut and every
female wear pigtails. But the ideas of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,’ expressed in the Declaration of Independence, later found
specific definition in the Constitution itself, including of course free-
dom of expression and a wide zone of privacy. I had supposed those
guarantees permitted idiosyncrasies to flourish, especially when they
concern the image of one’s personality and his philosophy towards
government and his fellow men.”³7 Echoing the arguments of high
school students and hippies that restrictions on long hair were anti-
thetical to the concept of American freedom, this judge argued that

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 the regulation of long hair was a denial of the very liberties that the
Constitution was meant to protect.
The virulence of these dissenting opinions illustrates how judges,
attempting to make sense of workplace restrictions on hair, hotly
contested whether the right to freedom of expression included one’s
personal appearance, and what limits, if any, could be placed on this
right. On the one hand, debates among judges might have reflected a
broader jurisprudential debate on the wisdom of granting constitu-
tional protection to rights that were not expressly stated in the Con-
stitution; backlash against recent Supreme Court decisions upholding
an implied right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe
v. Wade (1973) perhaps provided some incentive for some judges to
limit the reach of their interpretations of constitutional rights.³8 On
the other hand, the dissents in Akridge v. Barres suggested that broader
public debates on men’s long hair also informed these judicial dis-
agreements. Was the right to wear one’s hair as one wished part of
a valid interest in combating conformity and asserting freedom of
choice in one’s personal appearance, or did cultural norms of respect-
ability allow state employers to limit the styles of their employees?
Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelley v. Johnson (1976)
ended the debate on whether the right to choose one’s personal
appearance was subject to state employer regulation, although the
opinion failed to decide whether or not the Constitution protected
such a right. In upholding a police department’s regulation of the
hair lengths of its officers, the majority opinion sidestepped the issue
of whether or not personal appearance was a “liberty interest” to be
protected by the Constitution. Instead, the court ruled that the “desire
to make police officers readily recognizable to the members of the
public, or a desire for the esprit de corps which such similarity is felt
to inculcate within the police force itself,” were “rational” reasons to
allow the police department to regulate the appearance of its officers,
regardless of whether or not personal appearance was a constitution-
ally protected right. The Supreme Court thus tacitly adopted the ear-
lier reasoning of the Ramsey decision in ruling that public employers
could regulate grooming styles of employees for “legitimate” reasons.

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 But Justice Powell’s concurring opinion and Justice Marshall’s dis-
sent (which was joined by Justice Brennan) argued that the choice
of one’s personal appearance was a constitutionally protected liberty.
While Justice Powell agreed that the need to regulate the appearance
of police officers outweighed the personal right in this case, such a
regulation “would be an impermissible intrusion upon liberty in a
different context.” Justice Marshall took this reasoning further, arguing
that restrictions on personal appearance were “fundamentally incon-
sistent with the values of privacy, self-identity, autonomy, and personal
integrity that I have always assumed the Constitution was designed
to protect.” Indeed, Marshall pointed to restrictions on hair lengths
enforced by the governments of Czechoslovakia, Libya, and South
Korea as evidence of the risks involved in allowing the government
the latitude to regulate their citizens’ personal appearance. Simply
belonging to the police force was not reason enough to allow the
state to regulate an individual’s hair length, Marshall concluded: “A
policeman does not surrender his right in his own personal appear-
ance simply by joining the police force.”³9
Thus, even as the Supreme Court upheld regulations on the hair
length of police officers, at least three of the Justices—Marshall and
Brennan in dissent, and Powell in a concurring opinion—argued that
an individual’s personal appearance was protected as a fundamental
right under the Constitution. The majority opinion, however, set a
precedent that state employers could regulate the personal appear-
ance of employees for legitimate reasons. In some ways, the court’s
decision was politically predictable—Justices Rehnquist, Burger, Stew-
art, Blackmun, and Powell often joined in conservative decisions in
the 1970s, while Marshall and Brennan more often joined the liberal
wing.40 But judicial ideologies alone cannot fully explain the split;
Justices Blackmun, Burger, and Stewart, for example, had previously
recognized an expanded constitutional right to privacy by upholding
abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973). The decision in Kelley v. John-
son thus hinged on more than differing ideologies of constitutional
interpretation. The case also posed the question of whether or not
personal appearance in itself was a freedom that deserved respect in

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 American society, or whether cultural norms and employer prefer-
ences could trump the liberty of employees.
Lower courts used Kelley v. Johnson to rule against employee claims
that the grooming codes of their state employers violated their consti-
tutional freedoms. In Jacobs v. Kunes (1976), the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit followed the precedent set by the Supreme
Court. The court ruled that the hair length regulations of a county
assessor’s office were not “arbitrary,” but rather were based in the ratio-
nale that customers were repelled by long hairstyles on men. Even if
“the hair length requirements . . . impinged upon . . . constitutional
rights,” state employers could regulate personal styles so long as their
reasons for doing so were not “irrational.”4¹ Significantly, the decision
in Jacobs v. Kunes ruled that cultural norms of men’s long hair could
be deemed “rational” reasons to restrict personal styles, in acknowl-
edging that public opinions against the styles trumped any poten-
tial violation of the personal liberty of employees. Since customers
had expressed their dislike of long hair, the county assessor’s office
could “rationally” regulate it, the court concluded. Even if choosing
one’s personal appearance was a fundamental liberty protected by
the Constitution, then, cultural views on the desirability of certain
styles could legitimately limit the reach of constitutional protection
for state employees.
Cultural views on men’s long hair were changing, however, and
many employers, both public and private, changed their regulations
in the 1970s to allow men with long hair (and women in pants, and
others sporting new hair and dress styles) to work without restric-
tion. But these cases, and the conflicting opinions of judges, reflected
continued debates in American society about the limits that could
be placed on personal presentation. Did individuals have the right to
choose their own styles of personal appearance, or did the discretion
of individual employers, and their wish for adherence to prior cul-
tural norms, trump any growing acceptance of these styles in popu-
lar culture? While legal precedent might have ultimately concluded
that employer regulation was allowed, the broader issue of freedom of
expression that underpinned these cases remained open for discussion.

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 TITLE VII AND THE LIMITS OF SEX
DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT
Constitutional arguments for freedom of expression, however, could
only be used in cases against state employers; private employers were
not subject to the same constitutional limits on employee regulation.
But fortunately for terminated employees, a law that prohibited dis-
crimination by private employers was at their disposal. In the 1970s,
male plaintiffs began to bring lawsuits under Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act, claiming that terminating them from employment
due to their long hair was discrimination based on their sex. Title
VII was a relatively new law, and its passage held a strange history;
originally meant to prevent discrimination in the hiring and employ-
ment of African Americans, the final wording of the law outlawed
employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or
national origin.” Sex was not originally part of the bill, but women’s
rights activists pushed for this addition to the bill’s language, and
some Southern congressmen decided to add their backing as well,
perhaps hoping that this amendment would erode support for the
bill. When the amended law passed, “sex” suddenly became a category
of unlawful discrimination in employment.4² While now made the
enforcement of Title VII a priority for its women’s rights agenda, in
cases of workplace dress and grooming codes, many more men used
Title VII to claim sex discrimination than did women. The law, how-
ever, was written broadly enough to apply to both males and females,
and male plaintiffs claimed that employers could not restrict their
hair lengths if they allowed their female employees to wear long hair.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc), the
governmental agency in charge of enforcing Title VII, initially took a
clear stance on the issue of workplace grooming codes. In a number
of eeoc decisions in the early 1970s, the agency found that employers
who forbade women to wear pants, refused to hire male applicants
with shoulder-length hair, enforced a “no bushy hair” policy targeted
at Afro hairstyles, and forbade the long skirts required for individu-
als of the Muslim faith, all violated Title VII by discriminating in

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 employment based on sex, race, or religion.4³ The eeoc thus agreed
with the claims of longhaired male employees, as well as with Afri-
can Americans who were fired from jobs for their Afro hairstyles,
that such regulations constituted discrimination in the workplace.
In the case of longhaired men, the eeoc argued that policies that
restricted the hair length of men but not women were unlawfully
discriminatory: “To maintain one employment standard for females
and another for males discriminates because of sex within the mean-
ing of . . . Title VII,” the eeoc concluded.44 Even when grooming
policies were equally enforced, such as the rule against “bushy hair,”
the commission ruled that the regulation failed to take into account
“racially different physiological and cultural characteristics,” and thus
“adversely affect[ed] Negroes because they have a texture of hair dif-
ferent from Caucasians.”45 Policies that disproportionately affected
one race or one sex were thus also deemed by the eeoc to be dis-
criminatory under Title VII.
With the backing of these eeoc rulings that the Supreme Court had
said were “entitled to great deference” by courts when hearing Title
VII cases, male plaintiffs began to bring lawsuits against employer
regulations of men’s long hair.46 Initially, courts hearing their cases
tended to agree with the eeoc. In Roberts v. General Mills (1971), a
federal judge in Ohio ruled that the discharge of a male employee
with long hair was discriminatory. General Mills’ policy required
that men’s hair fit underneath the hats issued as part of their uni-
form; women, however, had the option of wearing hairnets to cover
their long hair. Denying Roberts the opportunity to wear a hairnet,
when such an opportunity was provided to women, constituted sex
discrimination because it “deprived [him] of his employment oppor-
tunities” based on the “stereotype” that women, and not men, had
long hair.47 If women could not be discriminated against based on
gender stereotypes, the opinion concluded, neither could men. Sig-
nificantly, the judge assigned to the case, Don John Young, had been
appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson and was an advocate of the rights
of minorities in the workplace.48
The next year, in Donohue v. Shoe Corporation of America (1972), a

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 federal judge in California similarly ruled that the firing of a long-
haired male employee constituted sex discrimination. Judge Harry
Pregerson cited the eeoc decisions in concluding that “the applica-
tion of a hiring or retention standard to one sex but not to the other
violates the Act.” But Pregerson, a well-known liberal judge who had
also been appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson, also decried the stereo-
types that informed these grooming regulations, which he argued
violated the very essence of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: “In our soci-
ety we too often form opinions of people on the basis of skin color,
religion, national origin, style of dress, hair length, and other super-
ficial features. That tendency to stereotype people is at the root of
some of the social ills that afflict the country, and in adopting the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress intended to attack these stereo-
typed characterizations so that people would be judged by their
intrinsic worth.”49 Echoing the arguments of some hippie activists
that individuals should be judged by their character rather than by
their appearance, Pregerson argued that discrimination based on hair
length was similar to discrimination based on stereotypes of differ-
ent races, nationalities, or religions that Title VII meant to prohibit.
Individual employees should be judged on their merit, he suggested,
not upon whether they had long hair.
Other courts followed these or similar lines of reasoning to rule in
favor of male plaintiffs with long hair. The Supreme Court of New
York in 1972 ruled that a restaurant’s refusal to hire men with long
hair was discriminatory after being presented with evidentiary pho-
tographs of “female employees engaged in work at the [restaurant],
all of whom [had] hair styles extending well below the shoulder
line.” The opinion concluded that an employer who “hires women
with long hair but refuses to hire men with long hair” was clearly
engaged in a form of sex discrimination. The opinion also noted that
the ubiquitous nature of “uni-sex” hair and dress trends “belie[d]” the
restaurant’s assertion that long hairstyles on men would be “detri-
mental” to the image of their business.50
In a similar case, a federal judge in California ruled in Aros v.
McDonnell Douglas Corporation (1972) that differential hair policies for

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 male and female employees constituted sex discrimination because
they “reflect[ed] a stereotyped attitude toward one of the sexes”—
namely, the stereotype that men with long hair were “hippies” or
“troublemakers.” The entire point of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the
decision argued, was to prevent employers from hiring or retaining
employees based on these stereotypes, forcing them instead to eval-
uate employees on their individual merits. “The message of the Act
is clear,” wrote Judge Ferguson, another Johnson appointee known
for his liberal views on individual rights.5¹ “Every person is to be
treated as an individual, with respect and dignity. . . . Any stereotyped
image of males with longer hair as ‘troublemakers’ unjustifiably pun-
ishes a large class of prospective, otherwise qualified and competent
employees.” Finally, Ferguson noted that “under the fashion norms
of today it is quite permissible for men to wear their hair in longer
styles than a few years ago. Longer male hair styles are now widely
accepted and little burden is placed upon the average employer by
prohibiting him from discriminating between the sexes on the basis
of hair length.”5² Employers claiming that long hairstyles on male
employees were “bad for business” were simply ignoring the vast
popularity and growing societal acceptance of these styles, making
the discriminatory nature of such regulations even more apparent.
Despite these first court and eeoc decisions arguing that differ-
ential hair-length regulations for men and women qualified as sex
discrimination, subsequent decisions began to rule against these com-
plaints. One factor in this shift was the appointment of new federal
judges by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, many of whom were apt to
take more conservative views in their interpretations of the law and
less willing to extend the reach of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Rulings
in these cases, however, did not always split neatly along liberal/con-
servative lines. Perhaps more pressingly, growing societal concerns
about feminism and homosexuality—particularly by 1973, as anti-
era activists warned that same-sex marriages, gender-neutral bath-
rooms, and a “unisex society” would be legally enforced under the
amendment—were reflected in this new wave of decisions on hair
length and Title VII. In many cases, these rulings reflected a concern

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 that all differential treatment of employees based on sex could be
deemed discrimination under Title VII, even distinctions that were
widely held to be common sense.
A federal judge in Washington dc was the first to rule against
a longhaired male plaintiff in December 1972. In Boyce v. Safeway
Stores, Judge Gesell, a “staunch liberal” who had been appointed by
Johnson, ruled that having “separate written grooming standards”
for male and female food clerks was not discriminatory so long as
both sexes had a set of rules to follow.5³ Safeway hired both men
and women for food clerk positions, the judge noted; in his opin-
ion, “mild grooming rules [were] not shown to discriminate on the
basis of sex any more than a condition of employment that requires
males and females to use separate toilet facilities.” An employer, he
argued, had a right “to have its personnel meet grooming standards
which in its judgment will appeal to the largest number of its cus-
tomers.” Customer preferences, therefore, made restrictions on men’s
long hair a “bona fide occupational qualification” that was exempt
from prosecution under Title VII, according to the opinion. Finally,
Judge Gesell argued that Title VII must be interpreted reasonably by
the courts: “The laws outlawing sex discrimination are important. . . .
They must be realistically interpreted, or they will be ignored or dis-
placed. Ours should not be an effort to achieve a unisex society or
an effort to eliminate all standards for modes of dress and groom-
ing set out for employees who want to serve the public.”54 Focusing
on the implications of a “unisex society” in which no differentiations
between the sexes could be acknowledged by employers—perhaps
even eliminating separate bathrooms for men and women— Gesell
concluded that some “rational” differentiations in grooming stan-
dards for men and women had to be allowed. Gesell never criticized
long hair itself; rather, he concluded that a grooming policy could
differentiate between men and women to avoid the “unisex” impli-
cations of outlawing such a policy.
While other courts would affirm Gesell’s opinion, his legal rea-
soning was shaky; in ruling that differential grooming standards for
men and women were a bona fide occupational qualification, Judge

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 Gesell “ignored the rationale of earlier cases in which customer appeal
was not accepted as a ground upon which to justify an employment
requirement.”55 White customers, for example, might have “preferred”
white employees over African Americans, but allowing this customer
preference to stand as a “bona fide occupational qualification” would
contradict the entire purpose of Title VII to restrict individual biases
in employment decisions. Subsequent decisions therefore sought dif-
ferent rationales for upholding differential grooming requirements.
The appellate court decision in Fagan v. National Cash Register Com-
pany (1973) demonstrates the “judicial gymnastics” that some courts
used to justify employer hair-length regulations under Title VII.56
In ruling against a longhaired plaintiff who had been fired from his
job at the National Cash Register Company, the court (in a two-to-
one decision pitting two conservative judges against a liberal) argued
that the “Congressional purpose” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was “to
establish that persons of like qualifications are to be given employ-
ment opportunities irrespective of their sex. Certainly on our record
there is no evidence of discrimination against women” by the com-
pany, the majority decision noted, since the company had hired both
women and men as employees in the past.57
But what about the plaintiff’s claim that it was discriminatory
to regulate the hair lengths of men but not of women? While the
majority opinion did not explicitly use the bona fide occupational
qualification exception to justify the policy, it did note that “reason-
able regulations prescribing good grooming standards are not at all
uncommon in the business world,” and that “taking account of basic
differences in male and female physiques and common differences in
customary dress of male and female employees” was standard prac-
tice in business dress codes. Fagan’s claim, therefore, was “not . . . a
challenge to the right of the employer to require Fagan to wear his
hair in a shorter style but [an] urging that in order for the company
legally to do so, it must require women to conform to the groom-
ing style applicable to males.” A non-gender- differentiated grooming
policy, however, would fail to take into account legitimate differences
between males and females. In a footnote, the opinion noted previ-

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 ous court cases that upheld employer regulations of male beards and
female pregnancies because, the opinion exclaimed, “some men grow
beards and some women become pregnant!” Men and women, this
footnote implied, were different in some ways, and employers still
needed to be able to take into account legitimate differences between
the sexes in their regulations of employees: the “basic differences in
male and female physiques” and the “customary dress of male and
female employees,” the opinion explained. Gender differentiation,
the opinion implied, was part and parcel of “good grooming stan-
dards . . . in the business world,” and thus needed to be “reasonably”
allowed to employers.58
While other courts would use this concept of “employer rights” to
uphold gender- differentiated grooming codes, other decisions latched
on to a rationale that the Fagan decision only briefly explained: the
idea that Title VII protected “immutable characteristics” rather than
aspects of racial or sex identity that were deemed voluntary. Accord-
ing to this reasoning, an individual could not change his or her bio-
logical race or sex, but hair length was subject to individual choice;
hair, therefore, was not an “immutable . . . classification” and there-
fore was not subject to protection under Title VII. In Dodge v. Giant
Food Company (1973), the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington dc, in
a unanimous three-judge decision that included two Nixon appoin-
tees, expanded on the brief mention of immutable characteristics in
Fagan to provide a rationale for their ruling.59 “Since hair length is
not an immutable characteristic but one which is easily altered,” the
court explained, “the sexual distinction embodied in the hair-length
regulations does not significantly affect employment opportunities
and thus does not violate the statute.” A longhaired man, therefore,
was not denied employment because of his sex, but rather because
of his refusal to cut his hair. In Dodge, the court also differentiated
between hair length and marital status (since earlier decisions had
ruled that a sex- differentiated policy based on marital status was a
violation of Title VII) by arguing that “marriage has a much more
fundamental importance to and effect upon an individual’s life.”
Marital status was thus implied to be a more fundamental right than

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 hair length, and therefore was deserving of protection under Title
VII, even though one’s hairstyle was not.60
Subsequent court decisions borrowed this immutable character-
istics reasoning to rule against longhaired plaintiffs. In Bujel v. Bor-
man Food Stores (1974), a Nixon-appointed federal judge in Michigan
ruled that the “regulations of employers based on personal, mutable
characteristics of men, used by the employer to choose one or more
men over other men in the various aspects of employment, do not
discriminate against men on the basis of sex.” In other words, men
could still be hired, so long as they did not have long hair.6¹ In Baker
v. California Land Title Company (1974), an appellate court three-judge
panel consisting of two Nixon appointees and one Johnson nomi-
nee ruled similarly: “Since race, national origin, and color represent
immutable characteristics, logic dictates that sex is used in the same
sense rather than to indicate personal modes of dress or cosmetic
effects.” Title VII was therefore not meant to protect “hair styles or
modes of dress over which the job applicant has complete control,”
but rather to protect against discrimination due to “characteristics
which the applicant, otherwise qualified, [has] no power to alter.”6²
While these opinions placed their emphasis on the legal reasoning
that “immutable characteristics” were the sole protected categories
under Title VII, lurking in the language of these decisions were con-
tinued fears about the implications of outlawing employers’ gender-
differentiated dress codes. In Dodge, the court compared “hair-length
regulations to the requirement that men and women use separate
toilet facilities or that men not wear dresses. Admittedly these are
extreme examples, but they are important here because they are logi-
cally indistinguishable from hair-length regulations.” Sex discrimi-
nation based on a woman’s marital status might have legitimately
violated Title VII, but discrimination based on a man’s hair length
seemed to take Title VII too far, the Dodge court argued. “The issue
in these cases is one of degree. Few would disagree that an employ-
er’s blanket exclusion of women from certain positions constitutes
‘discrimination’ within the meaning of Title VII. At the same time,
few would argue that separate toilet facilities for men and women

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 constitute Title VII ‘discrimination.’ The line must be drawn some-
where between these two extremes.”6³ Hair-length regulation, even if
the rules were different for men and women, seemed to this court to
be a “reasonable” requirement of employment, just as separate toilets
for men and women were also reasonable. In Baker, the court was
blunt: “A private employer may require male employees to adhere
to different modes of dress and grooming than those required of
female employees,” the ruling concluded.64
These judicial disagreements over whether or not male hair-length
regulations constituted sex discrimination came to a head in the Fifth
Circuit case Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Company. First heard by
a three-judge panel in 1973, the decision was handed down just one
day before the Fagan decision and was the first U.S. Court of Appeals
decision to consider whether hair-length regulations for male employ-
ees violated Title VII. In a two-to- one split, the majority overturned
the district court and followed the reasoning in Roberts, Donohue, and
Aros in ruling for the plaintiff: “We find that a grooming code requir-
ing different hair lengths for male and female job applicants . . . treats
applicants differently because of a sex stereotype: only males are pro-
hibited from wearing their hair long.” Since Title VII outlawed the use
of sex stereotypes in employment, hair-length regulations for men but
not for women were found to be unacceptable. In a forceful dissent-
ing opinion, however, Judge John Milton Bryan Simpson (a Johnson
appointee) argued that the majority opinion defied “common sense”:

If this interpretation of the Act is expanded to its logical extent,

employers would be powerless to prevent extremes in dress and
behavior totally unacceptable according to prevailing standards
and customs recognized by society. For example, if it be man-
dated that men must be allowed to wear shoulder length hair . . .
because the employer allows women to wear hair that length, then
it must logically follow that men . . . could not be prevented by
the employer from wearing dresses to work if the employer per-
mitted women to wear dresses. . . . Continuing the logical devel-
opment of plaintiff’s proposition, it would not be at all illogical

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 to include lipstick, eye shadow, earrings, and other items of typi-
cal female attire among the items which an employer would be
powerless to restrict to female attire and bedeckment.

