Valentina Tereshkova
Whenever I look at Halloween costumes for women these days, I think of Valentina Tereshkova.
Tereshkova was the first woman in space, a Soviet cosmonaut who made history when she flew the Vostok 6 into orbit on June 16, 1963. The Soviet press at the time made much of Tereshkova, highlighting her proletarian background and party loyalty. They also made a big point of stressing her femininity. News reports explained that a vanity mirror had been installed in Tereshkova’s space capsule, presumably so she could check her makeup while in orbit. The real reason was just to demonstrate to the world that, though Tereshkova might be a cosmonaut, she was still first and foremost a girl: an appropriately feminine woman who conformed to expected gender stereotypes.
See, here’s the deal: in a patriarchal society, women are defined by their sexuality. They are, to put it bluntly, the breeding stock. Men are the real people and women are just their wives and mothers. As Napoleon said:
“Nature intended women to be our slaves…they are our property, we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener. What a mad idea to demand equality for women!…women are nothing but machines for producing children.”
And to this end, Rousseau explained,
“…the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them – these are the duties of women at all times and should be taught them from their infancy.”
You couldn’t ask for a better description of pure patriarchy. It’s a world in which women’s number one job is to serve men, sexually and domestically.
Thankfully, we no longer live in a pure patriarchy. The past two centuries of feminist activism means that we now live in what I call a transitional patriarchy. It’s transitional because women have won a large measure of legal equality and the right to pursue full lives. Yet our society’s unconscious mores and biases are still rooted in the patriarchal past.
The hallmark of this transitional state is that women are still expected to fulfill that number one job of serving and pleasing men. Sure, we can do other things—we can be astronauts and doctors and lawyers and police officers—as long as we continue to uphold our traditional obligation to be sexy and/or domestic.
That’s why Tereshkova’s space capsule had a vanity mirror. It’s why Amelia Earhart was pressured to wear feminine clothes, and why Babe Didrikson felt compelled to reassure the public that she liked all the “woman’s things,” such as sewing and cooking.
It’s why women today still do the majority of the housework and childcare, even while holding down full-time outside jobs. It’s why women professionals are routinely described as “moms,” and why women, but never men, are quizzed on whether they can handle their careers and be parents at the same time.
It’s why Hillary Clinton was judged on her cankles, and why pundits on national television actually discussed whether the nation could stand to watch a female president age in office.
It’s why Dorothy Parker said 75 years ago that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” And why, still today, teenage girls worry that going into STEM will make them seem unfeminine.
It’s why a Halloween astronaut costume for men looks like this:
while the astronaut costume for women looks like this:
And allow me to point out that all the female astronaut costumes look like this. There are no normal astronaut costumes for women. If you’re female and you want to dress up as an astronaut, this is it.
Shades of Tereshkova’s vanity mirror.
Now, Dan Savage does not understand any of this. He’s on record with defending Sexy Halloween as a kind of Heterosexual Pride parade. He thinks that Halloween is a chance for straight people to express their sexuality, which apparently they don’t get to do the rest of the year. He acknowledges (barely) that women’s Halloween costumes are more revealing than men’s, but he chalks this up to evolutionary psychology, which he thinks means that women have naturally evolved to wear miniskirts and thigh-high stockings.
He’s wrong.
Look, Dan Savage is a gay man and a sex columnist. He understands very well the problems that patriarchy imposes on gay men. Patriarchy—at least our society’s form of patriarchy—denies the right of gay men to even exist as sexual beings. This is why gay liberation tends to take the form of Gay Pride, in which homosexuality is defiantly celebrated and claimed.
But that’s not what patriarchy does to women. Patriarchy certainly restricts women’s sexual freedom, but it doesn’t deny their existence as sexual beings. On the contrary, patriarchy tells women that they’re nothing but sexual beings. Wives and mothers. Breeding stock.
Astronaut costumes that look like Hooters Girl outfits, cop costumes with plunging necklines, firefighter costumes with bare midriffs: these are not the expressions of a long-oppressed sexuality finally being allowed to show its face. They’re just the modern-day equivalents of Tereshkova’s mirror.
The message is clear. Women can’t just be astronauts or cops or firefighters. They have to be sexy astronauts, sexy cops, sexy firefighters. They have to uphold that traditional patriarchal obligation to be sexually pleasing to men.
