Origin of Everything

(host) If you're a woman and you're you could have been arrested.

Walking down the street today, most of us wouldn't bat an eye at a woman wearing pants or a man in a pink and flowery shirt.

But, believe it or not, until pretty recently there were laws in many countries that forbade a person from appearing publicly in clothes that didn't align with their biological sex.

Oh, did I say recently?

Yeah, sorry.

That was a typo.

I meant today.

There are laws that exist to this day that prevent people around the world from cross-dressing.

And before we get all revved up writing comments about, "It's 2018," which it is, and how this seems a little bit retrograde, because it is, we should stop to ask ourselves: When did these laws originate, and why did they persist on the books for centuries around the world?

Because despite these regulations, there's a long history of folks bucking the gender divide and dressing any way they please, from Joan of Arc to Pachuca fashion in Los Angeles, to "RuPaul's Drag Race."

And if there's one thing you've learned on "Origin of Everything" it's that rules and unnecessary laws are often made to be broken.

So, to start off this week's episode, we first have to ask: When did governments start regulating people's clothing, and why?

Well, before the U.S. was caught up in anti cross-dressing laws in the mid-19th to mid-20th century, and long before there were similar laws on the books around the world, governments were concerned with the style and dress of its citizens.

That's because of the so-called sumptuary laws across Europe that look to making dressing, well, less sumptuous.

That's because clothing has often been used as a marker of class, wealth, and distinction.

Sumptuary laws aim to limit spendy-looking fashions because, first, they were considered a sign of sinful indulgence.

So scandalous.

And second, as more and more people got access to greater wealth and flashier clothing, European regulatory bodies wanted to make sure that people didn't dress fancier than they actually were.

According to Professor Sarah Bond, as early as ancient Athens and Sparta in the fourth century BCE, magisterial bodies were tasked with figuring out what women could and could not wear, and this could include what clothes were appropriate for funerals and also religious festivals.

And their name, roughly translated into English, means "controllers of women."

Delightful.

In some cases, clothing choices were linked directly to one's station in life, as Bond notes that Roman matrons wore stolas or long tunics as a sign of respect, whereas there were ancillas for women who were enslaved and meretrix worn by sex workers.

Later, in 1157, the Council of Reims banned religious women in the Catholic church from wearing fancy fabrics like fur trims and silk gowns, and had to do it again in the Council of Vienne in 1311, according to Professor Yvonne Seale, since apparently nuns really like to dress up long before Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act."

In his article, "Fashion, Sumptuary Laws, and Business," Professor Herman Freudenberger traces the rise of sumptuary laws from as early as a law passed by Edward III of England that outlawed the outrageous and excessive apparel of diverse people against their estate and degree to their peak in Europe between 1650 and 1800, because all of those European royals and well-to-do folks didn't like to see people they considered of a lower station wearing the same duds as them.

And fashion still kind of operates this way today.

Because people are less likely to be judgmental of someone wearing an expensive Rolex if they're a celebrity flashing a watch on Instagram than if it's another regular Joe wearing a custom-made ballgown.

But some jewelry laws also had a tint of xenophobia in them since many of the fancy fashions that these European governments sought to cut back on came from foreign countries with wicked senses of style.

And that's "wicked" in the sense of evil, not a Bostonian wicked sense of style.

And sumptuary laws continued to be geared towards limiting people's fashion choices well into the 17th and 18th century.

Okay, so laws limiting fancy clothes started hundreds of years ago, and some of these laws were gender specific, although they weren't aimed specifically at preventing people from dressing across gender norms, but more at limiting the amount of stunting committed by medieval nuns and newly rich people.

So, our next question is: When did laws about cross-dressing specifically enter the books, and why?

Sociologist Clare Sears' book, "Arresting Dress: "Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" traces the rise of these laws in the U.S. back to the mid-19th century.

The first of the cross-dressing laws she found dates back to an 1863 law passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that made it illegal for a person to appear in public "in a dress not belonging to his or her sex."

And this was part of a larger wave of public decency laws that continued to sweep the nation until around World War I. Sears notes that the cross-dressing ban was part of a larger set of laws that criminalized public nudity, indecent exposure, lewd acts, and immoral performances.

They were passed in over 40 U.S. cities between the Civil War and World War I and covered a surprisingly broad terrain of activities, including performers who dressed in drag, transgender people, and people who wore gender-bending clothing of all sorts.

But why the sudden rush to legislate cross-dressing?

People dressing in different kinds of gender clothing wasn't exactly hot news beginning in the 19th century.

Think of women who crossed the gender divide to join famous battles like Joan of Arc, Sarah Edmonds, a Union soldier in the Civil War, or the legend of Mulan.

Women also pretended to be men to get ahead, like Dr. James Barry, an Irish doctor and soldier who was born Margaret Anne Bulkley in 1789 before assuming the name of an uncle in order to pursue an education as a physician.

And Ellen Craft emancipated herself and her husband William by dressing as a white man, pretending William was her servant, and traveling north out of slavery in first rate trains and hotels.

But these 19th century laws were geared towards eliminating people who didn't dress according to gendered expectations from public life by criminalizing different forms of dress.

And in the 20th century, these laws saw a new resurgence as cities began to swell and social attitudes began to rapidly change.

In the 1950s and 1960s, police officers often enforce these cross-dressing laws when they laid raids on gay and lesbian community hangouts in order to arrest, harass, and discriminate against patrons who were congregating there, which was the case during the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riots and was one of the inciting factors of the Stonewall Riot of 1969.

And around the same time in Buffalo, New York, butch lesbian women could be arrested for wearing less than three pieces of female clothing.

I'm not entirely sure how you would begin to even count something like this, and it wasn't until attitudes began to rapidly change again through the careful activism of gay and transgender communities that these laws were eventually repealed or thrown out altogether in the 1970s.

So how does it all add up?

While anti cross-dressing legislation isn't enforced in the U.S. today, there are still restrictive dressing laws that exist around the world, and most of these laws seem to fall disproportionately on women, whether it's laws dictating religious dress in Saudi Arabia or a ban on miniskirts in Uganda, or France's infamous and widely covered burka ban.

Although all three of these examples have quite disparate histories and aren't aligned to say that they're of the same piece, but rather to point out that government interference in clothing options isn't quite over yet, and even though cross-dressing laws in the U.S. are off the books, that doesn't mean that questions of dress code regulations and propriety aren't still flaring up across the country today, such as, should women be forced to wear high heels if it's part of a uniform, and do dress codes that limit distracting clothing actually help students learn, or do they just give school administrators one more reason to tally up demerits and detentions while targeting students based on their own biases about what's appropriate.

So, while we're always told it's what's on the inside that counts, it seems like folks have a lot of anxiety about what's covering our outsides and how that all aligns with our social standing, political choices, and identities.

So, what do you think?

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