The logical conclusion of these hair-grooming cases, in other words,

would be men in dresses and lipstick, and women with “shave[d]
head[s] as clean as a billiard ball,” Judge Simpson argued. Employer
dress and grooming codes, therefore, had to be able to take into
consideration “biological and cultural differences” between male
and female self-presentation. The problem, once again, was not long
hair per se, but the implications of forcing employers to write their
grooming codes without regard to gender.65
With a split decision and a powerful dissent, the Willingham rul-
ing was not a ringing endorsement of the discriminatory nature of
male hair-length regulations. Indeed, briefs of amicus curiae filed
after the initial decision was published, urging the entire Fifth Circuit
to rehear the case en banc, echoed the concerns of Judge Simpson
that this ruling would set a precedent that “virtually every differ-
ence between the sexes is unlawful discrimination.” Grooming stan-
dards that were “sexually uniform,” requiring both male and female
employees to wear crew cuts, dresses, or lipstick, would need to be
upheld by the courts, one brief argued.66 Another brief warned, “The
effect of this holding will be far reaching. All employer grooming
and dress codes which do not enforce identical standards for males
and females will have to fall before it. . . . Although ‘unisex’ has not
appeared to be part of Title VII in the past, this opinion will certainly
become known as the opinion which required ‘unisex.’”67
Perhaps as a result of these briefs, and perhaps also due to the
contradicting decisions issued in Boyce, Fagan, and Dodge, the Fifth
Circuit agreed to rehear the case en banc, with all fifteen judges par-
ticipating. This time, the court ruled eleven to four in favor of the
company’s hair-length regulations, borrowing the “immutable char-
acteristics” reasoning used in previous cases as well as the concept
of the employer’s right to regulate its employees to guard its public
image. The full court was particularly persuaded by the company’s

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 insistence that a music festival held nearby the city where the com-
pany was located had “soured” the public against “counter- culture
types,” and that male employees with long hair would create a par-
ticularly bad business image in their community.68 While the court
acknowledged that refusing to hire longhaired males was a form
of discrimination, the discrimination was “based not upon sex, but
rather upon grooming standards.” Since hair length was neither an
immutable characteristic nor a “fundamental right” like marriage
or parenthood, the regulation did not count as sex discrimination
under Title VII. The opinion admitted that male hair-length rules
were based on a stereotype that men ought to have short hair; how-
ever, the court argued that “the elimination of sex stereotypes” was
not necessarily the purpose of Title VII. The court opined, “Con-
gress in all probability did not intend for its proscription of sexual
discrimination to have significant and sweeping implications.” In
the end, the opinion concluded, “private employers are prohibited
from using different hiring policies for men and women only when
the distinctions used relate to immutable characteristics or legally
protected rights.”69
The decisions in the Willingham hearings cannot be easily explained
by looking at the political ideologies of the judges involved. While
the two judges ruling for the plaintiff on the original three-judge
panel, John Minor Wisdom and Elbert Parr Tuttle, were known for
their decisions upholding civil rights for African Americans in the
South, the dissenting judge, Simpson (who also wrote the major-
ity opinion in the en banc decision), was a Johnson appointee also
known for his pro– civil rights decisions as a district court judge in
Florida.70 Moreover, eight of the judges on the fifteen-judge panel in
the en banc hearing had been appointed by Johnson, and three of the
judges in the majority opinion—Brown, Gewin, and Thornberry—
ruled later that year in Hander v. San Jancinto Junior College that reg-
ulating the hair length of a public employee was a violation of his
constitutional freedoms.7¹ While the Fifth Circuit might have been
more conservative than other U.S. Courts of Appeals based on its
location in the Deep South, the judges involved were not necessar-

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 ily hostile to civil rights nor to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, nor were
they necessarily dismissive of the notion that hair length could be
considered fundamental to an individual’s freedom of expression.
Broader concerns about the implications of deregulating self-
presentation, however, were implicit in the en banc decision. While
the majority opinion did not focus on the gendered connotations of
differential grooming codes, the decision noted that it was “persuaded
by the arguments of Macon Telegraph and its amici supporters,” and
its mention of the “significant and sweeping implications” of strik-
ing down a differential grooming policy suggests that the court had
their arguments about the impending “unisex society” in mind. By
limiting employers’ uses of differential policies for men and women
to instances of protecting “immutable characteristics or legally pro-
tected rights,” the court implicitly argued that employers could treat
male and female employees differently when there was reason to do
so. Implying that men and women did have “real” differences that
needed to be respected, the court rejected interpretations that Title
VII required identical treatment of men and women and instead
argued that it was possible for employers to base their policies on sex
stereotypes if there was a legitimate business reason to do so, assum-
ing that those stereotypes did not violate a fundamental right or
discriminate based on immutable characteristics. While employers
could not discriminate based on parental or marital status, in other
words, they could discriminate on the basis that men ought to look
like men and women ought to look like women.
The second Willingham decision overturned the earlier three-judge-
panel ruling and concurred with all of the other U.S. Court of Appeals
rulings that male hair-length regulations were not a violation of Title
VII. As a result, the en banc decision set a precedent that subsequent
courts would follow in cases claiming sex discrimination based on
differential grooming regulations and dress codes. One month after
the decision was released, a federal court in Missouri ruled against a
longhaired plaintiff in a very brief opinion, citing Willingham and the
other appellate decisions.7² Another federal judge in Missouri, Judge
Regan (a John F. Kennedy nominee), followed the same reasoning

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 of the Willingham decision in an opinion released the next month:
“So far as we are aware, every appellate court which has considered
this question has reached a similar conclusion.”7³ The U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Eighth Circuit cited Willingham, Baker, Dodge, and
Fagan as “the more realistic and reasonable interpretation of [Title
VII]” when ruling against a longhaired male plaintiff.74 By 1976 the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did not even feel the
need to explain its reasoning in ruling against the Title VII claim of
a male longhaired employee. “All four courts of appeals that have
ruled on the question have held that requiring short hair on men and
not on women does not violate Title VII,” the court wrote. “Without
necessarily adopting all of the reasoning of those opinions, we are
content to abide by this unanimous result.”75
The Willingham decision set a precedent that gender- differentiated
dress codes for men and women were legal and was used by subse-
quent courts in considering other cases in which plaintiffs claimed
sex discrimination based on dress and grooming codes. In 1977, for
example, a federal court upheld the firing of a male grocery-store
worker who refused to wear a tie, which was a requirement of the
workplace dress code for men. The court concluded that a workplace
“may promulgate different personal appearance regulations for males
and females,” citing Willingham among other cases.76 In Data La Von
Lanigan’s case, similarly, the court cited “haircut” cases like Willing-
ham in arguing against her claim of sex discrimination for not being
allowed to wear a pantsuit to work. Although Lanigan argued that
“not allowing women to wear pants perpetuates the stereotype that
men are more capable than women of making business decisions,”
and “perpetuates ‘a sexist, chauvinistic attitude in employment,’” the
court dismissed these arguments, stating that the “contention that
the policies perpetuate a stereotype is simply a matter of opinion.”
Instead, the court cited the “immutable characteristics” reasoning in
differentiating between sex discrimination and dress codes. “[The]
Plaintiff does not contend that she is unable to wear clothes other
than pantsuits or that she is in any way physically unable to comply
with the dress code,” the opinion wrote. “In other words, plaintiff’s

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 affection for pantsuits is not an ‘immutable characteristic.’” The court
thus reasoned that the regulation against pantsuits was not a mat-
ter of sex discrimination, but rather was simply part of a “company’s
choice of how to run its business.”77
Willingham also set a precedent in racial discrimination cases that
employers could restrict certain black hairstyles so long as groom-
ing standards were applied equally to employees of all races. African
American plaintiffs had some supportive rulings earlier in the decade,
with some courts recognizing that the prohibition of Afros or “other
natural hairstyles” could be considered a form of racial discrimina-
tion in employment.78 These decisions agreed with eeoc rulings
that restrictions on Afro hairstyles constituted racial discrimination
because they disproportionately affected minority races. However,
after the Willingham decision, courts began to interpret these rulings
more narrowly. When a black male was fired from his position after
growing a mustache, the court argued that his claim was not one
of racial discrimination since the “grooming policy was obviously
applied across the board and no man, white or Black, escaped its
scrutiny. The Court fails to detect the slightest hint of a racially dis-
criminatory application.”79 An earlier eeoc decision had noted that
“goatees and various types of mustaches are more prevalent among
minority group males than Caucasian males,” and that restrictions
against facial hair had a “foreseeable disproportionate impact upon
Negro males because of their race.”80 However, in this case the court
ruled against the African American plaintiff, stating that “neither
facial hair nor hair length is an immutable or protected characteris-
tic of either males or Black males.”8¹ Later, a federal judge in Geor-
gia ruled that it was not racial discrimination to prohibit cornrows
as a hairstyle so as long as the regulations were enforced equally for
all races and sexes. Again citing Willingham as precedent, the court
reasoned that a braided hairstyle was not an “immutable characteris-
tic” that was protected by Title VII and argued that “an even-handed
application of reasonable grooming standards does not constitute
racial discrimination.” The court also claimed that there was “no
proof” that “black people are more likely to wear beads in their hair

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 than white people,” thus denying that the regulation had a “dispro-
portionate impact on black people.”8² Thus, the decision in Willing-
ham allowed legal backing for some restrictions on black hairstyles.
The decision in Willingham has continued to be applied in cases
having nothing to do with men’s long hair. In 2006, for example,
the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in Jespersen v.
Harrah’s Operating Company that it was not a violation of Title VII to
require female bartenders to wear makeup, garnering ire from many
feminist legal scholars who disparaged the court for upholding a
seemingly sexist grooming policy.8³ The Jespersen decision made the
Willingham case, which it cited as precedent, seem illogical and out-
dated; why in the world should it be legal, many wondered, to force
women to wear makeup as a condition of employment? In the his-
torical context of the era, however, the decision in Willingham made
sense. It is no coincidence that courts began to rule against long-
haired male plaintiffs at the same time that anti-era activists were
warning about unisex bathrooms and antigay rights activists were
arguing that antidiscrimination laws would require employers to hire
men in dresses. By upholding gender- differentiated grooming codes
for men and women, these jurists implicitly acknowledged the con-
cerns of political conservatives that the law—whether Title VII or
the era— ought not be used to enforce a “unisex” society, in which
“real” differences between men and women could not be taken into
account by employers or by the public. The fear was not necessarily
long hair itself, but the continued implications of the fights for gen-
der and sexual equality under the law.
Indeed, one judge made these concerns explicit upon dissent-
ing in a rare case that found a differential grooming policy to be an
undue burden on women. In Carroll v. Talman Federal Savings and
Loan Association (1979), the Seventh Circuit found that an employer
policy requiring a company uniform for female, but not male, bank
tellers was a violation of Title VII. In a scathing dissent, Judge Pell,
a Nixon appointee and conservative judge, criticized the ruling as
extremist and out of line with the meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act.84 “With this decision of this court, Big Brother or perhaps in this

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 case, Big Sister has encroached . . . farther than the Congress intended
or authorized into the domain of private enterprise,” he wrote. Differ-
ential grooming policies for men and women were clearly allowed
under Title VII, Judge Pell argued, and in no way prevented women
from being hired or holding a job. Whether or not women liked the
policies was beside the point. Implying that “Big Sister” women’s
liberationists were behind the majority’s decision, the judge issued
a warning that this ruling would lead the law down a path of femi-
nist extremism. “Opponents of the Equal Rights amendment have
argued that its adoption would be followed by extreme applications
bordering on the ridiculous where no meaningful discrimination
exists. The result reached by the majority opinion in the applica-
tion of the statute I can only regard as adding strength to that argu-
ment.”85 In his dissent, Judge Pell made explicit what previous rulings
on dress and grooming codes had only implied: if employers could
not implement sex- differentiated grooming codes, the “unisex soci-
ety” that anti-era activists feared would soon follow.

CULTURAL NORMS OF GENDER AND THE LEGAL

REGULATION OF SELF- PRESENTATION
Legal cases dealing with hairstyles, dress, and grooming codes reflected
many of the conflicts in America regarding changing self-presentation
styles in the 1970s. Disparities among the conclusions of different
courts reflected broader disagreements about the meaning of cultural
changes in self-presentation. Nearly all of the courts acknowledged
the ongoing changes in cultural mores of hairstyles and dress. But
the courts were not always willing to legally sanction these changes.
Certain styles might have been considered acceptable to some, such
as men with long hair; other styles, such as men in dresses, were not.
The legal solution, for the most part, was to leave the decisions to
employers as to whether or not to regulate the personal presentation
of employees, allowing public opinion to sanction the acceptability
of cultural trends rather than the courts.
Judges and lawyers did not make their legal arguments in a vacuum;
these cases demonstrate how jurists are affected by their historical

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 context just as much as court decisions sometimes shape history. As
long hair on men, pants on women, and unisex styles became increas-
ingly ubiquitous, some judges acknowledged the growing cultural
acceptance of these styles by striking down workplace dress codes
and acknowledging that hair and dress styles were fundamental to
individual freedom of expression. Other judges, however, reflected
conservative fears about feminism, gay liberation, and the fate of
gender difference in American society in the face of changing cul-
tural norms of gender. While some changes, like long hair on men
or pants on women, might have gained some cultural acceptance by
the 1970s, other changes, like dresses on men, signified a much more
troubling challenge to gender norms.
The courts, therefore, became a new front for “holding the line”
against changing modes of self-presentation into the 1970s. While
many employers decided on their own to allow their employees to
don the new styles of the era while at work, the courts, for the most
part, refused to force any employer to recognize these styles as valid.
While self-presentation styles had changed by the 1970s, both pop-
ular culture and the law recognized that differences between men
and women still existed, and the courts allowed employers to dif-
ferentiate employee dress codes based on these cultural conceptions
of gender. The precedents set in workplace grooming codes cases
in the 1970s, however, did not arise without conflict, and the differ-
ences in opinions between judges reflected continued debates over
the meanings of new modes of self-presentation in a rapidly chang-
ing American culture.

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 EPILOGUE
The Politics of Style in Retrospect

It is impossible to consider the tumultuous

decade of the 1960s without images of long hair, miniskirts, hip-
pie styles, and Afros appearing in one’s mind. This book has shown
how these styles of self-fashioning were not merely amusing cultural
accoutrements of the 1960s, but rather became central symbols of
the political conflicts of the era. As the 1960s ended, many of these
styles lost their charged political meaning. But debates over various
styles of self-presentation never fully ended, and in some cases arise as
conflicts today. It is still not illegal for employers to restrict the hair
and dress styles of their employees in many cases. Some employers
still balk at longhaired or bearded male employees, women in pant-
suits, and Afro hairstyles; in response, some individuals are willing
to let their employers dictate their dress and hairstyles. Even as the
gay rights movement has made large gains in the area of same-sex
marriage, men in dresses are socially acceptable only in drag per-

187

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 formances or as transgender individuals; certain boundaries of gen-
dered dress still cannot be crossed without dramatic social conflict.
And in 2010, a four-year- old boy was suspended from his preschool
for having long hair.¹ Debates over styles of self-presentation did
not end in the 1960s or 1970s, and continue to shape the world that
these decades made.
An important question to consider is whether the social move-
ments of the 1960s would have been strengthened or weakened if
clothing and hairstyles had not been introduced into their politics.
Certainly, this book has illustrated the ways that these styles some-
times provoked backlash against these movements. Conservatives
such as George Wallace, Phyllis Schlafly, and Anita Bryant focused
explicitly and implicitly on the perceived styles of activists and turned
these styles against them. One might argue that the rise of the New
Right political coalition was aided by the symbolism of these styles,
which conservatives used to persuade their followers of the threats
of these movements to the traditional social norms that they valued.
Self-presentation styles were thus tools of opponents of liberal and
radical social activists just as much as these styles provided tools for
the social movements themselves. On the other hand, styles of self-
fashioning provided an important cultural tool for the social move-
ments of the era, fostering solidarity among activists and encouraging
followers to their cause. Fashion styles might have even popularized
these movements among American youths by exposing them to the
politics of self-presentation. Restrictions on popular styles forced
young Americans to stand up for themselves and consider the nature
of the American creed of freedom and perhaps fostered political activ-
ism among individuals who may not have done so by themselves.
The 1960s era created vast changes in American society: legal pro-
tections for African Americans and women from discrimination in
the workplace; unprecedented growth of the numbers of women in
predominantly male professions; new recognitions of individual sex-
ual autonomy outside of marital or heterosexual relationships; and
new modes of hairstyles and dress that allowed women and men to
express their individuality, free from constraints of norms of gender,

188 EPILOGUE

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 class, race, or “respectability.” The era also inspired the “culture wars”
over race, social order, abortion, gay rights, and “family values” that
American society continues to debate today. This book has illustrated
how various self-presentation styles were often symbols of these cul-
ture wars, as visual markers of different interpretations of a chang-
ing American culture. What some Americans saw as stylistic freedom
or political protest, others saw as signs of the demise of traditional
American society. Self-presentation was, and still remains, a powerful
visual symbol of the changes, continuities, and disagreements over
what it means to be an American.