One reason I’m so sure of this is because I know what happens when girls and women try to buck the trend. College girls are heckled by guys for wearing “too many clothes.” One woman wrote to me about being harassed so aggressively for her unsexy costume that she almost felt afraid. That’s not liberation. It’s enforcement.
Does this mean that sexy costumes are intrinsically wrong? No, of course not. Sexuality is part of who we are. And a lot of women definitely do want to sex it up on Halloween, which is fine. When I say, as I did in our Kickstarter video, that “there’s nothing wrong with wanting to dress sexy,” I mean it.
What I want is for women to have the freedom to be sexy if they want to, and the freedom not to be sexy if they don’t want to. I want both of those things to be valid choices. It sounds ridiculously simple, but you know what? We’ve been fighting for this for 200 years, and we’re still not there.
Before Hurricane Sandy shuts down our power and yours, here’s a thing you need to know (apart from what to pack for your emergency evacuation):
Our 2012 Halloween costume contest is here! Send in a photo of yourself (or a friend or family member) in costume for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate from Amazon! (Prize courtesy of a very kind sponsor.)
Here are the rules:
1. The photo must be of you or a friend or family member in costume. If the photo is of a friend or family member, you must obtain their permission to submit it. You’ll need to tell us their name as well as yours, and note what your relationship is (sister, daughter, etc.).
2. The costume doesn’t have to be inspired by Take Back Halloween, but we prefer that it fall into one of our categories: a goddess or mythological figure, a notable woman from history, a queen, a glamorous star—you get the idea. You’ll notice that we don’t do fictional characters on our website (such as Princess Leia or Hermione Granger), so we’re more likely to be impressed by a mythological or historical costume.
3. Please tell us what the costume is, in case we are too dense to figure it out.
4. The costume may be from this year or any previous Halloween.
5. By submitting the photo, you are giving us permission to publish it on the Take Back Halloween website and on our Facebook page. You can send in multiple photos if you’re not sure what the best one is or if you need several angles to reveal the full glory of the costume.
6. Submissions should be emailed to contest@takebackhalloween.org.
7. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm EST on Friday, November 9, 2012.
8. The prize is a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Use it on anything you like!
We expect to publish the winner the week of November 12, 2012.
Of course, all of this is assuming we don’t get washed out to sea. We did not get washed out to sea! Contest is going strong, so email your pics to contest@takebackhalloween.org.
UPDATE November 10, 2012: Our contest is now closed, and we’ll announce the winner next week. We were absolutely amazed by the wonderful costumes people put together, and the judging will be hard! Check out the entries we’ve posted on our Facebook page and you’ll see what we mean. Thanks to everyone for sending in your pictures.
We’re going to invite everybody to send in a picture of themselves in costume this Halloween, with prize(s) to be awarded for the best costume. But what should the prize(s) be? Should we offer the same swag we’re offering with our Kickstarter campaign (unique buttons for each of our costumes and a mind-blowing “Epic of Woman” poster)? Or should it be some kind of costume accessory, like a peacock fan or opera gloves? Or a gift certificate?
Let us know your thoughts. Post a comment on our Facebook page, post a comment here, send us a Tweet (@takehalloween), or email Suzanne at scoggins.suzanne@gmail.com.
Peacock fan, useful with several queen and goddess costumes.
Black (or white) opera gloves, useful with several glamour costumes.
PRESS RELEASE
Why be Sexy Big Bird when you can be Hatshepsut?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 25, 2012 — Halloween costumes for women tend to fall into two categories: Sexy and Sexier. But a website called Take Back Halloween is bucking the trend.
Launched in 2010, the site is a free how-to guide with instructions on how women can dress up as famous queens, goddesses, and other figures from history.
“The response has been phenomenal,” says Suzanne Scoggins, who founded Take Back Halloween. The site logs millions of visits and, according to Scoggins, has been forced to make two server upgrades in the past week just to cope with the traffic. “There is a tremendous demand for this kind of thing,” she explains. “You would think from the media that everybody is out there wanting to be Sexy Big Bird. But in fact, a lot of women really don’t want that. They’re looking for a different approach.”
Take Back Halloween offers costume designs for Hatshepsut, the “female king” of Egypt, as well as Jezebel, Boudicca, the Queen of Sheba, Nzinga, Fu Hao, and dozens of others. Goddesses include Greek favorites, like Athena, as well as the Egyptian Isis, the Maya Ix Chel, the Aztec Chalchiuhtlicue, the Norse Freyja, and the Celtic Brighid. The “Notable Women” category covers an enormous range of women, from Enheduanna—the Sumerian poet who is the first known author in world history—to physicist Lise Meitner, the discoverer of nuclear fission.
