The ancient Egyptians were afflicted with plagues of various kinds - blood, frogs, lice, beasts, cattle, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness - each one more deadly than the one before, but the last and worst has been reserved for our times: a plague of legs. They get everywhere now that women have adopted the trouser culture. Once not considered in keeping with sartorial propriety, everywhere in the Western world trousers on women now predominate. If you walk down the street of any city or town, the proportion of women wearing trousers to skirts is something like 10:1. The fashion has become so institutionalised that some women can be said to live in trousers. For nearly 6,000 years, women always wore long dresses, but only since the last 40 years, a dress is suddenly impractical to wear. Formerly, women performed a wide variety of jobs, including farming, in skirts. Nowadays, they cant so much as rake a few leaves in the garden without feeling the need to put on a pair of pants. The moral consensus Feminine modesty has been understood as being distinctive from its male counterpart in every society since the dawn of history, even in places where Gods word has never reached. (St Thomas Aquinas holds that the behaviour of all is subject to moral judgement, whether or not they know of the Revelation of Christianity.) Women have never, in the entire history of civilization, in any era from earliest antiquity or in any part of the world until our times, stalked about in trousers that delineated the lower half of their body and gave visual prominence to their hips and legs. Why not? Because they had the good sense to realise their physical vulnerability as the weaker vessel vis-à-vis male readiness to exploit it, and besides, they wanted to be cherished and respected for their personal qualities other than their physical endowments. The fundamental issue is that a bifurcated garment worn as outer attire was considered by people of all civilisations, even the most barbarian and pagan, to infringe basic levels of feminine decency and identity. The custom of women wearing trousers did not start with Catholic women. Like the New Mass, the fashion was inaugurated and promoted by liberal-minded people, particularly feminist agitators, intent on discarding Christian traditions and altering peoples understanding of Christian values. (It is true that the Dress Reform Movement was also a protest against the cruelly restrictive clothing of the 19th century that was injurious to womens health, but there are modest and immodest solutions to every problem.) Just like the New Mass which broke with the whole of liturgical tradition, the custom has in no way developed from the innate sense of decency passed down from one Catholic woman to another throughout 2000 years of the Churchs influence on society. The skirt-trouser dichotomy had become established within all civilisations, including Christian culture, as one of the main differences between mens and womens clothing. Only very recently has this difference been obscured. As we shall see later, Catholic clergy, nuns and educators before the Council denounced the fashion of women wearing trousers as unbecoming in the sense of being unfeminine (appropriate only for men) and indecent (inviting immodest regard). Thus, in the period before Vatican II, a Catholic dress code for girls and women was closely linked with the concept of feminine decorum and the avoidance of the occasion of sin. From their knowledge of the Gospels in which Our Lord demanded purity in glances, thoughts, desires and actions and warned against giving scandal, Christians generally understood that immodesty is related to lust and causes temptation to others. And so a moral conscience was formed which told them that immodesty, particularly in a woman because of her nature as the temptress of man, involves an offence against God and a lack of respect for ourselves and our neighbour. Not to disapprove of trousers for women is to shrug aside the seriousness of the situation.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:45:37 +0000