EPILOGUE 189

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 NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS
sfpl San Francisco Public Library
glbths glbt Historical Society of Northern California
lha Lesbian Herstory Archives Subject Files

INTRODUCT I O N
1. See Rising, Clean for Gene, 67; “Be Clean For Gene,” Newsweek, March 18,
1968, 51–52; “Students Trim for McCarthy,” Hartford Courant, March 20,
1968; “Mr. Clean Makes It in New Hampshire,” New Republic, March 23,
1968, 13; Stavis, We Were the Campaign, 16; Stout, People, 164.
2. On the events of 1968, see Kaiser, 1968 in America; on unisex fashion, see
“Some Fashions Are for Boys and Girls, While Others Are Strictly for the
Ladies,” New York Times, August 15, 1968; on George Wallace, see “Wallace
Hits Professors Who Support Viet Cong,” Hartford Courant, September 15,
1968, and “The Wallace Boom: Third-Party Candidate Shakes Major Par-
ties as He Wins Followers,” Wall Street Journal, September 17 1968; on pro-
tests at the Miss America Pageant, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 92–101, and
Rosen, World Split Open, 160.
3. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 3.

191

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 4. See Wilson, Adorned in Dreams; Parkins, Fashioning the Body Politic; Storm,
Functions of Dress; Kidwell and Steele, Men and Women; Davis, Fashion, Cul-
ture, and Identity; Craik, Face of Fashion; Hollander, Sex and Suits; Rubin-
stein, Dress Codes; Barnard, Fashion as Communication; Entwistle, Fashioned
Body; Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas.
5. See L. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; and Frank, Conquest of Cool.
6. See Spigel, Make Room for tv.
7. See Young, Dissent in America.
8. McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Nicolaides,
My Blue Heaven; Kruse, White Flight; Dan Carter, Politics of Rage; Lassiter,
Silent Majority; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; W. C. Martin, With God on
Our Side; Perlstein, Before the Storm and Nixonland; Dochuk, From Bible
Belt to Sunbelt.
9. See Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

1. “YOU CAN ’T TELL THE GIRLS FROM THE BOYS ”

1. “Norwalk School Suspends 53 in Hairline Dispute,” New York Times, Janu-
ary 30, 1968; “‘Hung by a Hair,’ Students in Norwalk See aclu,” Hartford
Courant, January 31, 1968; “Long Hair Battle Ends at Barber and Court,”
New York Times, February 6, 1968; “Norwalk Youths Lose Hair Fight,” New
York Times, February 8 1968.
2. See Lipsitz, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”; Frank, Conquest of Cool.
3. Bailey, Sex in the Heartland.
4. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, chapter 5; Breines, “The ‘Other’ Fifties,” 399–400.
5. Allan Kozinn, “Critic’s Notebook; They Came, They Sang, They Con-
quered,” New York Times, February 6, 2004.
6. “Beatles Arrive on tv—and Girls Flip Wigs,” Chicago Tribune, February 10,
1964.
7. “Now the Beatles Hold the Stage,” Hartford Courant, February 17, 1964.
8. “The Boy- Girl Hero in Our Adolescent Folkways,” Hartford Courant, Sep-
tember 22, 1964.
9. “Beatle Debate,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1964.
10. Dialogue with Youth, Christian Science Monitor, November 24, 1964.
11. Dialogue with Youth, Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 1964.
12. Dialogue with Youth, Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 1964.
13. “Beatle Hair-Do Draws Cutting Remarks,” Washington Post, January 26,
1964; “Thru the Looking Glass: Whew! Beatle Hair Style Could Sweep the
Nation,” Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1964.
14. “Hi Notes,” Washington Post, January 26, 1964; “Here’s How to Get Away
from It All,” Hartford Courant, January 31, 1964.

192 NOTES TO PAGES xvii–6

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 15. “The British Boys: High-Brows and No-Brows,” New York Times, February
9, 1964.
16. “New British Invaders Outdo Beatles,” Washington Post, May 26, 1964.
17. “Din Overpowers Dave Clark Five,” New York Times, May 30, 1964.
18. See the dvd Monterey Pop.
19. “The New Far- Out Beatles,” Life, June 16, 1967, 100; “The Messengers,” Time,
September 22, 1967.
20. “British ‘His’ and ‘Her’ Hairdos Blur ‘Him-Her’ Line,” New York Times, July
23, 1964; “Shaggy Englishman Story,” New York Times, September 6, 1964.
See also E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 143.
21. “Youth Comments,” Hartford Courant, February 25, 1968.
22. “British ‘His’ and ‘Her’ Hairdos Blur ‘Him-Her’ Line,” New York Times, July
23, 1964.
23. “This Is the Year of the Great Rebellion—in Boys’ Haircuts,” Chicago Tri-
bune, August 31, 1965.
24. “Big Sprout- Out of Male Mop-tops,” Life, July 30, 1965, 58.
25. “Beatle Haircuts Opposed by Two Out of Three,” Hartford Courant, Octo-
ber 6, 1965; “Support on Vietnam Down,” New York Times, May 17, 1965.
26. Art Seidenbaum, “Teen Hair Problem: Long and Short of It,” Los Angeles
Times, April 24, 1966.
27. See, for example, Cory, Homosexual in America, chapter 8.
28. Art Seidenbaum, “Teen Hair Problem: Long and Short of It,” Los Angeles
Times, April 24, 1966.
29. Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage.
30. Art Seidenbaum, “Teen Hair Problem: Long and Short of It,” Los Angeles
Times, April 24, 1966.
31. “Rebellion, Boredom Affect Teen Dress,” Chicago Tribune, December 8,
1966.
32. “The Kids Don’t Get Their Hair Cut,” New York Times, October 22, 1966.
33. “Voice of Youth—Students Tell Views: hair fare,” Chicago Tribune, Octo-
ber 22, 1967.
34. “Beatle Debate,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1964.
35. “This Is the Year of the Great Rebellion—in Boys’ Haircuts,” Chicago Tri-
bune, August 31, 1965.
36. “The Younger Generation Speaks—Two Viewpoints,” Los Angeles Times,
February 12, 1967.
37. Dialogue with Youth, Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 1964.
38. “The Younger Generation Speaks—Two Viewpoints,” Los Angeles Times,
February 12, 1967.
39. “Beatle Fans Let Their Hair Down!” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 1964.

NOTES TO PAGES 7–10 193

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 40. “Observer: Hirsute, and So What?” New York Times, September 17, 1965.
41. “A Male Privilege,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1967.
42. David Kuch, “‘A Sad Tendency Revealed,’” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1966.
43. Ralph J. Gleason, “Perspectives: The Final Paroxysm of Fear,” Rolling Stone,
April 6, 1968, 10.
44. “School Orders Boy: Brush Bangs Back and Go to Classes,” New York
Times, December 17, 1964; “Beatles’ Mop Hair Style Banned at Hinsdale
High,” Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1965; “Long-Hair Boys in for Trim-
ming,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1965.
45. Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 523.
46. Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 528.
47. “School Battles over the Beatle Haircut,” Hartford Courant, September 27,
1965.
48. “Norwalk School Suspends 53 Boys in Hair Squabble,” Hartford Courant,
January 30, 1968; “Schools in the Area Give Notice that Long Hair Is for
Girls Only,” New York Times, September 13, 1965.
49. Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 531.
50. “Norwalk School Suspends 53 in Hairline Dispute,” New York Times, Janu-
ary 30, 1968.
51. “Forum,” The Illustrated Paper (sf), no. 5 (October 1966): 9, reel 1, Under-
ground Press Collection.
52. Harry E. Smith, “Schools, Skirts, Haircuts,” Los Angeles Times, September 15,
1967.
53. “Observer: Hirsute, and So What?” New York Times, September 17, 1965.
54. “Forum,” The Illustrated Paper (sf), no. 5 (October 1966): 9, reel 1, Under-
ground Press Collection.
55. “‘Hung by a Hair,’ Students in Norwalk See aclu,” Hartford Courant, Janu-
ary 31, 1968.
56. Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 540.
57. “Billboard Hippie Is Shy Type,” Hartford Courant, April 17, 1968; “Environ-
ment: Mysterious Billboard,” Time, March 1, 1968.
58. “Post Office Bans Hippie Garb,” Washington Post, February 1, 1968; “Hip-
pie Hair Fashions Facing Ban in Cafes,” San Francisco Examiner, August 4,
1967; “Long-Haired Waiters Ordered to Net It,” Washington Post, August 5,
1967; “Brooklyn Precinct Tells Men to Shun the Hippie Look,” New York
Times, July 15, 1968.
59. Quoted in Morrison and Morrison, From Camelot to Kent State, 203.
60. “The New Student President,” Esquire, no. 68 (September 1967): 93.
61. “Boy, 15, Partly Scalped as Hair Cut by ‘Patriots,’” Los Angeles Times, May 8,
1970.

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 62. “Miniskirts Are Raising Some Retailing Eyebrows,” New York Times,
December 4, 1966.
63. “Miniskirts for the Bride? Girls Aren’t Mod About It,” Los Angeles Times,
November 27, 1966; “Miniskirts Are Selling Out,” Oregonian, October 30,
1965; “Miniskirts Are Raising Some Retailing Eyebrows,” New York Times,
December 4, 1966.
64. “Miniskirts Draw Looks and Plenty of Frowns,” Hartford Courant, June 21,
1967.
65. “Miniskirts Are Raising Some Retailing Eyebrows,” New York Times,
December 4, 1966.
66. Melinkoff, What We Wore, 145–48.
67. Letters to the editor, Washington Post, July 13, 1967.
68. “Miniskirts Are Raising Some Retailing Eyebrows,” New York Times,
December 4, 1966; “Miniskirts Draw Looks and Plenty of Frowns,” Hart-
ford Courant, June 21, 1967.
69. Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, 21, 48.
70. May, Homeward Bound, 98.
71. “Women Got the Vote, Now What?” Hartford Courant, May 5, 1968.
72. “The Swinging English,” Augusta Chronicle, May 9, 1967.
73. “Women Got the Vote, Now What?” Hartford Courant, May 5,1968.
74. “Long Hair Soothing to Male Ego,” Hartford Courant, May 4, 1967.
75. “Miniskirts Are Raising Some Retailing Eyebrows,” New York Times,
December 4, 1966.
76. “‘. . . A Knee Can Be Sexy!’” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1967.
77. “Garment Makers Modifying Mod,” New York Times, April 16, 1967.
78. “Short-Short Skirts,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1966.
79. Letters to the editor, Washington Post, April 22, 1967.
80. “Grandmother Gives Short Shrift to Miniskirt Idea,” Los Angeles Times,
April 20, 1967.
81. “Standards for School- Clothes High So Skirts Better Be Low,” Los Angeles
Times, September 8, 1966.
82. “Pants Glamorized by Designers,” New York Times, February 15, 1964;
“Parisienne Stylists on Pants Kick,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1964; “Cour-
reges Puts Accent on Women-in-Pants Vogue,” Los Angeles Times, August 4,
1964.
83. “Chanel Makes Pants Official,” Hartford Courant, August 9, 1964; “Women
in Pants? Don’t Cuff That Idea, Critics,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1967;
“Bell Bottom Sailor Trousers Hit Paris,” Washington Post, August 1, 1964.
84. “Uniform of the Day: Stylish Women Flock to Army Navy Stores,” Wall
Street Journal, July 7, 1966.

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 85. “Swingin’ Bride Wears White—Bell Bottoms,” Los Angeles Times, June 10,
1966.
86. “The Pants Suit People State Their Case Ubiquitously,” New York Times,
October 8, 1966; “Women Wear the Pants and with Approval, too,” Chi-
cago Tribune, October 29, 1966; “Pants: Success Story Is Big,” New York
Amsterdam News, October 8, 1966; “Summer’s Miniskirt Brigade Leads the
Rush to Pants for Fall,” New York Times, September 6, 1968.
87. “Pattern Aids in Adjusting Fit of Pants,” New York Times, October 15, 1964;
“Pants Suits For the City Stir Debate,” New York Times, August 20, 1964;
“A Dilemma for Restauranteurs: Where Do Slacks End and Pants Start?”
New York Times, August 3, 1966.
88. “Should Women in Pants Be Admitted?” Chicago Tribune, September 7,
1966; “Restauranteurs Cave in Before the Pants Suit Onslaught,” New
York Times, April 25, 1969; Women in Pants? No, Yes and Maybe,” Hartford
Courant, January 27, 1969; “Double-Duty Outfit Solves ‘Pants’ Dilemma,”
Hartford Courant, March 9, 1969; “Women in Pants? Where and When?”
Washington Post, March 30, 1969.
89. “It Helps If Your Husband Isn’t Running For Office,” New York Times,
November 7, 1966.
90. “Chicago Women Divided on Paris Pants Fashion,” Chicago Tribune, Sep-
tember 4, 1964.
91. “Sophisticated Controversy: Pants for City Life,” New York Amsterdam
News, October 31, 1964.
92. “Pants Suits for the City Stir Debate,” New York Times, August 20, 1964.
93. “Fashion Authority Gives Paris Fad ‘Kick in Pants,’” Chicago Daily
Defender, October 13, 1964.
94. “Pants Suits for the City Stir Debate,” New York Times, August 20, 1964.
95. “Pants Suits for the City Stir Debate,” New York Times, August 20, 1964.
96. “Miniskirts to Tux,” Hartford Courant, December 19, 1966.
97. Grace Glueck, “Now His Is Hers,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, Sep-
tember 20, 1964, 45.
98. “Wanted: Identity for Today’s Woman,” Washington Post, April 21, 1968.
99. “Fashion Authority Gives Paris Fad ‘Kick in Pants,’” Chicago Daily
Defender, October 13, 1964.
100. “The New Femininity,” Vogue, January 15, 1967, 88.
101. “Kick Up Your Heels!” Cosmopolitan, January 1965, 38.
102. Amy Vanderbilt, “Let’s Be Counted in the ‘Battle of the Sexes,’” Hartford
Courant, July 3, 1966.
103. Letters, New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 4, 1964, 118.
104. “Couture Collections,” Baltimore Sun, January 3, 1967.

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 105. “Summer’s Miniskirt Brigade Leads the Rush to Pants for Fall,” New York
Times, September 6, 1968.
106. “Restauranteurs Cave in Before the Pants Suit Onslaught,” New York
Times, April 25, 1969.
107. “‘Hung by a Hair,’ Students in Norwalk See aclu,” Hartford Courant, Jan-
uary 31, 1968; see also “Seniors Strike for Miniskirts,” Hartford Courant,
October 22, 1966.
108. “Uniform of the Day: Stylish Women Flock to Army Navy Stores,” Wall
Street Journal, July 7, 1966; “The Army-Navy Surplus Store: High Fashion
on 42d Street,” New York Times, September 2, 1965.
109. Anthony Carthew, “Dear Sir— or Madam?” New York Times, November 7,
1965.
110. “Sassoon and His Scissors,” Life, July 9, 1965, 67–68; “Mia Farrow Sports
Crew- Cut Now,” Washington Post, December 18, 1965; “Cindy Makes
Her Decision: Pigtail Goes,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1966;
“Short and Easy Hair- do Keeps the Stylists Busy,” Los Angeles Times,
June 10, 1967.
111. Bill Cunningham, “Men are starting to walk . . . ,” Chicago Tribune,
November 1, 1965.
112. “Uni-Sex,” Newsweek, February 14, 1966.
113. “The Male Head: Now Even Squares Are Going Long-Haired,” New York
Times, September 22, 1967; “Longer Hair Is Not Necessarily Hippie,” Time,
October 27, 1967; “The Ladder of Success,” Newsweek, July 15, 1968, 61.
114. “Off Again, On Again, It’s the Latest Thing in Men’s Whiskers,” New York
Times, June 8, 1968; “Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow: Artificial Moustaches,
Beards, etc. Are Big Business,” Washington Post, September 4, 1968.
115. “Men Shun Grey for Peacock Hues,” Hartford Courant, April 7, 1968.
116. “Men’s Fashions in the 1960s: The Peacock’s Glory Was Regained,” New
York Times, December 15, 1969; “Male Plumage ’68, Newsweek, November
25, 1968, 70; Frank, Conquest of Cool, 187.
117. “The Nehru,” Washington Post, May 26, 1968.
118. “Penchant for Pendants,” Newsweek, April 1, 1968, 99.
119. “Penchant for Pendants,” Newsweek, April 1, 1968, 99.
120. “Male Plumage ’68,” Newsweek, November 25, 1968, 78.
121. “Men Shun Grey for Peacock Hues,” Hartford Courant, April 7, 1968.
122. “The Age of Unisex,” Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1968.
123. “Male Plumage ’68,” Newsweek, November 25, 1968, 78.
124. David Wilkerson, Hope for Homosexuals: Teen Challenge (Teen Challenge,
1964), 40–41, reel 303, box 1127, folder 18 (Lesbian and Gay Rights: Misc.,
1965), aclu subject files.

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 125. Tom Wolfe, “After WWII, Young Men in California Began to Create Their
Own Statusspheres,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1968.
126. “If a Fashion’s Good Enough for Her, It’s Good Enough for Him,” New
York Times, January 6, 1968.
127. “Uniworld of His and Hers,” Life, June 21, 1968, 86–90.
128. “Retailers of ‘Unisex’ Apparel Wear Uncertain,” New York Times, March 2,
1969.
129. Art Buchwald, “Skirts vs. Trousers,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1966;
“Wait ‘Till Men’s Skirts Catch On,” Hartford Courant, March 12, 1967;
“Who Wears the Pants?” Hartford Courant, December 31, 1967; “Men May
Skirt New Fashions,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1968.
130. Odenwald, Disappearing Sexes, 3, 4, 24, 140.
131. Winick, New People. See also E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 222.
132. See reviews by Isadore Rubin in Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 225; Beigel in Journal of Sex Research, 70–71;
Blood in Social Forces, 359; and Robert W. Stock, New York Times, June
30, 1968.
133. “Books of the Times: It’s Here to Stay—Are We?” New York Times, August
16, 1968.
134. “Vive La Difference,” Hartford Courant, April 14, 1967.
135. “His, Hers, and Theirs,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1969.
136. “The Age of Unisex,” Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1968.
137. “Retailers of ‘Unisex’ Apparel Wear Uncertain,” New York Times, March 2,
1969.
138. “Who’s She? Why, Dear, That’s He,” Washington Post, March 13, 1968.
139. “Retailers of ‘Unisex’ Apparel Wear Uncertain,” New York Times, March 2,
1969.
140. “The Real Change Has Just Begun,” Life, January 9, 1970, 104–5.
141. Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag,” 533.