And the site is still growing. Take Back Halloween has already launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund 15 new costume designs for 2013.
“We get hundreds of requests for new costumes,” says Scoggins. “We get emails all year long. There is a real demand for this.”
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Kickstarter:
The past few days have been exciting and stressful, since we had to do an emergency server upgrade on Friday to cope with the traffic. And once we got on the new box, our host advised us that we really needed to be on an even bigger box, so then we moved again. But we’re all settled in now and ready to go.
So here it is: our Kickstarter!
Our goal is to raise $4,500 to add 15 brand new costume designs for 2013—pirates, geeks, and more general awesomeness. Check out our video:
Visit our Kickstarter project page to grab the embed code for the video and project links. Please share this around and help us spread the word!
If you’ve had trouble loading this site in the past 24 hours, it’s because we had a massive traffic spike, immediately followed by an emergency server upgrade to cope with said massive traffic spike. But if you’re seeing this now, it means everything has moved to the new server and the series of tubes has gotten itself sorted. We think. We hope!
At any rate, we are very sorry for the downtime and happy to be coming to you now live, in living color, via satellite.
We are getting excited and nervous about our Kickstarter campaign, which we expect to launch next week. Nervous just because it’s a new thing and we’ve never done a Kickstarter before. But excited because we are so psyched about all the new costumes on the drawing board. We’re going to fund at least 15 new costumes, and the more money we raise, the more costumes we can add.
So you know all those suggestions you’ve been sending in for pirates and geeks and national heroines? They’re finally on the way. Here are a few of the costumes our Kickstarter is going to make possible:
Pirates!
We get more requests for pirates than anything else. And that’s saying something, since we literally get hundreds of suggestions for costumes. So we’re planning to add:
- Grace O’Malley, the Sea Queen of Connaught
- Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who sailed with the infamous Calico Jack
- Ching Shih, the most successful pirate in history
Geeks!
Everybody loves the geek costumes, probably because female geniuses/scientists/inventors haven’t gotten nearly their due in the history books. So we’re adding:
- Marie Curie, recipient of two Nobel Prizes
- Rosalind Franklin, whose work on DNA was “borrowed” by Watson and Crick
- Grace Hopper, who invented the compiler (the wheel + the alphabet + fire)
- Hypatia, the last great pagan philosopher and mathematician
Queens and heroines!
Because you can never have too much awesome. At the top of the list are:
- Queen Christina of Sweden, who shocked Europe with her crossdressing
- The Trung Sisters, queens and national heroines of Vietnam
- Amelia Earhart, and you know who she is
That’s 10 costumes right there, and people who join the Kickstarter will get to vote on the remaining 5 costumes (or more, if we raise more money).
The rewards are gonna be cool too. In order to have something tangible to send people, we’re designing unique mini-buttons for each of the women represented by our costumes. For example, the button for Enheduanna looks like the ancient Enheduanna Disk.
So watch this space!
Okay, I think some kind of line has been crossed. This is too much. Ladies (and gentlemen), I give you: Sexy Joan of Arc.
Because what’s hotter than being burned at the stake?
Allow me to remind that you Joan was only 19 years old when she was executed. Burned alive. Whatever you think of her visions, there’s no question that she was incredibly courageous. And there’s no question that she was persecuted in large part because she refused to conform to standard femininity.
So it’s kind of hilarious that the modern costume industry has decided to do what Joan wouldn’t, and transform her into a perfectly conformist sexy female. And check out the helpful suggestion from the seller: “To make this ensemble even sexier, and worthy of leading a French revolution, consider purchasing gold strappy sandals, a large sword, a long blond wig, fishnet hosiery and cross necklace from our accessories section.”
It’s true, fishnets and stripper shoes are certainly the first things I think of when visualizing Joan of Arc. But what’s really fantastic about this suggestion is the long blond wig. Because everybody knows that Joan actually cut her hair short and wore it like a man. In fact, that was one of the “unfeminine” things she was persecuted for. It’s like the costume industry is retroactively erasing all that messy nonconformist proto-feminism from history. Instead of Joan of Arc, crazy-ass armor-wearing mystical-hallucinating brilliant general from hell, we get Sexy Joanie, with her bustier and her fishnets and her long blond hair.
