“The Clothes I Wear Help Me to Know My Own Power”: The Politics of Gender Presentation in the Era of Women’s Liberation

In 1971 a woman writing in the Iowa City feminist 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 identity 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

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. Feminist criticisms of makeup, high heels, and miniskirts have been well documented by scholars, and nearly every history of the so-called second-wave feminist movement recounts the protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant as the epitome of feminist critiques of fashion and beauty culture.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 challenged 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. Indeed, self-presentation remains a contested topic among feminists today, as activists continue to debate the implications of fashion and beauty culture for women. This article analyzes the politics of gender presentation—defined in this paper as one’s choice of dress, hairstyles, and self-fashioning as part of one’s display of gender to the outside world—as it was debated by feminists and their observers during the movement’s early years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Women’s dress, hair, and fashion styles became the sites of cultural battles over the meanings of feminism and womanhood.

Feminists were not the only ones in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge what it meant to “look like” a man or a woman. Fashion trends such as long hair on men, jeans and pants on women, and unisex clothing also challenged previously established norms of gendered dress. Nor was women’s liberation the first social movement of the era to politicize self-presentation; hippies, student and anti–Vietnam War activists, and Black Power advocates all appropriated self-fashioning styles as part of their political activism.³ During these years the public hotly debated these broader changes in gendered self-presentation, as well as activists’ hair and dress styles. Feminists, however, were the first 1960s activists to connect gender-bending dress and hairstyles to an explicit politics of gender that challenged broader conceptions of sex roles and femininity. This case study of self-presentation as a political tactic of women’s liberation thus highlights some of the successes, challenges, and divisions within second-wave feminism.

On the one hand feminists who promoted the concept of freedom of choice in dress pushed American society to accept changing fashion styles for women. Many American women, inspired in part by the rhetoric of the women’s movement, fought for the freedom to wear pantsuits...