2 . “ WHAT TO WEAR TO THE REVOLUTION”

1. “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers,” New York Times, May
9, 1970.
2. See Farber, “Silent Majority”; and Appy, Working- Class War.
3. See “Joe Kelly Has Reached His Boiling Point,” New York Times Magazine,
June 28, 1970.
4. J. B. Freeman, “Hardhats.”
5. See Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 197–201.
6. Kelley, “Nap Time.”
7. Kelley, “Nap Time”; Feldstein, “‘I Don’t Trust You Anymore’”

198 NOTES TO PAGES 24–34

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 8. Chappell, Hutchinson, and Ward, “‘Dress modestly, neatly . . . as if you
were going to church!’”; E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 230–40.
9. See Carson, In Struggle, chapter 1.
10. E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 242–43.
11. Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, chapter 5.
12. Cleaver, “As Crinkly As Yours.”
13. Ogbar, Black Power, 12.
14. “The Woman of Islam,” Muhammad Speaks 1 (October–November
1961): 8–9; “Blackwoman Beauty Is A Standard,” Muhammad Speaks 1.2
(December 1961): 16; “Be Satisfied with Self!” Muhammad Speaks 1.3
(January 1962): 21; “Why No Makeup?,” Muhammad Speaks 1.4 (Feb-
ruary 1962): 24; Cleaver, “As Crinkly As Yours, Brother,” Muhammad
Speaks 1.8 (June 1962): 4 (reprint of Eldridge Cleaver’s article from the
Negro History Bulletin); “The Natural Look Is Reborn in Brilliant New
Show,” Muhammad Speaks 2.10 (February 4, 1963): 12–13; “Many Negro
Women Favor New African-Type Hairdos,” Muhammad Speaks 2.15
(April 15, 1963): 17.
15. Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 149–54; “Writer Rips Alleged ‘Bad’ and
‘Good’ Hair Standards,” Muhammad Speaks 2.1 (September 30, 1962): 15.
16. “Should Women Wear Pants or Dresses?,” Muhammad Speaks 1.4 (February
1962): 26.
17. Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 55.
18. Malcolm X, “Not Just an American Problem but a World Problem.”
19. “Mainspring of Black Power: Stokely Carmichael,” London Observer, July
23, 1967. See also “‘Black Power’ Rally Calm,” Los Angeles Sentinel, Decem-
ber 1, 1966; Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 72–73, 84.
20. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 73.
21. “The Natural Look,” Ebony, June 1966, 142–43. See also Craig, Ain’t I a
Beauty Queen?, 93–94.
22. “Natural Hair: New Symbol of Race Pride,” Ebony, December 1967, 139;
“More Men Taking to the ‘Natural’ Hair Style,” Norfolk New Journal and
Guide, December 16, 1967; “‘Nappy State’ Marks New Trend, Says Mag,”
Baltimore Afro-American, December 23, 1967.
23. See Brown, Fighting for us, chapter 3.
24. “Black Nationalists Gain More Attention in Harlem,” New York Times,
July 3, 1966; “Students Observe Afro-American Week,” Los Angeles Sentinel,
March 7, 1968; “Fourth of July Is Marked in Afro Style,” New York Times,
July 7, 1969; Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 197–98.
25. E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 228.
26. “Report from Black America,” Newsweek, June 30, 1969, 17.

NOTES TO PAGES 35–38 199

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 27. “1968—The Year of Impact in Black Pride,” Baltimore Afro-American, Janu-
ary 4, 1969.
28. “New Beauty Aids Created As Natural Hair Style Wearers Multiply,” New
York Amsterdam News, June 15, 1968. See also S. Walker, “Black Is Profitable.”
29. “African Spreads Her Wings in Fashion,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December
7, 1967; “About Dashikis and the New Breed Cat,” New York Times Sunday
Magazine, April 20, 1969, 93.
30. “1968—The Year of Impact in Black Pride,” Baltimore Afro-American, Janu-
ary 4, 1969.
31. On the association of Afro hair with militance and violence, see “Angela
Davis Third on fbi Wanted List,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 19, 1970;
“Cosmetics for Blacks Reflect Growing Pride,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 27, 1970; “Natural Afro Losing Its Frizz as Relaxed Hair Comes Back,”
Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1972.
32. “Citizens Give Views on Survival of Afro as Hairstyle,” New York Amster-
dam News, March 3, 1973.
33. Letter to the editor, Los Angeles Sentinel, November 13, 1969.
34. “By the Way,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 29, 1970. This advertisement also
appeared in Atlanta Daily World, June 30, 1970; Los Angeles Sentinel, July 2, 1970;
New Pittsburgh Courier, July 4, 1970; New York Amsterdam News, July 4, 1970.
35. Letter to the editor, Los Angeles Sentinel, November 13, 1969.
36. “More Men Taking to the ‘Natural’ Hair Style,” Norfolk New Journal and
Guide, December 16, 1967.
37. Letter to the editor, Los Angeles Sentinel, November 13, 1969.
38. “The Natural Look,” Ebony, June 1966, 146; S. Walker, “Black Is Profitable,” 270.
39. “The Afro: Black and Beautiful,” Washington Post, August 18, 1968.
40. Letters to the editor, Ebony, August 1966, 12.
41. See “Black and Beautiful,” Black Panther 1.5 (July 20, 1967): 15, 17, 18; Black
Power! [periodical of the Northern California Chapter of the Black Pan-
ther Party, December 1967] 8, Special Collections, Bancroft Library,
University of California–Berkeley; “Black Woman,” Black Panther 2.6 (Sep-
tember 14, 1968): 6.
42. “Black Woman,” Black Panther 2.6 (September 14, 1968): 6.
43. “Black and Beautiful,” Black Panther 1.5 (July 20, 1967): 15, 17, 18.
44. “Black Panthers Gain Support,” Christian Science Monitor, November
18, 1968; “Black Panthers Outline Stand,” Hartford Courant, April 1, 1969;
“Black Panther Case Courtroom Provides Contrasts,” Hartford Courant,
November 24, 1969; “‘Fuzzy-Haired’ Prof. Angela Davis Receives Anony-
mous Letters,” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 2, 1969; “Wife, Mother, and
Revolutionary,” Washington Post, January 5, 1970.

200 NOTES TO PAGES 38–40

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 45. Letters to the editor, “Back to the Hot Comb,” Ebony, November 1969, 19.
See also Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 125.
46. “Cosmetics for Blacks Reflect Growing Pride,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 27, 1970; “Civil Rights Enjoys Riches,” Chicago Daily Defender, June
17, 1968; “The Afro and Its Meaning to the Black Beautician,” New York
Amsterdam News, July 5, 1969.
47. “Wear It Your Way,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1975.
48. “Report from Black America,” Newsweek, June 30, 1969, 22.
49. See Rossinow, “Revolution Is About Our Lives.”
50. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, chapter 5; Breines, “The ‘Other’ Fifties,” 399–400.
51. Coleman, “Dressing for the Revolution,” 186.
52. “The White Revolution,” New Left Notes 2.25 (June 26, 1967): 20.
53. “The Teenage Scapegoat,” New Left Notes 2.25 (June 26, 1967): 9.
54. Gitlin, Sixties, 163; Rossinow, “Revolution Is About Our Lives,” 104–5.
55. Gitlin, Sixties, 163.
56. R. D. Myers, Toward a History of the New Left, 6; Rossinow, “Revolution Is
About Our Lives”; Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching, 30–31, 131.
57. Quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 47.
58. Quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 152, 168.
59. Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching, 31.
60. “The Teenage Scapegoat,” New Left Notes 2.25 (June 26, 1967): 9.
61. See L. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic.
62. Gitlin, Sixties, 12.
63. The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, 1962,
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html.
64. “What Is a Hippie?,” Haight-Ashbury Maverick 1.4 (1967): 1.
65. “Short Trips,” Haight-Ashbury Maverick 1.4 (1967): 2.
66. “Hippies Voice Philosophy, Love,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1967.
67. J. Rubin, Do It!, 96.
68. “Letter from a Beatnik,” The Illustrated Paper (sf) no. 3 (August 1966), 7, reel
1, Underground Press Collection.
69. Hodgdon, Manhood in the Age of Aquarius, xli, 41; Deloria, “Coun-
tercultural Indians and the New Age,” 66; “Squirrels, Beads, and the
Hippie-Bead Fad Give Navajos a Lift,” New York Times, September 7,
1968.
70. Dana Densmore, “Tarzan Had Long Hair Too,” No More Fun and Games,
no. 4 (April 1970): 70.
71. Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius, 72.
72. Coleman, “Dressing for the Revolution,” 188.
73. “Notes to Tourists,” Haight-Ashbury Maverick 1.6 (1967): 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 41–47 201

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 74. “Hippies Say They Need Protection from Police,” San Francisco Chronicle,
October 11, 1967.
75. J. Rubin, Do It!, 94.
76. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 71.
77. “Atlanta: The Great Hippie Hunt,” Time, October 10, 1969, 22.
78. J. Rubin, Do It!, 93–95.
79. Ann Landers, “Getting Through the Hair,” Washington Post, June 28, 1970.
80. Quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 168.
81. Appy, Working- Class War, chapter 1.
82. The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, 1962,
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html.
83. The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, 1962,
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html.
84. “Hippies Voice Philosophy, Love,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1967.
85. See Takaki, Double Victory.
86. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 105–6. For more on the relationship between
the Vietnam War and images of masculinity, see Dean, Imperial Brother-
hood; and Jeffords, Remasculinization of America.
87. “What Does It Take to Be a Man?” The Seed (Chicago) 1.10 (November
3–24, 1967): 8–9, reel 4, Underground Press Collection.
88. “Hair Piece,” The Seed (Chicago) 1.6 (August 11–25, 1967): 18, reel 4, Under-
ground Press Collection.
89. Letter dated February 1967, reel 19, series 3, section 1 (correspondence
1965–70), sds Papers.
90. Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers. Although some Vietnam War veterans grew
their hair long and adopted hippie styles of dress, Andrew E. Hunt, in The
Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, argues that mem-
bers of Vietnam Veterans Against the War “rejected the countercultural
fashions of the era. When they appeared at debates or interviews or on tv
shows, vvaw representatives usually wore short hair and dressed in suits
and ties” (21). These differences in the secondary sources might suggest
debates within vvaw over dress and self-presentation in their politics.
91. “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” Street Raps: A Com/co
Annotated Anthology (1966–1967), box 1, folder 6, sfpl Hippie Collection.
92. Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching, 31, 113.
93. See “Still Something Special,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chron-
icle, June 2, 1968; “Haighties Move Across Bay,” San Francisco Examiner,
March 10, 1967.
94. Document ny 100–148047, reel 1, section 1, fbi file on sds.
95. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, chapter 4.

202 NOTES TO PAGES 47–52

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 96. Memorandum dated July 9, 1965, reel 1, section 9, and memorandum
dated August 11, 1966, reel 2, section 19, fbi file on sds.
97. Memorandum dated May 11, 1967, reel 2, section 26, fbi file on sds.
98. Memorandum dated May 8, 1967, reel 2, section 26, fbi file on sds.
99. “Students Aid America’s Foes,” Times-Picayune, November 7, 1965; “Leftists
Meet at Clear Lake,” Des Moines Register, August 29, 1966. These news clip-
pings, dated after the memorandums cited in several of the preceding notes,
can be found in the files that the fbi kept on sds activities, suggesting that the
fbi may have supplied these news outlets with information for the articles.
100. Memorandum dated July 9, 1965, reel 1, section 9, fbi file on sds.
101. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 248–49; Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching,
88–90; see also “Paul Booth,” Harvard Crimson, November 2, 1965.
102. Transcript from “Off the Cuff,” aired June 7, 1965, on wbkb tv Channel 7
in Chicago, reel 1, section 6, fbi file on sds.
103. “Anatomy of a Liberal,” New Guard 5.6 (June 1965): 11; “The Beatles Sali-
vation Plot,” New Guard 5.6 (June 1965): 18; “Rebellion at Berkeley,” New
Guard 5.9 (September 1965): 6.
104. “Spotlight On: State Chairmen,” New Guard 5.6 (June 1965): 22; “Spotlight
On: State Chairmen,” New Guard 7.5 (May 1967): 19; “Spotlight On: State
Chairmen,” New Guard 7.4 (April 1967): 24; “Spotlight On: State Chair-
men,” New Guard 7.3 (March 1967): 23; “Berry’s World,” New Guard 7.6
(Summer 1967): 4.
105. Letters to the editor, New Guard 5.8 (August 1965): 22; Letters to the edi-
tor, New Guard 6.5 (May 1966): 26.
106. “Report on Civil Disorders Spurs Wallace’s Growth,” Los Angeles Times,
March 13, 1968; “Wallace Hits Professors Who Support Viet Cong,” Hart-
ford Courant, September 15, 1968; “The Wallace Boom: Third-Party Can-
didate Shakes Major Parties as He Wins Followers,” Wall Street Journal,
September 17, 1968.
107. “Republicans Like Wallace on Tour,” New York Times, November 6, 1967.
108. “Turbulence Marks Wallace’s Trip along Campaign Trail,” Los Angeles
Times, October 13, 1968; “Hecklers Try Using Silence on Wallace,” Chicago
Tribune, October 23, 1968.
109. “Violence Erupts as Wallace Is Heckled at Big Rally in S.F.,” Los Angeles
Times, October 14, 1968.
110. See Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Formisano, Boston Against Busing;
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven.
111. Dan Carter, Politics of Rage, 313.
112. “Who Inhabits ‘Wallace Country’?” Baltimore Sun, October 3, 1968. See
also Hamill, “Wallace”; and Novak, “Why Wallace?”

NOTES TO PAGES 52–55 203

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 113. “On the Hustings with Wallace in California,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 17, 1967; “‘It Isn’t a Mirage They’re Seeing,’ Says George Wallace,” New
York Times, September 22, 1968.
114. Braunstein and Doyle, Imagine Nation, 6.
115. Spiro Agnew, speech at Brigham Young University, May 9, 1969, in Agnew,
Collected Speeches, 19.
116. “Mr. Agnew Takes on the Nation’s Youth,” Hartford Courant, Novem-
ber 27, 1969; Perlstein, Nixonland, 430–31. Agnew’s attacks were not the
first time that conservative politicians accused liberals of being effete or
effeminate; similar attacks were common in the 1940s and 1950s, when
conservatives accused liberals of being “soft” on communism. See Dean,
Imperial Brotherhood; and Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political
Culture.
117. Agnew, Collected Speeches, 75.
118. “On the Hustings with Wallace in California,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 17, 1967.
119. See Rising, Clean for Gene, 67; “Be Clean For Gene,” Newsweek, March 18,
1968, 51–52; “Students Trim for McCarthy,” Hartford Courant, March 20,
1968; “Mr. Clean Makes It in New Hampshire,” New Republic, March 23,
1968, 13; Stavis, We Were the Campaign, 16; Stout, People, 164.
120. “Crusade of the Ballot Children,” Time, March 22, 1968, 13.
121. “Students Trim for McCarthy,” Hartford Courant, March 20, 1968.
122. See “Hecklers at Boston Rally,” New Left Notes 1.14 (April 22, 1966): 2.
123. “Four sds Members Attacked in Apartment,” New Left Notes 1.38 (October
7, 1966): 2.
124. See Gitlin, Sixties, chapter 10; “Rusk at the Fairmont—A View From One
Corner,” New Left Notes 3.3 (January 22, 1968): 3.
125. See Farber, Chicago ‘68.
126. See, for example, “Youths Dominate Capital Throng,” New York Times,
October 22, 1967; “Political Activism New Hippie ‘Thing,’” New York
Times, March 24, 1968.
127. “Police vs. Nonconformity,” New York Times, December 2, 1968.
128. Stark, Police Riots, 112–13.
129. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 49.
130. D. Walker, Rights in Conflict.
131. D. Walker, Rights in Conflict, viii–ix.
132. “Poll Shows 71.4% Find Police Action Justified in Chicago,” New York
Times, August 31, 1968.
133. “Only in America: More on the Convention,” Chicago Daily Defender, Sep-
tember 9, 1968.

204 NOTES TO PAGES 55–59

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 3. “ NO WOMAN CAN B E F RE E”
1. “Notes on Cutting My Hair,” Ain’t I A Woman? 1.11 (January 29, 1971): 2.
2. See Kreydatus, “Marketing to the ‘Liberated’ Woman”; Scott, Fresh Lipstick;
Collins, When Everything Changed.
3. See Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 180; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 92–
101; Rosen, World Split Open, 160.
4. New York Radical Women, “No More Miss America,” 184–85.
5. Friedan, Feminine Mystique; May, Homeward Bound, chapter 9.
6. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, chapter 7; Harrison, On Account of Sex,
chapter 10; Rosen, World Split Open, chapter 3.
7. Jo Freeman, “How ‘Sex’ Got into Title VII.”
8. Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, chapter 6.
9. Nancy Hewitt has offered an important critique of the “wave” metaphor
in describing the history of feminist activism, stressing continuities in
feminist thought and action rather than dividing feminist history into
distinct waves or periods. See Hewitt, No Permanent Waves.
10. Women, of course, did not themselves divide as neatly as these labels sug-
gest; for example, many women were members of both their local now
chapters and other women’s liberation groups. In general, I use the terms
“women’s liberationist” to describe younger women who joined feminist
activism based on their experiences in other leftist and radical movements
of the 1960s, and “women’s activist” to describe women who participated
in organizations like now that focused on legislative and legal change.
11. See Evans, Personal Politics; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, chapters 1–2.
12. Una Stannard, “If the Shoe Pinches,” Everywoman 2.12 (August 21, 1971);
“What the Hippies Gave to Us,” San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Punch,
December 22, 1968; “Short trips,” Haight-Ashbury Maverick 1.4 (1967): 2. See
also Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius, 72.
13. “Hairy Women Protest Fairy Queen,” The Rag 2.39 (September 23, 1968): 8.
14. Evans, Personal Politics; Rossinow, “Revolution Is About Our Lives.”
15. Coryell, “What’s in a Name?,” 216.
16. “What Is the Difference? Women’s Rights and Women’s Liberation,” reel 2,
folder 12b (Position papers, n.d.), Female Liberation: A Radical Feminist
Organization Records, 1968–1974 (part of Grassroots Feminist Organiza-
tions, Part 1: Boston Area Second Wave Organizations, 1968–98), Gale Cen-
gage Primary Source Microfilm Collection.
17. Maureen Davidica, “Women and the Radical Movement,” No More Fun and
Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, no.1 (1968).
18. Evans, Personal Politics, 192; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 45.