I swear to God, at this point I would not be surprised if they came out with a Sexy Mary Wollstonecraft costume.
P.S. Here’s the link to our non-sexy costume for Joan of Arc.
Tin Hinan (4th century) was the legendary queen of the Tuareg people, the matrilineal desert-dwelling Berbers who are famous for their blue clothing—and for the fact that it’s their men, rather than their women, who wear face veils. Tin Hinan is credited as the first leader and founding matriarch of the tribe, and is revered by the Tuareg today as “the Mother of Us All.” Her story is shrouded in myth, but unlike most myths, this one has a skeleton attached: the tomb of Tin Hinan was excavated in Algeria in 1925. The lady buried inside was loaded with splendor—a jeweled robe, armband cuffs in gold and silver, heavy gold necklaces, emeralds and pearls, coins, headdress, the whole bit. The main image above is a painting of Tin Hinan by Algerian artist Hocine Ziani. The inset image is “Berber Woman” by Émile Vernet-Lecomte, which we include because the style of clothing depicted (unsewn tunic pinned at the shoulders) may be closer to what people were actually wearing in the 4th century.
For the costume, we suggest a Tuareg-style layered effect: tunic plus shawl plus head veil (for shade, not modesty). Don’t worry about the blues matching; the Tuareg like to mix it up. The pieces we suggest, from left to right:
Modern Tuareg woman, with yellow ochre face paint, blueish-black lip color and eyeliner, and red circles on her cheeks and forehead.
1. For your base layer, a long tunic in dark blue. You can go with an inexpensive sleeveless maxi dress in navy blue, or you can rig up a Hellenistic-style unsewn tunic from a blue flat sheet. The unsewn tunic was common throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and people in Algeria may have been wearing something like that in Tin Hinan’s day. We give you instructions below on how to pin it together.
2. For your second layer, an embroidered blue dupatta with beads and sequins. Drape this around your body and over your shoulder, sort of like a toga. The bling is a nice echo of the jewel-covered stuff Tin Hinan was wearing in her tomb. Search on eBay for “embroidered blue dupatta” to find something similar to ours—there are always vintage dupattas on sale there.
3. For your third layer, a sheer navy blue veil. This one goes over your head.
4. Jeweled head ornament. This goes on top of the blue veil. We like the gold one with multicolored gems.
5. A “tribal” necklace with mirrors and coins. The “tribal” here actually refers to Afghanistan, but there are broad similarities between the Afghans and the Berbers in terms of their metalwork. Zarifa’s carries an ever-changing stock of jewelry pieces from Afghanistan, many of which would work very well for this costume. Search their store for “Afghanistan” or “tribal.”
6. A large armband in gold. If you want to be really accurate you should try to get one in silver too, since Tin Hinan was buried with a stack of gold bracelets on one arm and silver bracelets on the other. By the way, it’s worth noting that all the gold in Tin Hinan’s tomb clearly shows that it was only later that the Tuareg came to prefer silver almost exclusively.
Makeup: Tuareg women today use blueish-black makeup on their eyes and lips. Some Tuareg women also apply small red or white circles to each cheek and their forehead; they also sometimes coat their faces in yellow ochre. But we have no way of knowing if Tin Hinan did any of this. You might try black lipstick and black eyeliner (make sure to rim your eyes entirely).
Shoes: Wear simple flat leather sandals. If it’s too cold for sandals, wear soft slippers or leather boots, again with flat heels. (People in the desert do not wear high heels. Trust us.) The Tuareg are famous for steering their camels barefoot, but we’re thinking that probably won’t be your mode of transportation on Halloween.
Bonus: Peacock feather fan. The painting of Tin Hinan in our main illustration shows her holding a peacock fan.
How to make a chiton: The simplest ancient tunic for costuming purposes is the Doric chiton, which consists of a single rectangle of fabric folded around the body. This became the jeans-and-T-shirt of the classical world, and was worn from northern Europe to the Mediterranean. All you need is a flat sheet, some safety pins, and a belt or cord. Here are your chiton instructions:
And finally, just for fun: We’re big fans of the Tuareg rock band Tinariwen. Maybe this video will help you get in the mood for your costume:
We were thinking about doing this closer to Halloween, but the awesome shout-out today from The Mary Sue (thank you!) prompted us to go ahead and post it now: bedsheet costumes. That’s right, costumes you can make with a bedsheet.