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 19. Lynn Piartney, “A Letter to the Editor of Ramparts Magazine,” Notes from
the First Year, 1968.
20. Evans, Personal Politics; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, chapters 1–2; Rosen,
World Split Open, chapter 4.
21. Willis, “Women and the Myth of Consumerism,” 288–90. See also “‘Con-
sumerism’ and Women,” folder: “Early Women’s Liberation sf,” Sally Gear-
hart Papers, glbths.
22. Kreydatus, “Marketing to the ‘Liberated’ Woman,” 43–49.
23. “Truth and Beauty,” A Change Is Gonna Come 1.4 (April 1971): 5.
24. Ellen Willis, “Whatever happened to women? nothing—That’s the Trou-
ble: A Report on the New Feminism,” Mademoiselle, September 1969.
25. Una Stannard, “If the Shoe Pinches,” Everywoman 2.12 (August 21, 1971).
26. “Make-up Slave,” A Change Is Gonna Come 1.2 (February 1971): 2. See also
Lynn O’Conner, “Male Supremacy,” folder: “Early Women’s Liberation sf,”
Sally Gearhart Papers, glbths.
27. “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear,” Cowrie 1.5 (February 1974): 21.
28. “Lesbian Feminist Declaration of 1976,” reel 68, folder 06221, Lesbian
Herstory Archives Subject Files (lha), Thompson Gale Primary Source
Microfilms.
29. Once again, these labels are imperfect; many lesbians were active in now
chapters and in women’s liberation organizations as well as in sepa-
rate groups for lesbians. In general, I use the term “lesbian feminist” to
describe women who identified as lesbians or who wrote in periodicals
devoted to lesbian/feminist issues. On the growth of lesbian feminism
and divisions between lesbian and straight women, see Echols, Daring to
Be Bad, chapter 5; Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace; Stein, Sex and Sensibil-
ity; and Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, chapters 3 and 5.
30. Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” Come Out! 1.4 (June/July
1970): 12–13.
31. Sally Gearhart, “Lesbianism as a Political Statement,” Sisters 1.2 (December
1970): 1.
32. See Mead, Male and Female; Money, Hampson, and Hampson, “Hermaph-
roditism,” 285. See also Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, chapter 3.
33. Jo Freeman, “Women’s Liberation Front,” reprinted from The Modera-
tor, November 1968, folder: “Early Women’s Liberation sf,” Sally Gearhart
Papers, glbths.
34. Una Stannard, “If the Shoe Pinches,” Everywoman 2.12 (August 21, 1971);
“Stamp Out High Heels,” reprinted in Dear Sisters, 40; “Make-up Slave,”
A Change Is Gonna Come 1.2 (February 1971): 2; Lynn O’Conner, “Male
Supremacy,” folder: “Early Women’s Liberation sf,” Sally Gearhart Papers,

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 glbths; Sharon Zecha, “Being a Real Woman,” Born a Woman, no. 1 (Fall/
Winter 1971): 31.
35. Reid, “Coming Out in the Women’s Movement,” 99–100.
36. “What Every Young Girl Should Ask!” reel 68, folder 06221, lha.
37. Una Stannard, “If the Shoe Pinches,” Everywoman 2.12 (August 21, 1971);
“Stamp Out High Heels,” reprinted in Dear Sisters, 40; “Make-up Slave,”
A Change Is Gonna Come 1.2 (February 1971): 2; Lynn O’Conner, “Male
Supremacy,” folder: “Early Women’s Liberation sf,” Sally Gearhart
Papers; Una Stannard, “Clothing and Sexuality,” Everywoman 2.13 (Sept
10, 1971): 6.
38. “Rita Right on Radical Fashion,” Lesbian Tide 2.7 (February 1973): 11.
39. “What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear,” Cowrie 1.2 (June 1973): 5. See also
“Well-Trained Hair,” Lavender Woman 4.1 (February 1975): 8.
40. Sharon Zecha, “Being a Real Woman,” Born a Woman, no.1 (Fall/Winter
1971): 31.
41. Cassell, Group Called Women, chapter 6. See also Kaminski, “From Per-
sonal to Public,” 149.
42. Ellen Cantarow, “Some Autobiographical Reflections, Or: A Case In
Point,” Female Liberation Newsletter 1.1 (1969): 2.
43. “Did you know . . . ,” Sisters 4.6 (June 1973): 18.
44. On the growing popularity of fashions in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
see “If a Fashion’s Good Enough for Her, It’s Good Enough for Him,” New
York Times, January 6, 1968; “Uniworld of His and Hers,” Life, June 21, 1968,
86–90.
45. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, ix–x.
46. Lydia Darnell, “Unisex Fashions and Equality,” Chicago Tribune, June 13,
1972.
47. “Make a Ladder of Your Hair, Rapunzel,” Free Press Underground 3.3 (March
1968): 4.
48. “Dyke Image,” Dykes and Gorgons 1.1 (May-June 1973): 4.
49. Deevey, “Such a Nice Girl,” 25.
50. “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear,” Cowrie 1.2 (June 1973): 5.
51. “Finally out of Drag,” Dykes and Gorgons 1.1 (May–June 1973): 3.
52. “Dyke Image,” Dykes and Gorgons 1.1 (May–June 1973): 4.
53. “A Feminist Perspective: Dyke and Proud,” Advocate, no. 171 (August 27,
1975): 32.
54. “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear,” Cowrie 1.2 (June 1973): 6.
55. “Are Blue Jeans Mandatory?” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle,
May 3, 1970.
56. See, for examples, Una Stannard, “Editorial: Beauty is a Beast,” sf now

NOTES TO PAGES 71–75 207

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 Newsletter, March 1970; “Feminists View the Fashion Scene,” sf now News-
letter 1.6 (May 15, 1970): 12, box 60, folder 13, Martin/Lyon Papers, glbths.
57. Cassell, Group Called Women, 85.
58. Letter to Aileen Hernandez, box 47, folder 12, series XIII, now Records,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
University.
59. Scott, Fresh Lipstick, 285.
60. Press Release, now New York, March 29, 1967, and “Announcement of
Press Conference and Request for Coverage,” June 12, 1967, box 48, folder
29, series XIII, now records.
61. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 173. Emphasis in original. See also Rosen, World
Split Open, 86–87; Kreydatus, “Marketing to the ‘Liberated’ Woman,” 48.
62. Rosen, World Split Open, 83; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, chapter 5; Jay, Tales of
the Lavender Menace.
63. See Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality,” 87–117; Smith-
Rosenberg’s chapter, “New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and
the Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” in Disorderly Conduct; Newton, “Mythic
Mannish Lesbian.”
64. Echols, Daring to Be Bad, chapter 5; Breines, Trouble Between Us.
65. “Rita Right on Radical Fashion,” Lesbian Tide 2.7 (February 1973): 11.
66. Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradic-
tions?” Second Wave 2.4 (1973): 19.
67. N. Williamson, “Case for Studied Ugliness,” 10.
68. “The Controversy over ‘Androgyny,’” Women: A Journal of Liberation 4.1
(Winter 1974): 58–59.
69. “Butch or Fem? The Third World Lesbian’s Dilemma,” Coming Out Rage
(May 1973): 11.
70. Quoted in Enke, Finding the Movement, 55.
71. See Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.
72. Stein, Sex and Sensibility, 83.
73. Discussion with Marisela Chavez, Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar
“Sequels to the 1960s,” Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University, June 2008.
74. See Wallace, “Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.”
75. “Cosmetics for Blacks Reflect Growing Pride,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 27, 1970; “Civil Rights Enjoys Riches,” Chicago Daily Defender, June
17, 1968; “The Afro and Its Meaning to the Black Beautician,” New York
Amsterdam News, July 5, 1969.
76. “Are Blue Jeans Mandatory?” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle,
May 3, 1970.

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 77. Letters, Cowrie 2.1 (April 1974): 7.
78. Letters, Cowrie 1.5 (February 1974): 11.
79. Dori Fields, “Dyke-ism Is Dying,” Gay-Vue 2.2 (February 1972): 2.
80. “Our Own Feelings About Androgyny,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 4.1
(Winter 1974): 32–33.
81. See Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; Case, “Towards a
Butch-Femme Aesthetic”; Cvetkovich, “Recasting Receptivity.”
82. Boyd, Wide Open Town, 180, 192–93; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Com-
munities, 106. Marcia Gallo’s study of the dob, however, found that opin-
ions on self-presentation within the organization were much more
complex than these works suggest. See Gallo, Different Daughters, 23–24.
83. “The Realities of Lesbianism,” Motive, March–April 1969, reprinted in
“Lesbians Speak Out” (n.d.), 4–10, folder: “Lesbians, early 1970s,” Anson
Reinhart Papers, glbths; see also “Who is a Lesbian?” box 35, folder 14,
Martin/Lyon Papers, glbths; speech in Bellingham, April 6, 1973, box 40,
folder 16, Martin/Lyon Papers, glbths; Martin and Lyon, Lesbian/Woman,
12–23, 74–78.
84. Abbot and Love, “Is Women’s Liberation a Lesbian Plot?,” 445.
85. “Something It Means to Be a Lesbian,” Gay Women’s Liberation, Berkeley,
December 1969, printed in “Lesbians Speak Out,” folder: “Lesbians, early
1970s,” Anson Reinhart Papers, glbths.
86. “Gay Women’s West Coast Conference,” Everywoman 2.10 (July 9, 1971).
87. “Distinctions: The Circle Game,” Amazon Quarterly 1.2 (February 1973):
26.
88. National Organization for Women, Statement of Purpose, 1966, http://
now.org/history/purpos66.html.
89. Self, All in the Family, 135.
90. Self, All in the Family, 147.
91. Self, All in the Family, 329.
92. Letters, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1.4 (October 1968): 11.
93. “On the Yin Side: Fall Fashions for Feminists,” Second Wave 2.2 (1972): 45.
94. Women: A Journal of Liberation 4.1 (Winter 1974): 24.
95. “Being a Long-haired Dyke,” reel 62, folder 05720, lha.
96. “Our Own Feelings About Androgyny,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 4.1
(Winter 1974): 32–33.
97. “Herstory,” Lesbian Tide, October 1971, 8.
98. “One Dyke’s Declaration of Independence,” Lesbian Connection 2.2 (May
1976): 3.
99. Image of Task Force News, July 1973 memo, box 30, folder 65, series VIII,
now records.

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 100. Weisstein and Booth, “Will the Women’s Movement Survive?,” insert p. 2.
101. Letters, Cowrie 2.2 (June/July 1974): 16–17.
102. “The Movement: They Act the Part,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1969. See
also Kaminski, “From Personal to Public,” 181.
103. “Blacks and Women’s Lib Picket Sahl,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 23,
1970.
104. Scott, Fresh Lipstick, 297–98; “Gloria Steinem’s Putdown,” San Francisco
Sunday Chronicle and Examiner, February 13, 1972; “Germaine Greer,” Life,
May 7, 1971, 30.
105. Harriet Van Horne, “Militants’ Mistake,” San Francisco Examiner, August
23, 1970.
106. Morton Hunt, “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!” Playboy, May
1970, 95, 206. See also Pitzulo, “Battle in Every Man’s Bed.”
107. Helen Lawrenson, “The Feminine Mistake,” Esquire, January 1971, 83, 146–
54. See also Kaminski, “From Personal to Public,” 167.
108. “Question Man: Would You Join the Women’s Liberation Movement?”
San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1970.
109. “Harris Poll: A Look at the American Woman,” San Francisco Chronicle, March
24, 1972; “Women Against Liberation,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 1971.
110. See Phyllis Schlafly, “What’s Wrong With ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?”;
from the Phyllis Schlafly Report, February 1972, and reprinted in Levy, ed.,
America in the Sixties, 221–28.
111. See Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism.
112. “The Pictures the Press Didn’t Print,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 9.11, section 2
(June 1976): 1; “Why the Equal Rights Amendment Should Be Rejected,”
Phyllis Schlafly Report 10.9, section 2 (April 1977): 2.
113. “Why Women Should Not Serve in Military Combat,” Phyllis Schlafly
Report 13.8, section 2 (March 1980): 1–2.
114. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 224–25, 229, 236.
115. “At War with the Pink Ladies,” Mother Jones 2.9 (November 1977): 21–22.
116. “Libbers Talking Their Way into Trouble,” Washington dc Evening Star and
Daily News, February 21, 1973.
117. “Pants, Suitable,” Buffalo News, November 19, 2000; “Wearing the Pants:
Envisioning a Female Commander-in- Chief,” Washington Post, December
9, 2007; “Donatella Versace Tells Hillary Clinton to Take Her Pants Off,”
StyleList, February 8, 2007; “Slacking Hillary,” New York Sun, June 3, 2008;
“Column: Perceptions of Female Politicians Affected by Appearance,”
Daily Nebraskan, September 17, 2008; “Sarah Palin Sexism Watch: Skirt-
Wearing, SexyMom Edition,” Feministing.com, September 8, 2008.
118. See Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta.

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 4. “WEARING A DRESS IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT ”
1. “Drag Debut,” Gay Sunshine 1.7 (June-July 1971): 15.
2. Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, 88. For examples of gay activists using
the term “gender fuck” to describe political drag, see “Preview With Pic-
tures: The Queens,” Advocate, no. 166 (June 18, 1975): 33; “The Politics of
Drag,” Advocate, no. 217 (June 15, 1977): 33.
3. This chapter will focus on gay male activism rather than lesbian or les-
bian feminist activism, although women and lesbians will be included
where appropriate. Lesbians were usually outnumbered by men in gay
organizations, often organized separately from gay males, and oftentimes
aligned themselves with the feminist movement rather than the gay liber-
ation movement. An exception can be found in the case of Philadelphia;
see Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves. However, particularly
in the gay liberation era, women often felt excluded from predominantly
gay male organizations and formed separate lesbian organizations to com-
bat what they claimed was sexist treatment by gay males. I have therefore
decided to include the lesbian and lesbian feminist politics of self-
presentation in the preceding chapter on feminism. See Armstrong, Forg-
ing Gay Identities, 140–47; Marotta, Politics of Homosexuality, chapters 9 and
11; and McGarry and Wasserman, Becoming Visible 179–97.
4. See Hekma, “‘Female Soul in a Male Body’”; Chauncey, “From Sexual
Inversion to Homosexuality.”
5. See Duberman, Stonewall; David Carter, Stonewall.
6. See D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Bérubé, Coming Out
Under Fire; Johnson, Lavender Scare.
7. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 119.
8. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 201; M. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves,
273; Gay Pioneers. On the increasing militance of some Mattachine Soci-
ety chapters in the 1960s, see D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, chapters 9–11; on the
formation of sir, see Boyd, Wide Open Town, 227–31.
9. Suran, “Coming Out Against the War,” 465, 470–71.
10. See Jay and Young, introduction to Out of the Closets, xxxiv.
11. Clipping San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 1969.
12. Photograph in Berkeley Barb, January 2, 1970; “Gay Labor Pain,” Berkeley
Times, January 30, 1970; “‘Boys in the Band’ Picketed,” San Francisco Chroni-
cle, March 28, 1970.
13. Gay Pioneers.
14. Jay and Young, introduction to Out of the Closets, xxxiv.
15. “Dept. Store Faggot,” Gay Sunshine 1.1 (August/September 1970): 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 92–97 211

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 16. “Homosexual Call for Militancy,” [news clip, n.d.], box 21, folder 30, Mar-
tin/Lyon Papers, glbths.
17. “Sir?,” San Francisco Free Press 1.4 (November 1–14, 1969): 7.
18. See cover, The Insider, November 11, 1970.
19. “Editorial: I,” Come Out! November 1969, reprinted in Come Out! Selections
from the Radical Gay Liberation Newsletter.
20. Third World Gay Revolution and Gay Liberation Front (Chicago), “Gay
Revolution and Sex Roles,” reprinted in Jay and Young, Out of the Closets,
252.
21. A. N. Diaman, “On Sex Roles,” Gay Flames pamphlet no. 11, folder 5, Ste-
phen Lowell Papers, glbths.
22. Third World Gay Revolution and Gay Liberation Front (Chicago), “Gay
Revolution and Sex Roles,” 252.
23. Tony Diaman, “The Search for the Total Man,” Come Out! 1.7 (December–
January 1970): 22.
24. For other gay liberation critiques of gendered heterosexuality and norms
of masculinity, see “Fear of Self,” Gay Sunshine 1.1 (August-September
1970): 14; “Will You Still Need Me When I’m 64,” Gay Sunshine 1.5 (January
1971): 9; “Gay Defense Rally at Hayward State,” Gay Sunshine 1.6 (March
1971): 3; “Masculinity As an Oppressive Ideology,” Gay Sunshine, no. 14
(August 1972): 5; “Random Notes,” and “Gay Oppression,” People’s Gay Sun-
shine (n.d.): 6, 13.
25. Martha Shelley, “Gay Is Good,” Gay Flames pamphlet no. 1, box 1, folder 43,
Charles Thorpe Papers, sfpl.
26. “Fear of Self,” Gay Sunshine 1.1 (August–September 1970): 14.
27. “Homosexuals in Revolt: The Year That One Liberation Movement
Turned Militant,” Life, December 31, 1971, 66–67.
28. On “camp” or festive appropriations of drag, see Boyd, Wide Open Town,
chapter 1; Chauncey, Gay New York, chapter 11; Johnson, “Kids of Fairy-
town”; and Drexel, “Before Paris Burned.” Drag shows and balls were a
significant part of sir’s social and fundraising events in the 1960s; see
“Halloween Ball,” Vector 4.1 (December 1967): 21; “‘Millie’ Premiere a
S.I.R. Triumph!,” Vector 3.11 (October 1967): 5; “Sirlebrity Capades ‘67:
A Review,” Vector 4.2 (January–February 1968): 4–5; “This Was Hallow-
een,” Vector 4.12 (December 1968): 21–23; “Questions Unanswered,” Vector
1.3 (1965): 1; “The Empress’ Military Ball,” Vector 4.3 (1968): 20. See also
Luther Hillman, “‘The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act a Homosex-
ual Can Engage In.’”
29. Guy Nassberg, “Revolutionary Love: An Introduction to Gay Liberation,”
Gay Flames pamphlet no. 11, box 1, folder 43, Charles Thorpe Papers, sfpl.

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 30. See “Court Okays Skag Drag, Police Demur,” Advocate, no. 100 (Decem-
ber 6, 1972): 18; for other examples of gay liberationists using political
drag tactics, see “R.I.P. Offs,” Gay Sunshine 1.1 (August-September 1970): 7;
“Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You,” Gay Sunshine 1.3 (November 1970): 16.
31. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 43.
32. See “Homosexuals in Revolt: The Year That One Liberation Movement
Turned Militant,” Life, December 31, 1971, 66–67; and the film Question of
Equality.
33. Alinder, “Gay Liberation Meets the Shrinks,” 143.
34. “Gay ‘Guerilla’s’ Picket Drag Ball,” San Francisco Free Press 1.4 (Novem-
ber 1–14, 1969): 1; “Gay? To Our Brothers and Sisters, What Are You Doing
Here?,” box 1, folder 13, Charles Thorpe Papers, sfpl; Berlandt, “My Soul
Vanished from Sight,” 54.
35. “Camp Out?,” Gay Sunshine 1.1 (August–September 1970): 9.
36. David Bertelson, “A Comparative Approach to the Meaning of Gay Liber-
ation,” March 1971, box 22, folder 15, Martin/Lyon Papers, glbths.
37. Rossinow, Politics of Authenticity, 298; Estes, I Am A Man!, chapter 7.
38. Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries,” 104–34, 111.
39. Lekus, “Queer Harvests,” 57–91.
40. “Why Are We Rocking the Boat?” chf Newsletter, April 29, 1969, 1.
41. “A Meaning of the States Lines Confrontation,” chf Newsletter, May 13,
1969, 1–2.
42. “Gay Militants Demonstrate for Rights at uc Berkeley,” Advocate 3.11
(December 1969): 3.
43. See “Drag Queens Demonstrate,” Drag, 1.1 (n.d.): 5; Ted Rauch, “Transves-
tism and Gay Liberation,” Gay Activist 1.7 (November 1971): 5; Letter from
the gaa to the New York Times, dated July 29, 1971, reel 7, box 17, folder 9,
News and Media Relations Committee, Correspondence, gaa records;
“Statement Against Transvestism,” Drag 5.18 (1974): 36–37, 42.
44. See Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 235; Marcus, Making History, 192–93.
45. “The Wearing of Drag,” Vector 3.5 (March 1967): 16–17.
46. “Statement Against Transvestism,” Drag 5.18 (1974): 36–37, 42.
47. “Mailbag: Transsexuals & tvs: Pro & Con,” Advocate, no. 114 (June 20, 1973): 36.
48. Arthur Evans, “Should tvs Embarrass Gay Cause?” Advocate, no. 112 (May
23, 1973): 37.
49. Reverend Edward J. Hansen, “The Church and the Tenderloin” (Sermon),
July 17, 1966; and Edward Hansen and Fred Bird, Mark Forrester and Vic-
tor J. Des Marais Jr., “The White Ghetto: Youth and Young Adults in the
Tenderloin Area of Downtown San Francisco,” [paper, n.d.], Ed Hansen
Papers, glbths; “The Fairytale Ballad of Katy the Queen,” Vanguard, no.

NOTES TO PAGES 100–106 213

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 1 (1966). See also Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of
Northern California, “mtf Transgender Activism,” 349–72.
50. See Vanguard, n.d., box 21, folder 3, Martin/Lyon Papers, glbths.
51. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 171; Question of Equality.
52. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities, 85–87. On the use of Marxist ideology in
1960s- era social movements, see Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left.
53. “Anti-Thanksgiving March Stuns Exploiters—Ends in Good Vibes at sir,”
San Francisco Free Press 1.6 (December 7–21, 1969): 2.
54. “God Save the Queen,” Gay Sunshine 1.3 (November 1970): 2.
55. Arthur Evans, “Should tvs Embarrass Gay Cause?” Advocate, no. 112 (May
23, 1973): 37.
56. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, chapters 3 and 6.
57. “Transformation,” Vector 4.6 (May–June 1968): 17. See also “Tenderloin
Transsexual,” Vanguard 1.9 (n.d.): n.p.
58. Screaming Queens. See also Meyerowitz, “Sex Change and the Popular
Press,” 159–88.
59. “Mailbag: Transsexuals & tvs: Pro & Con,” Advocate, no. 114 (June 20,
1973): 36.
60. “Transsexual Ban Splits dob Unit,” Advocate, no. 102 (January 3, 1973):
14; “Transsexual Issue Plagues Lesbians,” Advocate, no. 111 (May 9, 1973):
4; “Lesbian Conference a Bomb,” S.F. Women’s Newsletter, May 1973, 8;
“News,” Drag 3.10 (n.d.): 6–7. See also Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed,
258–61.
61. “Politics of Drag,” Lavender Woman 2.5 (August 1973): 13.
62. Randy Shilts, “Fantasy Kingdoms of Rhinestone and Royalty,” Eugene
Register- Guard Sunday Magazine, February 9, 1975, 5.
63. “Response from the Red Dyke Theater,” Lesbian Connection 1.7 (September
1975): 11.
64. Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradic-
tions?” Second Wave 2.4 (1973): 18. For other examples of lesbian feminist
criticisms of drag and transvestites, see “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will
Wear,” Cowrie 1.5 (February 1974): 21–22; “My Mother the Drag Queen,” San
Francisco Women’s Newsletter, August 1973, 7; “Drag: Misogyny in Disguise,”
Sojourner: The Women’s Forum 2.2 (October 1976): 5.
65. “God Save the Queen,” Gay Sunshine 1.3 (November 1970): 2.
66. Bob Kohler, “Right On!,” Come Out! 1.3 (April–May 1970): 5.
67. “Androgyny and Male Supremacy,” The Effeminist, no. 1 (May 1971): 1.
68. Kenneth Pitchford, “Faggot Militants: From Sexual Liberation to Revo-
lutionary Effeminism,” Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism, no. 1 (1972): 8;
Steven Dansky, “The Gay Enemy,” Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism, no.

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 2 (Winter/Spring 1973): 37. See also Kenneth Pitchford, “Where We Came
from and Who We Are,” Flaming Faggots, Summer 1972, 23; “Principles
of Revolutionary Effeminism,” Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism, no. 2
(Winter/Spring 1973): 3–4; John Knoebel, “Funeral Procession,” Double-F:
A Magazine of Effeminism, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973): 7–8; all available in
box 1, folders 1–3, Steve Dansky Papers, M.E. Grenander Department of
Special Collections and Archives, State University of New York at Albany
(suny).
69. See letter from Barbara Stephens, box 21, folder 6, Martin/Lyon Papers,
glbths; “T.V. Guide,” Gay Sunshine 1.6 (March 1971): 6.
70. “Del Martin— Columnist Resigns, Blames Male Chauvinism,” Vector 6.10
(October 1970): 35–37.
71. “Don’t March! It’s Part of a Sexist Plot,” Double-F: A Magazine of Effemi-
nism, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973): 11.
72. “Gay Pride Week,” Focus: A Journal for Gay Women, July 1973, 5; “Drags and
tvs Join the March,” Drag 3.11 (1973): 4–5. See also Marotta, Politics of Homo-
sexuality, 295–97; Marcus, Making History, 266–68; Duberman, Stonewall,
235–39; Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 169–73; Retzloff, “Eliding
Trans Latino/a Queer Experience in U.S. lgbt History,” 140–61; Question of
Equality.
73. Karla Jay, “The Decline and Fall of an Idealist or Why Ain’t I Marching
Anymore,” Lesbian Tide 3.1 (August 1973): 10.
74. Eskridge, “Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet,” 927–30.
75. Marotta, Politics of Homosexuality, chapter 8.
76. “Intro 475 May Dog Lindsay Campaign,” Advocate, no. 78 (February 2,
1972): 1; “Commitments Fail Test: Intro 475 Defeated Again,” Advocate, no.
92 (August 16, 1972): 1.
77. Ted Rauch, “Transvestism and Gay Liberation,” Gay Activist 1.7 (November
1971): 5.
78. “Unruly Hearing Fails to Move Intro 475,” Advocate, no. 74 (December 8,
1971): 3.
79. Marotta, Politics of Homosexuality, 222.
80. “Intro 475 Defeated,” Advocate, no. 79 (February 16, 1972): 1.
81. “What is gaa?” reel 17, box 22, folder 2, printed ephemera, 1972, gaa
records; Minutes of Gay Activists Alliance Meeting, September 24, 1970,
reel 13, box 19, folder 1, Minutes— General Meetings, 1970, gaa records;
Gay Activists Alliance Meeting Minutes, December 10, 1970, reel 13, box 19,
folder 1, Minutes— General Meetings, 1970, gaa records.
82. Ted Rauch, “Transvestism and Gay Liberation,” Gay Activist 1.7 (November
1971): 5.

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 83. “A Time and a Place,” New York Mattachine Times, December 1971, 1.
84. Ted Rauch, “How to Save Intro 475,” reel 11, box 18, folder 11, Gay Activist
(news sheet), gaa records.
85. “Won’t Be Sacrificial Lambs, Drags Vow,” Advocate, no. 75 (December 22,
1971): 12; see also “Transvestite Rebuffs ‘Straight’ Gays,” Gay Activist 1.6
(December–January 1972): 11.
86. “Intro 475—Round 3,” Gay Activist 1.9 (February 1972): 8.
87. “Intro 475 Defeated in Third Vote,” Advocate, no. 112 (May 23, 1973): 1; “City
Council Committee Rejects Homosexual Bill,” New York Times, April 28,
1973; “A Rights Bill for Homosexuals Rejected Again in City Council,”
New York Times, December 21, 1973.
88. “Dressing ‘Rider’ Under Wraps,” Advocate, no. 132 (February 27, 1974): 6;
“Homosexual Bill Gains in Council,” New York Times, April 19, 1974; “TVs
Excluded from Gay Civil Rights Bill,” Drag 4.14 (1974): 8; “City Council’s
Bill on Homosexual Rights,” New York Times, May 5, 1974.
89. See “Midwest ts’s and tv’s Fight for Civil Rights,” Drag 6.23 (1975): 25;
“State Laws, 1975,” jour-box 1, folder 27, Randy Shilts Papers, sfpl; “‘No
Compromise’ Gay Coalition May Sink Rights Bill,” Advocate, no. 163 (May
7, 1975): 4; Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 236–38.
90. “State Laws, 1975,” jour-box 1, folder 27, Randy Shilts Papers, sfpl.
91. “State Laws, 1975,” jour-box 1, folder 27, Randy Shilts Papers, sfpl; “Crip-
pled Rights Measure Passes Mass. House,” Advocate, no. 165 (June 4, 1975):
4; “Massachusetts Senate Defeats Job Rights Bill,” Advocate, no. 166 (June
18, 1975): 4.
92. “State Laws, 1975,” jour-box 1, folder 27, Randy Shilts Papers, sfpl.
93. Unmarked news clipping dated May 25, 1978, box 7, folder: “Gay Rights 2,”
Harvey Milk Papers, sfpl. Bryant’s campaign is also recounted in Clen-
dinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, chapters 22–23.
94. “Gays’ White House Visit Angers Anita,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1977;
“Bryant Rants . . . No Sunshine,” Lesbian Tide 6.6 (May/June 1977): 16.
95. “Miami’s Gay Rights Ordinance Repealed,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner
and Chronicle, June 12, 1977; “The Battle over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, June
6, 1977, 16.
96. “Anita’s Side Wins Easily—Miami Gays Defeated,” San Francisco Chronicle,
June 8, 1977.
97. Murray S. Edelman, “A Survey of Anti- Gay Attitudes of Dade County Vot-
ers,” box 7, folder: “Gay Rights 1,” Harvey Milk Papers, sfpl.
98. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 191–92.
99. “‘Soap’ Protest,” It’s Time 3.9 (August–September 1977): 3; “Media Notes,”
It’s Time 4.1 (October 1977): 2.

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 100. “Not All Quiet on the Gay Lib Front,” Drag 5.17 (1974): 5; “Gay Is Not
Proud . . . of Queens on Parade,” Drag 5.18 (1974): 32; “All Not Quiet on the
Gay Lib Front,” Vector 11.2 (February 1975): 30; “Gay Pride March ’77,” Drag
(1977): 22.
101. “Media Accepts Gay Demands,” Lesbian Tide 3.6 (January 1974): 4.
102. “Gay People: Your Friends, Neighbors, and Co-Workers,” jour-box 8, folder
23, Randy Shilts Papers, sfpl.
103. “Questions and Answers about Homosexuality,” box 7, folder: “Gay Rights
2,” Harvey Milk Papers, sfpl.
104. David B. Goodstein, “Snub by Solons Points Up Law Reform Problems,”
Advocate, no. 117 (August 1, 1973): 2. See also “The Man in the Gay Flan-
nel Suit,” Los Angeles Free Press, July 30–August 5, 1976; Clendinen and
Nagourney, Out for Good, 249.
105. “Homosexuals Ask for Job Equality,” San Jose Mercury, September 11, 1974;
“The Battle over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, June 6, 1977, 16–26.
106. “The Battle over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, June 6, 1977.
107. “In and Out of Drag,” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle Sunday Living
Magazine, May 28, 1978, 31.
108. Harvey Milk, “It’s Not a Festive Day,” San Francisco Sentinel, June 17, 1977.
109. “250,000 Gays, Supporters in High-Spirited S.F. March” [unmarked news
clipping], jour-box 5, folder 34: “Gay Parade, 1978,” Randy Shilts Papers,
sfpl; Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 320.
110. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities, 107–10.
111. “Is Gay Liberation Dead? Skirting the Issue,” Vector 12.6 (June/July 1976):
31, 35–37.
112. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities, 91; Marcus, Making History, 257–59;
McGarry and Wasserman, Becoming Visible, 199–219.
113. Eisenbach, Gay Power, 258.
114. Levine, Gay Macho, 7.
115. “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” Christopher Street 2.9 (March 1978): 4;
“The Ends of Sensitivity,” Advocate, no. 245 (July 12, 1978): 18; “Making Too
Much Mucho About Macho,” Advocate, no. 266 (May 3, 1979): 20–21.
116. Levine, Gay Macho, 5.
117. “The Village People,” jour-box 8, folder 15: “Village People, 1978,” Randy
Shilts Papers, sfpl.
118. See Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, 95.

5. “SEEING LO N G HAI R O N ME N ”
1. “San Francisco Lounge Bans All Long-Hairs—Like Stockbrokers,” Wall
Street Journal, October 15, 1971.

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 2. “Clift Hotel Opens Doors to Longhairs,” Los Angeles Times, December 13,
1974.
3. Frank, Conquest of Cool.
4. See Frank, Conquest of Cool, chapter 9.
5. See Self, American Babylon, chapter 6; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
6. See Gitlin, Sixties; Farber, Chicago ’68; Jacobs, Ways the Wind Blew; Berger,
Outlaws of America.
7. “Theater: ‘Hair’—It’s Fresh and Frank,” New York Times, April 30, 1968;
Levy, America in the Sixties, 195.
8. James, “‘The Movies Are a Revolution,’” 299.
9. Discussions of feminism were an exception to this formula; for example,
Gloria discovers that Mike is not supportive of her feminist pursuits in
season one, episode eleven.
10. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 192–93.
11. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 9.
12. “Ellen Peck: Haircut Hassle,” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1971.
13. Dear Abby, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1970.
14. “Long Tresses Cost Fireman His Post,” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1972;
“Marine Longhairs Get Aid of Pucinski,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1972;
“Guardsmen Sent Home to Cut Hair,” Washington Post, April 15, 1973; “Bat-
tle over Hairstyles Raging at Fort Meade,” Washington Post, July 6, 1973.
15. “Rumpled Generation Shapes Up,” Hartford Courant, July 11, 1970.
16. “Men’s Fashion Industry Lends an Ear to Consumer,” Los Angeles Times,
June 7, 1970.
17. “Assault on Unisex,” Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1971.
18. “Corporate Look: Is It about to Change?” New York Times, October 3, 1971.
19. “Keep This under Your Hat,” Newsweek, July 26, 1971, 30–31.
20. “Hippie Description,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1971.
21. “‘I Don’t Have Heroes Anymore,’” Washington Post, August 27, 1972.
22. “Long Hair, Mod Dress, But He’s a gop Pro,” Los Angeles Times, October 11,
1971.
23. “Rumpled Generation Shapes Up,” Hartford Courant, July 11, 1970.
24. “Are Nation’s Barbers about to Be Rescued?” Hartford Courant, February
23, 1972.
25. “Long-Tressed Males Facing End of Hair-Raising Adventure,” Hartford Cou-
rant, March 16, 1972. See also “Ears See Comeback as Men’s Manes Fall,”
Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1972; “Collar Clip: Longer Hair No Longer That
Long,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1972.
26. “Collar Clip: Longer Hair No Longer That Long,” Los Angeles Times, April
5, 1972.

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 27. “Mini’Pinions,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1970; see also “A Hairy Contest,”
Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1970.
28. “Mini’Pinions,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1970.
29. “A Hairy Contest,” Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1970.
30. See “It’s a Man’s Prerogative,” gq 37.2 (March 1967): 56; “Gentlemen,” gq
37.4 (May 1967): 43; “Introducing Six New Sensations for Your Body,” gq
38.7 (November 1968): 20; “Chanel for Men,” gq 39.2 (March 1969):11; Cha-
nel advertisement, gq 39.5 (September 1969): 1; Fabergé advertisement, gq
39.5 (September 1969): 24.
31. “. . . Or You Belong to One of the Protest Groups,” New York Times, Sep-
tember 25, 1970. See also “Say Goodbye to Short Skirts,” Hartford Cou-
rant, February 1, 1970; “Dissenters Say ‘pooff’ to Style World,” Los Angeles
Times, March 2, 1970; “No Shortage of Long Skirt Foes,” Los Angeles
Times, March 9, 1970; “The Battle of the Hemline,” Newsweek, March
16, 1970, 70; “Midis Inch Toward Approval,” Los Angeles Times, March
16, 1970; “Dead Knees Displease,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1970;
“Midis Bring Romance Back to Fashion’s No-Man’s-Land,” Los Angeles
Times, April 5, 1970; “Designers’ Sales Go Up as Hem Lines Fall,” New
York Times, June 1, 1970; “Buyers,” Washington Post, September 27, 1970;
“‘Slaughter on 7th Avenue,’” Washington Post, November 18, 1970; “The
Midi Laid an Egg in 1970, But It Did Hatch Other Fashions,” New York
Times, January 1, 1971; “Leggy Look ok for Job Seekers in L.A.,” Los Ange-
les Times, January 14,1970; “Command Decisions in Favor of Pants,” Busi-
ness Week, October 31, 1970, 20.
32. “Dissenters Say ‘pooff’ to Style World,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1970;
“The Battle of the Hemline,” Newsweek, March 16, 1970, 70; Ann Landers,
Hartford Courant, September 28, 1970.
33. “Designers’ Sales Go Up as Hem Lines Fall,” New York Times, June 1, 1970.
34. E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 289.
35. “Pantsuit Voted Tops for Fall,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1970.
36. “Pantsuit Voted Tops for Fall,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1970.
37. “Pantsuits Rescue Garment Makers,” Business Week, January 2, 1971, 54.
38. “Long Hair Gets ok after Indian Protest,” Los Angeles Times, November
23, 1972; Embers 1970, Yearbook of Amity Regional High School, Wood-
bridge, Connecticut.
39. “Come in Pantsuit, Change to a Skirt,” Hartford Courant, August 8, 1970;
“Pants: They’re Going to Any Lengths,” New York Times, November 26,
1975; Edith Head, “Yesterday’s Vamps Are Today’s Ladies,” Hartford Cou-
rant, November 27, 1970.
40. “California Couture,” Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1971.

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 41. “Pants: They’re Going to Any Lengths,” New York Times, November 26,
1975.
42. Art Seidenbaum, “Where Are the Girls?” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1972.
See also “Women’s Wear Puzzles Investor,” Christian Science Monitor, Octo-
ber 31, 1970.
43. “Women’s Lib Gets Members,” Hartford Courant, September 3, 1970;
“American Image,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1973; “A Few Women
Sizzle but Boycott Is Fizzle,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1975; “Something
New in the Women’s Movement,” New York Times, December 12, 1973.
44. “Midis Inch toward Approval,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1970.
45. “No Shortage of Long Skirt Foes,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1970.
46. “No Shortage of Long Skirt Foes,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1970.
47. “Pantique No. 2,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1970.
48. “Hot Pants Worn by Engineer,” Hartford Courant, September 1, 1971.
49. “Fashions,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1971.
50. “The Uniform Look of S.F.’s Female Executives,” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 20, 1978.
51. “Accent on Fashion,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 26, 1971.
52. “Fashions,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1971.
53. “Midi-length Hemlines Showing Up for Spring,” Chicago Daily Defender,
November 11, 1970; “Fashions,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1971; Edith
Head, “‘Tis the Season to Be Pretty,” Hartford Courant, March 5, 1971;
“Hooks’ Line . . . on Fashion,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 3, 1971; Edith
Head, “Fashion Forecast Emphasizes Softness,” Hartford Courant, April 23,
1971.
54. “Slip on a Style for All Seasons—the Pantsuit,” Chicago Tribune, July 14,
1974.
55. “Woman Likes Her Pantsuit,” Hartford Courant, February 5, 1973.
56. “The Afro and Its Meaning to the Black Beautician,” New York Amsterdam
News, July 5, 1969.
57. “More Men Taking to the ‘Natural’ Hair Style,” Norfolk New Journal and
Guide, December 16, 1967; “Looking on in Norfolk,” Norfolk New Journal
and Guide, April 20, 1968; “Negro Models Capitalize on Their African Her-
itage,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1968; “Beyond the Afro: Baldness and
Braids,” Washington Post, August 8, 1971.
58. S. Walker, “Black Is Profitable,” 254.
59. S. Walker, “Black Is Profitable,” 255.
60. “Cosmetics for Blacks Reflect Growing Pride,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 27, 1970.
61. “Dynamite Naturals,” Essence 1.1 (May 1970): 38–39.