The reason you can get away with using a bedsheet for ancient costumes is because an awful lot of ancient clothing wasn’t sewn. The Greeks, for example, wore a chiton, which was just a length of cloth wrapped around the body and pinned at the shoulders. The Greek chiton became the jeans-and-T-shirt of the classical world, with even “barbarians” in the north (like the Celts) wearing a version of it. And before that (way before that) there were the Sumerians and Akkadians, who wore a big rectangle of cloth wrapped in a spiral around the body and draped over the left arm.
All these outfits do call for some extra accessories, but the basic garment is a bedsheet:
Athena, above, Greek goddess of wisdom and civilization.
Demeter, above left, Greek goddess of agriculture and the bountiful earth, mother of Persephone.
Persephone, above right, Greek goddess of the Underworld and of spring rebirth, daughter of Demeter.
Sappho (ca. 620-570 BCE), above left, the world’s first great love poet.
Themistoclea (6th century BCE), above right, philosopher and priestess at Delphi who taught Pythagoras.
Boudicca (died around 61 CE), above left, kick-ass British queen who fought a war of resistance against the Romans.
Zenobia (240–274?), above right, kick-ass Syrian queen of Palmyra who conquered Egypt and also fought the Romans.
Enheduanna (ca. 2300 BCE), above left, Sumerian-Akkadian poet and the first known author in the history of human civilization.
Puabi (ca. 2600 BCE), above right, queen in ancient Sumer around the time of the First Dynasty of Ur—before the pyramids in Egypt had even been built.
P.S. If you’re on Pinterest, check out our Bedsheet Costumes board.
UPDATE: And one more!
Tin Hinan (4th century), above, legendary queen and founding matriarch of the Tuareg people.
It’s our favorite month.
Halloween is just 30 days away. Have you decided on your costume yet? Have you started thinking about your costume yet? Time to get cracking!
We’ve been incredibly busy this past month getting ready for the October rush. We uploaded brand new costume designs for Ixchel (the Maya goddess who’s going to destroy the world on December 21—kidding), Freyja (the chief goddess of the Norse pantheon), Isis (the Egyptian savior goddess of magic and motherhood), Fu Hao (amazing Shang Dynasty warrior queen), Puabi (queen in ancient Sumer—before the pyramids in Egypt were even built), Enheduanna (the first known author in the entire history of human civilization), and Marie de France (brilliant and influential poet at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine).
We’ve also updated the sourcing for all our other costumes, replacing old product links and finding new items wherever necessary. Stuff is constantly selling out though, especially now that the costume season is shifting into high gear, so move fast if there’s something you really need for your outfit.
Plus we have new stuff coming down the pike:
- A costume contest! Send in pictures of yourself in one of our costumes (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) for a chance to win a prize. We’ll announce the details later in October.
- Theme party ideas (fantasy literary salon, ancient Egypt, etc.).
- Three new costumes designs that are almost ready—if we can just find the time to finish them. One is a famous queen, one is a famous politician, and one is a famous inventor/movie star. Can you guess who?
- And finally, a Kickstarter campaign and video to raise the funding for our next season.
Be sure to “like” our Facebook page for the most up-to-date announcements. Follow us on Twitter too, and check out our Pinterest boards. (Is Pinterest a ton of fun or what?)
Stay tuned!
Hi, everybody! It’s Friday, August 31, and Halloween is exactly two months away. We’re back for another season of costuming, with some cool new designs and lots of fun stuff coming up.
Last year was amazing. We had 5 million page views the week of Halloween, our server spontaneously combusted, and we were covered by national media in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. It was awesome.
We’re shooting for an even bigger audience this year, and we’d especially like to get the word out earlier. I got a zillion emails last year (okay, not really a zillion) from people saying “Oh man! I wish I’d seen your site sooner! I’m totally bookmarking this for next year!” So we’re going to try to get on the radar before it’s too late for people to plan their fabulous mind-blowing costumes.
The Take Back Halloween website is our main center of operations, of course, but we’re also going to post regular updates on Facebook and Twitter. We’re also on Pinterest, which looks like it’ll be fantastic once we figure it out. (As of this writing we’re still in practice mode over there, figuring out how to pin stuff and follow people and all that. Don’t look, it’s embarrassing.)
We’ve also added a Donate page, because this site is entirely self-funded. We have no grant money, no backers, nothing. It’s all out of our pockets. So, if you appreciate our work and you’d like to help make the world safe for creative costumes, please consider pitching in a few dollars. Your support means everything.
Stay tuned for more!