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 62. S. Walker, “Black Is Profitable,” 255.
63. “Ironic Backlash? Afro Hairstyle: A U.S. Original, Africans Say,” Los Ange-
les Times, September 22, 1970.
64. “Perki’s Panacea,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 7, 1972.
65. “Black Cultural Nationalism,” Black Panther 2.18 (December 21, 1968): 15.
See also “Capitalism,” Black Panther 2.24 (March 3, 1969): 13; Linda Hamil-
ton, “On Cultural Nationalism,” Black Panther, February 2, 1969, reprinted
in Foner, The Black Panthers Speak.
66. C. V. Hamilton, “How Black Is Black?,” 25.
67. “All Hair Is Good Hair,” New Pittsburgh Courier, February 3, 1973.
68. “Beyond the Afro: Baldness and Braids,” Washington Post, August 8, 1971;
“Braids ‘in’ This Season,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 8, 1973; “Bushes and
Braids,” Chicago Defender, August 21, 1973; “All Hair Is Good Hair,” New
Pittsburgh Courier, February 3, 1973.
69. “Natural Afro Losing Its Frizz as Relaxed Hair Comes Back,” Los Angeles
Times, October 27, 1972.
70. “All Hair Is Good Hair,” New Pittsburgh Courier, February 3, 1973.
71. “Natural Afro Losing Its Frizz,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1972; “Wear
It Your Way,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1975.
72. “Wear It Your Way,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1975.
73. See Essence 1.1 (May 1970) and Essence 1.2 (June 1970).
74. “Black Women Prefer Own Look,” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 9, 1975.
75. “Personal Touches,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11, 1975.
76. “Negro Models Capitalize on Their African Heritage,” Los Angeles Times,
August 20, 1968.
77. “Black Models Reject Afro Garb, Hair,” Chicago Daily Defender, October
12, 1968.
78. Advertisement, Essence 1.2 (June 1970): 2.
79. See Self, American Babylon.
80. Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 61.
81. “Rudi Needles Romance,” Washington Post, January 8, 1970; Smith, Fashion-
able Clothing from the Sears Catalogs.
82. “A Boutique for Men, But It Has a Wider Appeal,” New York Times, Octo-
ber 2, 1970.
83. “A Men’s Boutique, But the Women Will Love It,” New York Times, Octo-
ber 11, 1971.
84. “Fashion for the ’70s,” Life, January 9, 1970, 115–17; “Rudi Needles
Romance,” Washington Post, January 8, 1970; [Photo standalone—no title]
Hartford Courant, January 11, 1970, 29a.
85. “Take Your Arm, Sir?” Hartford Courant, October 24, 1971; “Esterel Shows

NOTES TO PAGES 144–149 221

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 Long Dresses for Men,” Irish Times, January 27, 1970; “Men and the Cos-
metics Game,” New York Times, March 17, 1970; Bill Cunningham, “The
Young Men Are Seen,” Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1971; “Eye Shadow
and Lipstick—For Men,” New York Times, May 13, 1974.
86. Bill Cunningham, “The Young Men Are Seen,” Chicago Tribune, Decem-
ber 20, 1971.
87. “Pasadena Rock Bill Has Alice Cooper,” Los Angeles Times, January 20,
1970.
88. “Outrageous Behavior, Chicken Feathers and Rock,” Washington Post,
February 8, 1970. See also “Concert in Drag by Alice Cooper, a Boy and
Band,” New York Times, May 8, 1971.
89. “Iggy and Alice—The Outer Fringes,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1971.
90. “Lucky Glam Rock,” Guardian, September 2, 1972.
91. “Theatrics Sweeping Pop Music Scene,” New York Times, September 11,
1972.
92. “Iggy and Alice—The Outer Fringes,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1971; “Alice
Cooper? David Bowie? Ugh! And Ugh Again!” New York Times, Septem-
ber 24, 1972.
93. “His Name Is Alice Cooper,” Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1971.
94. “Former New York Doll Abandons Zap-Happy Genderfuck for Less
Punk and More Funk,” Advocate, no. 253 (November 1, 1978): 33.
95. “Patti Smith—A Return of Passion,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1975;
“Lock Up Your Sons, Moms, It’s the Runaways,” Washington Post, March
19, 1977.
96. “Gonna Be So Big, Gonna Be a Star, Watch Me Now!” New York Times,
December 21, 1975.
97. “Female Rockers—A New Breed,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1978.
98. “Runaways: Young, Female, Fun,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1976.
99. “Patti Smith, Traveling Light, With Magic at the Core,” Washington Post,
January 15, 1976.
100. “Esterel Shows Long Dresses for Men,” Irish Times, January 27, 1970.
101. “Esterel Shows Long Dresses for Men,” Irish Times, January 27, 1970.
102. Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1971, b9.
103. “Polo Shirts with a New Dimension,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1971.
104. “The Myriad Moods of Fashion for Fall,” Chicago Tribune, May 24, 1972;
“High Fashion Look-Alike Look,” Washington Post, October 1, 1972.
105. Bill Cunningham, “The Young Men Are Seen,” Chicago Tribune, March 19,
1973.
106. Herbert Brucker, “Equal Rights,” Hartford Courant, August 24, 1974.
107. “Designers Throwing Unisex a Curve,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1972.

222 NOTES TO PAGES 149–153

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 108. “About New York: Clothes Are in Fashion Again,” New York Times, Octo-
ber 23, 1974.
109. “A Whole New Thing on Campus Scene,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September
26, 1974; “Sensible Clothes That Reflect Now,” Los Angeles Times, Novem-
ber 19, 1974.

6. “NOT AN EFFORT TO ACHIEVE A UNISEX SOCIET Y”

1. City of Columbus v. Rogers, 41 Ohio St. 2d 161 (1975); “City Cross-Dressing
Ban Is Repealed, But Ohio Court Agrees to Hear Case,” Advocate, no. 145
(August 28, 1974): 14; “Cross-Dressing Laws Fall,” Advocate, no. 162 (April
23, 1975): 5. Columbus’s cross- dressing ordinance was adopted in 1848; see
Eskridge, Gaylaw, 27.
2. Lanigan v. Bartlett and Company Grain, 466 F. Supp. 1388 (1979).
3. See Whisner, “Gender-Specific Clothing Regulation”; Post, “Prejudicial
Appearances”; Williamson, “Moving Past Hippies and Harassment”; Fisk,
“Privacy, Power, and Humiliation at Work”; Levi, “Interplay Between
Disability and Sexuality”; Levi, “Some Modest Proposals for Challeng-
ing Established Dress Code Jurisprudence”; Levi, “Misapplying Equality
Theories.”
4. “‘Mod’ Man and His Job,” Christian Science Monitor, December 26, 1969.
5. “Shave and a Haircut for Hippie Postman,” San Francisco Shopping News,
February 22, 1968; “Post Office Bans Hippie Garb,” Washington Post, Feb-
ruary 1, 1968; “Hippie Hair Fashions Facing Ban in Cafes,” San Francisco
Examiner, August 4, 1967; “Long-Haired Waiters Ordered to Net It,” Wash-
ington Post, August 5, 1967; “Brooklyn Precinct Tells Men to Shun the
Hippie Look,” New York Times, July 15, 1968.
6. “Paper Towel Packer Fired for Long Hair,” Chicago Tribune, September 26,
1969; “Job Hunter to Job Holder: It Can Be a Tale of 2 Wardrobes,” New
York Times, January 6, 1970; “Leggy Look ok for Job Seekers in L.A.,” Los
Angeles Times, January 14, 1970; “Long Hair Costly on Job in California,”
New York Times, February 7, 1971; “The Newsmakers,” Los Angeles Times,
September 9, 1971; Hartford Courant, January 24, 1972, 20; “Salesman Fired
for Long Hair May Sue on Sex Bias Basis,” Los Angeles Times, February 15,
1972; “Long-Hair Ex-Employes [sic] Suing Stop & Shop Chain,” Hartford
Courant, August 9, 1972; “Judge Backs Safeway on Long Hair,” Washington
Post, December 5, 1972; “Grows Mustache, Loses Job,” Chicago Defender,
December 4, 1975.
7. For example, see “United Grounds Afro Styled Stewardess,” New Pittsburgh
Courier, October 11, 1969; “Long-Haired Teacher May Get Short Shrift,” Los
Angeles Times, May 24, 1970.

NOTES TO PAGES 153–159 223

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 8. “Portia in a Pantsuit? Not in my Courtroom,” Los Angeles Times, February
21, 1971; “Sexist Judge Rules Out Pantsuit,” Everywoman 1.4 (March 5, 1971):
14.
9. “Corporate Look: Is It About to Change?” New York Times, October 3, 1971.
10. “Office Dress: Not Quite Everything Goes,” New York Times, December 28,
1975.
11. “Policeman Who Defied Haircut Order Is Fired,” Hartford Courant, May 27,
1971.
12. “Lawman Reinstated in Haircut Dispute,” Hartford Courant, June 11, 1971.
13. “Berkeley Policemen Can Let Hair Grow,” Hartford Courant, July 9, 1971;
“Police Haircuts,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1971; “Papa Shouldn’t
Try to Dress a la Teen,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, February 3, 1973;
“Town Council Votes to Abolish Hair Code for Police,” Hartford Courant,
April 16, 1974.
14. “Office Dress: Not Quite Everything Goes,” New York Times, December 28,
1975. See also E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 321.
15. “Leggy Look ok for Job Seekers in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, January 14,
1970; “Command Decisions in Favor of Pants,” Business Week, October 31,
1970, 20.
16. “1969: Year of Maxi-Strides for Women,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1970.
17. “Nurses Herald Pantsuit Arrival in Day,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1970.
18. “Nurses Herald Pantsuit Arrival in Day,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1970;
“Labor Letter,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 1970; “Fashion Shops Hold
Breath as Skirt Lengths Slip Lower,” Christian Science Monitor, October 21,
1970; “On-the-Job Fashion Lib a Fringe Benefit,” Los Angeles Times, Octo-
ber 22, 1970; “Women’s Wear Puzzles Investor,” Christian Science Monitor,
October 31, 1970; “Command Decisions in Favor of Pants,” Business Week,
October 31, 1970, 20; “Clotheslines: Jewelry Pulse Quickens on Heart,” Los
Angeles Times, November 8, 1970; “Pantsuit to Get ok as Attire for Office,”
Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1970.
19. “Pantsuits for Stewardesses,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1973; “Steward-
esses Stay on Top of Styles,” New York Amsterdam News, July 10, 1971; Boris,
“Desirable Dress.”
20. “Command Decisions in Favor of Pants,” Business Week, October 31, 1970,
20. See also E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 319.
21. “Long-Haired Teacher May Get Short Shrift,” Los Angeles Times, May 24,
1970; “Nurses Herald Pantsuit Arrival in Day,” Los Angeles Times, June 18,
1970.
22. “At Revlon, a Controversy over Who Wears the Pants,” New York Times,
June 7, 1972. See also E. Myers, “Burning Bras,” 320.

224 NOTES TO PAGES 159–160

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 23. “Weight Hostess’ ‘Afro’ Boycott,” New Pittsburgh Courier, October 4, 1969;
“Airline Pays Up,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 24, 1970.
24. “A Few Women Sizzle but Boycott Is Fizzle,” Chicago Tribune, October 30,
1975.
25. “Jobs for College Graduates Dwindle for the Second Year,” Atlanta Daily
World, May 30, 1971. See also “Job Hunter to Job Holder: It Can Be a Tale
of 2 Wardrobes,” New York Times, January 6, 1970; “Two Worlds—The Long
and the Short of It,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1970; “Have We Met? Or,
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow,” Hartford Courant, May 24, 1971.
26. “Paper Towel Packer Fired for Long Hair,” Chicago Tribune, September
26, 1969; “The Newsmakers,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1971; Hart-
ford Courant, January 24, 1972, 20; “Salesman Fired for Long Hair May
Sue on Sex Bias Basis,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1972; “Long-Hair
Ex-Employes [sic] Suing Stop & Shop Chain,” Hartford Courant, August 9,
1972; “Judge Backs Safeway on Long Hair,” Washington Post, December 5,
1972; “Grows Mustache, Loses Job,” Chicago Defender, December 4, 1975.
27. See Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag.”
28. Ramsey v. Hopkins, 320 F. Supp. 477 (N.D. Ala. 1970).
29. Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969); Cohen v. California,
403 U.S. 15 (1971).
30. Hunt v. Board of Fire Commissioners, 68 Misc. 2d 261 (1971).
31. Dwen v. Barry, 483 F.2d 1126 (1973).
32. Hander v. San Jacinto Junior College, 519 F.2d 273 (1975); the earlier case was
Lansdale v. Tyler Junior College, 470 F.2d 659 (1972) (en banc), a case over-
turning a public college’s hair-grooming codes for college students.
33. Braxton v. Board of Public Instruction of Duval County, Florida, 303 F. Supp.
958 (M.D. Fla. 1969).
34. Schneider v. Ohio Youth Commission, 31 Ohio App. 2d 225 (1972).
35. Lattanzio v. Pennsylvania Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, 10
Pa. Commw.160 (1973).
36. On Justice Pashman, see “Morris Pashman, 87, Champion of Free Speech
on New Jersey’s Highest Court,” New York Times, October 10, 1999.
37. Akridge v. Barres, 65 N.J. 266 (1974). The quote from Justice Douglas was
cited from Ferrell v. Dallas Independent School District, 393 U.S. 856 (1968)
(Douglas, J. dissenting from denial of certiorari). It was Time magazine
that called Justice Douglas an “uncompromising libertarian” upon his
retirement from the court in 1975 and highlighted his defense of the First
Amendment in his jurisprudence. See “The Law: The Court’s Uncompro-
mising Libertarian,” Time, November 24, 1975.
38. Klarman,”Backlash.”

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 39. Kelley v. Johnson, 425 U.S. 238 (1976).
40. See “An Ideological Divide,” New York Times, May 11, 2010.
41. Jacobs v. Kunes, 541 F.2d 222 (1976).
42. See Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, chapter 6; Rosen, World Split Open,
71; Harrison, On Account of Sex; Jo Freeman, “How ‘Sex’ Got into Title VII.”
43. eeoc Decision no. 70–920, June 22, 1970; eeoc Decision no. 71–779,
December 21, 1970; eeoc Decision no. 71–1529, April 2, 1971; eeoc Decision
no. 71–2444, June 10, 1971; eeoc Decision no. 71–2343, June 3, 1971; eeoc
Decision no. 71–2620, June 25, 1971; eeoc Decision no. 72– 0979, February
3, 1972; eeoc Decision no. 72–1380, March 17, 1972; eeoc Decision no. 72–
1931, June 7, 1972. See cch eeoc Decisions in the bibliography.
44. eeoc Decision no. 71–2343, June 3, 1971. See also eeoc Decision no. 70–
920, June 22, 1970; eeoc Decision no. 71–1529, April 2, 1971; eeoc Decision
no. 72–1380, March 17, 1972. All in cch eeoc Decisions.
45. eeoc Decision no. 71–2444, June 10, 1971. See also eeoc Decision no. 72–
0979, February 3, 1972. All in cch eeoc Decisions.
46. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971).
47. Roberts v. General Mills, Inc., 337 F. Supp. 1055 (1971).
48. See Biography of Don John Young, Jr. History of the Sixth Circuit,
accessed March 22, 2010, http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/lib_hist/Courts
/district%20court/oh/ndoh/judges/djy-bio.html. Information on U.S Dis-
trict Court and Court of Appeals judges can be found on the online data-
base Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, available at the Federal
Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
49. Donohue v. Shoe Corporation of America, 337 F. Supp. 1357 (1972). On Preger-
son’s liberal reputation, see “Judge Harry Pregerson: Choosing Between
Law and His Conscience,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1992.
50. Doyle v. Buffalo Sidewalk Cafe, 70 Misc. 2d 212 (1972).
51. See “Warren J. Ferguson, 87, Federal Judge, Is Dead,” New York Times, July
12, 2008.
52. Aros v. McDonnell Douglas Corporation, 348 F. Supp. 661 (1972).
53. See “Judge Gerhard Gesell Dies at 82; Oversaw Big Cases,” New York Times,
February 21, 1993.
54. Boyce v. Safeway Stores, 351 F. Supp. 402 (1972).
55. Katz, “Personal Appearance Regulations,” 11.
56. Katz, “Personal Appearance Regulations,” 11.
57. Judge Danaher wrote the majority opinion; he had been appointed by
Eisenhower and was a former Republican senator from Connecticut. See
“John Danaher Is Dead at 91; A Former U.S. Senator and Judge,” New York
Times, September 26, 1990. Judge Wilkey, joining Danaher, had been nom-

226 NOTES TO PAGES 167–174

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 inated to the bench by Nixon in 1970 and became known for his conser-
vative opinions. See “Malcolm Wilkey, Noted Judge, Dies at 90,” New York
Times, September 18, 2009. Judge Wright, who dissented, had been nomi-
nated by John F. Kennedy and was a known liberal. See “Judge J. Skelly
Wright, Segregation Foe, Dies at 77,” New York Times, August 8, 1988.
58. Fagan v. National Cash Register Co., 481 F.2d 1115 (1973). See also Whisner,
“Gender-Specific Clothing Regulation,” 80.
59. Judges MacKinnon and Robb were appointed by Nixon in 1969; Judge
Tamm had been nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals by Johnson.
See Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, Federal Judicial Center,
http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
60. Dodge v. Giant Food, Inc., 488 F.2d 1333 (1973).
61. Bujel v. Borman Food Stores, 384 F. Supp. 141 (1974). Emphasis added. The
judge in this case, Charles W. Joiner, had been appointed by Nixon in
1972. See Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, Federal Judicial Cen-
ter, http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
62. Baker v. California Land Title Co., 507 F.2d 895 (1974). Judges Trask and
Neill had been nominated by Nixon in 1972; Judge Carter had been
appointed by Johnson in 1967. See Biographical Directory of Federal
Judges, Federal Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
63. Dodge v. Giant Food, Inc., 488 F.2d 1333 (1973).
64. Baker v. California Land Title Co., 507 F.2d 895 (1974).
65. Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Publishing Co., 482 F.2d 535 (1973). See also
Whisner, “Gender-Specific Clothing Regulation,” 95–96.
66. Brief for Rollins, Inc. as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petition for Rehear-
ing En Banc, filed August 7, 1973, Fifth Circuit case 72–2078, Records
of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Record Group 276, National Archives–
Southwest Region.
67. Brief Amicus Curiae of Mercantile National Bank at Dallas, filed July 25,
1973, Fifth Circuit case 72–2078, Records of the U.S. Court of Appeals,
Record Group 276, National Archives–Southwest Region.
68. See Williamson, “Moving Past Hippies.”
69. Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Publishing Co., 507 F.2d 1084 (1975) (en
banc).
70. On Judge Wisdom, see Friedman, Champion of Civil Rights; on Judge Tut-
tle, see “Obituary: Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle,” Cornell Chronicle, July 11, 1996;
on Judge Simpson, see “A Guide to the Judge John Milton Bryan Simpson
Papers, 1933–1983,” University of Florida Special and Area Studies Collec-
tions, accessed March 20, 2010, http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/pkyonge
/simpson.htm.

NOTES TO PAGES 175–179 227

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 71. Hander v. San Jacinto Junior College, 519 F.2d 273 (1975); Biographical Direc-
tory of Federal Judges, Federal Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public
/home.nsf/hisj.
72. Wamsganz v. Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., 391 F. Supp. 306 (1975). Judge
Wangelin had been nominated by Nixon in 1970; see Biographical Direc-
tory of Federal Judges, Federal Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public
/home.nsf/hisj.
73. Jahns v. Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., 391 F. Supp. 761 (1975). Judge Regan
was appointed by John F. Kennedy in 1962 but was considered “unsym-
pathetic to civil rights causes” as a judge; see Guide to the John Keating
Regan Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of
Missouri–St. Louis, accessed March 20, 2010, http://www.umsl.edu/~whmc
/guides/whm0173.htm.
74. Knott v. Missouri Pacific Railroad Co., 527 F.2d 1249 (1975). The three-judge
panel in this case included two Nixon appointees (Judges Stephenson
and Weber) and one Eisenhower appointee, Marion Charles Matthes.
See Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, Federal Judicial Center,
http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
75. Longo v. Carlisle Decoppet and Co., 537 F.2d 685 (1976). The judges in this
case, who ruled unanimously, were Judge Friendly (appointed by Eisen-
hower), Judge Feinberg (appointed by Johnson), and Judge Van Graaf-
eiland (appointed by Ford). See Biographical Directory of Federal Judges,
Federal Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
76. Fountain v. Safeway Stores, 555 F.2d 753 (1977).
77. Lanigan v. Bartlett and Company Grain, 466 F. Supp. 1388 (1979). See also
Whisner, “Gender-Specific Clothing Regulations,” 86.
78. Banks, “Black Side of the Mirror,” 18.
79. Thomas v. Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., 392 F. Supp. 373 (1975).
80. eeoc Decision no. 72–0979, February 3, 1972.
81. Thomas v. Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., 392 F. Supp. 373 (1975).
82. Carswell v. Peachford Hospital, 1981 U.S. Dist. lexis 14562 (1981).
83. Jespersen v. Harrah’s Operating Co., 444 F.3d 1104 (2006).
84. Pell was appointed by Nixon in 1970. See Biographical Directory of Federal
Judges, Federal Judicial Center, http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj.
85. Carroll v. Talman Federal Savings and Loan Association, 604 F.2d 1028 (1979).
See also Whisner, “Gender-Specific Clothing Regulations,” 84.

EPILOGUE
1. “Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class,” New York
Times, January 13, 2010.

228 NOTES TO PAGES 179–188

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andall and Linda Gordon, 288–90. New York: Basic Books, 2000. First
published 1969.
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1985.
Winick, Charles. The New People: Desexualization in American Life. New York:
Pegasus, 1968.
Young, Ralph F., ed. Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation. New
York: Pearson, 2006.

244 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 IN DEX

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations.

abortion, xx, 81, 140, 167, 189 63, 72–73, 77–79, 85–87; in main-
aclu. See American Civil Liberties stream fashions, 22, 26. See also
Union (aclu) gender transgression; unisex
African fashions, xviii, 32, 38, 159 androgyny, 72
Afro-American beauty industry, 38, Annie Hall, 141–43
144, 146 anti-era activists, 86–88, 112, 152, 158,
Afro hairstyles, xviii, xxiii, 32, 37–42, 172, 183–84
78, 143–48, 158–60, 169–70, 182. See Aros v. McDonnell Douglas Corporation,
also natural 171–72, 177
Afro-inspired jewelry, 38
Agnew, Spiro, 55 baby-boom generation, xvii, 2, 27, 32,
Akridge v. Barres, 165–66 49, 125
Allen, Woody, 142 Baker v. California Land Title Com-
All in the Family, 128–31, 145 pany, 176–77, 181
American Civil Liberties Union beards, xiii, xiv–xv, xvi, xvii, xxii, 22, 43,
(aclu), 1, 117, 124 46, 48, 54, 56, 134, 149; and African
androgynous dress: and feminism, Americans, 164; and “macho man”

245

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 beards (cont.) butch styles, 77, 79–80, 82, 151. See also
image, 120; and political drag, 101, dyke uniform; lesbians
92, 99–102; and workplace groom- Byrd, Ayana, 148
ing, 158–59, 161, 175, 187. See also
facial hair; mustaches Carmichael, Stokely, 37, 44
The Beatles, xxi, 5–7, 10 Carroll v. Talman Federal Savings and
Beatty, Warren, 135. See also Shampoo Loan Association, 183–84
Beautify America: Get a Haircut, 13 Carter, Dan, 54
bell-bottom pants, xv, 18, 21–22, 24, 155 Cell 16, 76, 84
Benton, Nick, 110. See also effeminists Chanel, Coco, 18
Berkeley Gay Liberation Front. See chf. See Committee for Homosexual
Gay Liberation Front (glf) Freedom (chf)
Berkeley Gay Women’s Liberation, 80 Chisholm, Shirley, 81
Berlandt, Konstantin, 100 Civil Rights Act of 1964, xxiii, 65, 156,
Bertelston, David, 102 169, 171, 172, 174, 180, 183. See also
birth control pill, 3, 16, 20, 84. See also Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
sexual revolution of 1964
Black, Joe, 39. See also Greyhound civil rights movement, xvii, xx, 34–35,
Corporation 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 54, 65, 94, 125
Black Panther Party. See Black Cleaver, Eldridge, 35. See also Black
Panthers Panthers
Black Panthers, 35, 40, 103, 145, 148 Cleaver, Kathleen, 40. See also Black
Black Power. See Black Power Panthers
movement Clift Hotel (San Francisco), 123–25
Black Power movement, xvi, xx, xxi, Clinton, Hillary, 88
32, 34–42, 47, 54, 78, 95, 102–3, 125, Coffy, 143
145–48 Cohen v. California, 162
Booth, Heather, 83 Cold War, xxii, 33, 49, 50–51
Booth, Paul, 53 Committee for Homosexual Freedom
Bowie, David, 150 (chf), 103, 110
Boyce v. Safeway Stores, 173, 178 Compton, Kevin, 13–14
Brewster, Lee, 111, 115. See also Queens Congress to Unite Women (1969), 76, 84
Liberation Front Cooper, Alice, 149–50
Brien McMahon High School, 1, 3, 13 Cosby, Bill, 144
Brown, James, 155 counterculture. See hippies
Brown, Patrick, 95 Country Joe and the Fish, 7
Bryant, Anita, 93, 112, 116–17, 118, 121, 188 Cowan, Liza, 74
Bujel v. Borman Food Stores, 176 Cowie, Jefferson, 130
Buren, Abigail Van, 132 crew cut, xxi, 5, 6, 22, 50, 131, 132, 134,
Burroughs, Margaret, 34 165, 178. See also short hair

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 culture wars, xvi, xx, 2–4, 27–29, 187–89 Equal Rights Amendment (era), 63,
86–88, 158, 183–84
Dansky, Steve, 110. See also effeminists era. See Equal Rights Amendment
dashikis, 38, 159. See also African (era)
fashions Evans, Arthur, 108
Daughters of Bilitis (dob), 79, 109, 111
Dave Clark Five, 7 facial hair, 9, 24, 46, 100, 153, 161–62,
Davidson, Carl, 44 182. See also beards; mustaches
Davis, Angela, vii, 40–41 Fagan v. National Cash Register Com-
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 144 pany, 174–75, 177, 178, 181
Dear Abby, 132 Farrow, Mia, 22
Deevey, Sharon, 73 “fashion feminists,” 140–41, 147
de la Renta, Oscar, 152 fbi. See Federal Bureau of Investiga-
Democratic National Convention, xiv, tion (fbi)
xvii, 57–59, 125 Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi),
dob. See Daughters of Bilitis (dob) 51–52, 59
Dodge v. Giant Food Company, 175–76, The Feminine Mystique, 65. See also
178, 181 Friedan, Betty
Donohue v. Shoe Corporation of Amer- feminism: and drag, 93, 109–11; and
ica, 170–71, 177 femininity, 61–63, 66–80, 82–89;
drag queens, 82, 93, 102, 104, 105–7, 109– ideologies of, xviii, xx, xxii, 62–68,
11, 113–14, 116–19. See also gender 70–76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 98; represen-
fuck; political drag; street queens; tations in the media, 65, 76, 83–85,
transvestism 129, 139–41, 143, 153. See also lesbian
Dunbar, Roxanne, 84. See also Cell 16 feminism; second-wave feminist
dyke look. See dyke uniform movement; women’s liberation
dyke uniform, 72, 79, 80, 82. See also movement
butch styles feminist movement. See feminism
Dykes and Gorgons, 73, 74 First Amendment, xxiii, 164, 225n37.
See also freedom of expression
Easy Rider, 126–28, 131 Fonda, Peter, 126–27. See also Easy
Ed Sullivan Show, 5 Rider
eeoc. See Equal Employment Oppor- Fouratt, Jim, 100, 113. See also Gay Lib-
tunity Commission (eeoc) eration Front (glf)
effeminists, 110–11 Frank, Thomas, 125
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 50 freedom of expression, xix, xxi, xxiii, 2,
Elliott, Beth, 109 4, 11–12, 28, 47, 134, 157–58, 161–69,
Equal Employment Opportunity 180, 185. See also First Amendment
Commission (eeoc), 65, 169–70, Freeman, Jo, 70
182 Freeman, Joshua B., 32

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 Free Speech Movement (fsm), 42, 46 glf. See Gay Liberation Front (glf)
Friedan, Betty, xxiii, 65, 76, 83. See also glitter rock, 149–51
The Feminine Mystique; National Good Times, 146
Organization for Women (now) Gordon, Nate, 53. See also Young
fsm. See Free Speech Movement (fsm) Americans for Freedom (yaf)
Furies, 73 Graham, Gael, 11, 13
Great Society programs, 130. See also
gaa. See Gay Activists Alliance Johnson, Lyndon B.
Gay Activists Alliance (gaa), 113–16 Greer, Germaine, 84
gay liberation. See gay liberation Greyhound Corporation, 39. See also
movement Black, Joe
Gay Liberation Front (glf): in Berke- Grier, Pam, 143
ley, 91–92, 99, 107, 110; in New York, Griswold v. Connecticut, 166
94, 98, 99, 100, 102, 110, 113
gay liberation movement, xviii, xx, hair. See Afro hairstyles; long hair; nat-
xxii–xxiii, 94–104, 107, 114, 118, 119, ural; short hair
120 Hair, 125–26
gay pride celebrations, 93, 100, 106, Hamilton, Charles V., 145
111, 117, 119; in Atlanta, 119; in New Hander v. San Jancinto Junior College,
York City, 111; San Francisco, 119 179
Gearhart, Sally, 70 Hartin, Frank, 91–92. See also Gay Lib-
gender bending. See gender eration Front (glf)
transgression Heilbrun, Carolyn, 72
gender fuck, 92, 99, 101. See also politi- hippie counterculture, 67, 71. See also
cal drag hippies
gender nonconformity. See gender hippies: 42, 123, 125; commercializa-
transgression tion of, 125, 149, 153; ideologies
gender transgression: and feminism, of, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 67, 127, 165, 171;
xxii, 72; and gay activists, xxii, reactions to, xiii, 53–58, 132–36, 129,
92, 93, 100, 102–4, 110, 111, 116–19, 172; styles of, xiii, xviii, xxi, 33, 45–
122; and glitter rock, 149–50; and 51, 65, 95, 96
hippies, 57–58; and mainstream Hoffman, Abbie, 47, 58
fashions, 6, 20, 24, 25, 149; and homophile organizations, 94, 95, 97,
street queens, 105–6; and trans- 100, 101, 105, 106, 107. See also Mat-
sexuals, 108. See also political tachine Society; Society for Indi-
drag; unisex vidual Rights (sir)
Gerhard, Jane, 16 homophobia, 103, 111
Gesell, Gerhard (Judge), 173–74 Hopper, Dennis, 126–27. See also Easy
Gewin, Walter Pettus, 179 Rider
Gitlin, Todd, 43, 44, 51 Horses, 151. See also Smith, Patti

248 INDEX

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 Intro 475, 112–16 long hair: court cases regarding, 163–
68, 170–81; on gay activists, 95, 96,
Jacobs v. Kunes, 168 97–98; in high schools, 1–2, 3, 11–13;
Jagger, Mick, 7, 150 on male adults, 22–23, 124, 132, 133,
Jay, Karla, 97 134–35; on male youths, 6–11, 131; on
Jefferson Airplane, 7 musicians, 5–6, 7, 149–50; politiciza-
Jespersen v. Harrah’s Operating Com- tion of, 44–51; reactions to, 33, 53–59;
pany, 183 representations in popular culture,
Jett, Joan, 150–51 126–30; in the workplace, 158–59, 161
jewelry, 38, 78, 89, 149 Lyon, Phyllis, 79. See also Daughters of
Jim Crow laws, xvii Bilitis (dob)
Johnson, Lyndon B., 48, 130, 170, 171.
See also Great Society programs “macho man,” 120–22, 121
Judeo- Christian values, xix, xx makeup: anti-era activists and, 87;
counterculture rejection of, 46, 65;
Kameny, Frank, 95 court decision regarding, 183; drag
Karenga, Maulanga, 38 and, 100, 111, 117; feminist criticism
Keaton, Diane, 142 of, xxii, 62, 67–74, 78; feminist
Kelley, Robin D. G., 34 embrace of, 75, 78, 79; male musi-
Kelley v. Johnson, 166–68 cians and, 151; media promotion
Kennedy, John F., 180, 227n57, 228n73 of, 20, 40, 84, 147, 149; third-wave
Kennedy, Robert F., xiv feminism and, 89
Kent State, 31, 32 Malcolm X, 36–37
King, Martin Luther, Jr., xiv, xvii Mamas and the Papas, 7
Kinsey, Alfred, 16 Martin, Del, 79, 111. See also Daughters
Klein, Herbert, 132 of Bilitis (dob)
Knoebel, John, 110. See also effeminists Mattachine Society, 94, 95, 114, 211n8.
Kohler, Bob, 110. See also Gay Libera- See also homophile organizations
tion Front (glf) May, Elaine Tyler, 16
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 93 McCarthy, Eugene, xiii, 56
Mead, Margaret, 70
Lanigan, Data La Von, 156, 181 midiskirt, 136–37, 138
Lauren, Ralph, 152 Miller, Bill, 99. See also Gay Liberation
Laurence, Leo, 110. See also Committee Front (glf)
for Homosexual Freedom (chf) miniskirts: criticism of, xiii, 1, 4, 15–17,
lesbian feminism, xxii, 68–70, 71–74, 28, 54–56, 62, 66–67; embrace of,
82, 109, 111, 116 14, 21, 74, 136–41; hippies and, 46;
lesbians, xxiii, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 93, male musicians and, 150–51; repre-
109, 111, 117–18 sentations in popular culture of,
Lincoln, Abbey, 34 129; in the workplace, 158–59

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 Miss America Pageant, xv, 63–65, 64 Nicholson, Jack, 126–27. See also Easy
Mod fashions, 22, 24. See also Peacock Rider
fashions; unisex Nixon, Richard, xiv, 55, 57, 132, 136;
Money, John, 70 campaign volunteers, 133, 134;
Monterey Pop, 7 judges appointed by, 172, 174, 175,
Morgan, Robin, 77, 109 183, 226–27n57, 227n59, 227n61,
Mothers of Invention, 150 227n62, 228n72, 228n74, 228n84
mustaches, 23, 51, 120, 127, 158, 161, 162, now. See National Organization for
182 Women (now)

naacp. See National Association for O’Conner, Carroll, 129. See also All in
the Advancement of Colored Peo- the Family
ple (naacp) Odenwald, Robert P., 25–26
naral. See National Association for Odetta, 34
the Repeal of Abortion Laws Oglesby, Carl, xviii
(naral)
National Association for the Advance- Palin, Sarah, 88
ment of Colored People (naacp), pants: and feminism, xxii, 71–72; as
65, 146 popular female fashion, 18–21, 25–
National Association for the Repeal 26, 28, 124, 137–43; for women in
of Abortion Laws (naral), 81 the workplace, 77, 156, 159–61, 169,
National Gay Task Force (ngtf), 116, 117 181–82. See also unisex
National Organization for Women pantsuits. See pants
(now), 65, 66, 75–77, 80, 81, 83, 86, Parliament Funkadelic, 150
160 peacock fashions, 22–24, 28, 131–36. See
Nation of Islam, 36 also unisex
natural: for black hair, xviii, xxi, 34– Peacock Revolution. See peacock fashions
42, 143–44, 147–48; and hippies, 46, Peck, Ellen, 131–32
65; and masculinity, 23, 135; and Peel, Tom, 91
women, 65, 71 Pell, Wilbur Frank, 183–84. See also
Nehru jacket, 23 Caroll v. Talman Federal Savings
New Left, xviii, 33, 34, 42–45, 49, 53, and Loan Association
55–58, 65–67, 94–95, 102–3. See also Pink Ladies, 87. See also anti-era
Students for a Democratic Soci- activists
ety (sds) Pitchford, Kenneth, 110. See also
New Right, xix–xx, xxii, 34, 86, 112, 188 effeminists
New York Dolls, 150 political drag, xxii, 91–92, 99–102,
New York Radical Women, 64 101, 104, 105, 119, 122. See also drag
ngtf. See National Gay Task Force queens; gender fuck
(ngtf) Pop, Iggy, 150

250 INDEX

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 Port Huron Statement, xviii, 45, 49. sexual revolution, xix, xxi–xxii, 3–4, 15–
See also Students for a Democratic 16, 33, 67, 126, 135
Society (sds) Shaft, 143
Pregerson, Harry, 171, 226n49 Shampoo, 135–36
Presley, Elvis, 5 Shelley, Martha, 99. See also Gay Lib-
eration Front (glf)
qlf. See Queens Liberation Front short hair: and black women, 34–35,
(qlf) 40, 147; as feminist style, 61, 71–73,
Quatro, Suzi, 150 76, 80; and male respectability, 6,
Queen, 150 7–10, 34, 39, 43, 53, 94; as popular
Queens Liberation Front (qlf), 105, women’s style, 4, 13, 20, 22, 24
111, 115 Silverstein, Mike, 91, 107, 110. See also
Gay Liberation Front (glf)
Radicalesbians, 70 Simone, Nina, 34
Ramsey v. Hopkins, 160–61 Simpson, John Milton Bryan, 177–
Reagan, Ronald, 55 79, 227n70. See also Willingham v.
Regan, John, 180, 228n73 Macon Telegraph Company
Reid, Coletta, 71 sir. See Society for Individual Rights (sir)
Reiner, Rob, 129. See also All in the Smith, Patti, 150–51
Family sncc. See Student Nonviolent Coordi-
Rivera, Sylvia, 106–7, 111 nating Committee (sncc)
Roberts v. General Mills, 170, 177 Society for Individual Rights (sir), 94,
Roe v. Wade, 166, 167 97, 100, 101, 105, 108, 121
Rogers, John Terry, 155–56 Southern Christian Leadership Con-
Rolling Stones, 7 ference (sclc), 38
Rubin, Jerry, 46, 47, 48 Stanis, Bern Nadette, 146
Runaways, 151 star. See Street Transvestite Action
Revolutionaries (star)
Sassoon, Vidal, 22 Stark, Rodney, 57
Schlafly, Phyllis, 63, 86, 87, 188 Steinem, Gloria, 84
Schneider v. Ohio Youth Commission, 164 Stewart, Rod, 150
sclc. See Southern Christian Leader- Stonewall Inn. See Stonewall Rebellion
ship Conference (sclc) Stonewall Rebellion, 94, 95, 98, 105,
sds. See Students for a Democratic 106, 115
Society (sds) Stop the Draft Week, 56
second-wave feminist movement, 62, street queens, 104–8, 110, 119. See also
65, 75, 81, 83, 89, 205n9. See also drag queens; gender transgression;
women’s liberation movement transvestism
Seidenbaum, Art, 139 Street Transvestite Action Revolution-
Self, Robert, 81 aries (star), 105

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 Struthers, Sally, 129. See also All in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist
Family Republics), 49
student movement. See hippies; New
Left; Students for a Democratic Vanderbilt, Amy, 20
Society (sds) Vanguard, 94, 106
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Vietnam War, xiii, xvii, xviii, xxi, 31–33,
Committee (sncc), 35, 37, 43 42, 48–50, 54, 86, 95, 126, 202n86,
Students for a Democratic Society 202n90
(sds), xviii, 43–45, 49, 51–53, 66, 94,
103, 125. See also New Left Walker, Susannah, 144
Suran, Justin, 95 Walker Commission Report, 58
Wallace, George, xv, 48, 53–55, 136, 188
Task Force on the Image of Women, Wallace, Michelle, 78
82. See also National Organization Weather Underground, 125
for Women (now) Weisstein, Naomi, 83
Tavern Guild of San Francisco, 101, 103 West Coast Lesbian Conference, 109
Tenderloin (San Francisco), 106–7 The Who, 7
Tharps, Lori, 148 Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Com-
third-wave feminist movement, 89 pany, 177–83
Thornberry, Homer, 179 Willis, Ellen, 67–68
Thorp, Charles, 97 Wilson, Elizabeth, xvii
Thurmond, Strom, 126 Winick, Charles, 26
Tinker v. Des Moines, 11, 162 Wisdom, John Minor, 179, 227n70
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of Wolfe, Tom, 24
1964, xxiii, 65, 156, 169–84 “The Women-Identified Woman,” 70.
Toddlers & Tiaras, 89 See also Radicalesbians
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, 72. women’s liberation movement, xxii–
See also Heilbrun, Carolyn xxiii, 61–75, 64, 69, 73, 83–85, 92,
transsexuals, xxiii, 92, 108–9, 116, 117, 118, 155 98–99, 109–10, 143, 184, 205n10
transvestism, 105–16, 118–19. See also women’s liberationists. See women’s
drag queens; street queens liberation movement
transvestites. See transvestism World War II, xvii, 2, 22, 44, 49
Tuttle, Elbert Parr, 179, 227n70
yaf. See Young Americans for Free-
unisex: anti-feminist derision of, 86, dom (yaf)
152, 183–84; discussed in court Young Americans for Freedom (yaf),
cases, xxiv, 157–58, 173, 178; as femi- 53
nist style, 72–73; as popular style, Young, Allen, 97, 102. See also Gay Lib-
xxiii, 22, 24–27, 25, 148–49, 151–53 eration Front (glf)
us Organization. See Karenga, Maulanga Young, Don John, 170

252 INDEX

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