On an ordinary day in February 2000 I attended a council meeting at Unisa wearing a pale green skirt and tunic top. The hem ended just above my knees and my summer-brown legs were bare down to bottle-green high-heeled leather pumps.
The next day, I went into work to meet the principal of the university wearing remorseless black — jeans, polo neck, jacket, huge kick-ass CAT boots with a tread that could grind gravel. The intervening event was the now-notorious whisky-flavoured kiss tendered by the chairperson of Unisa council.
Overnight, I had been transformed from a senior female academic into a victim of sexual harassment. And in the months that followed, while crusading through Unisa, mediation, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, the high court and the labour court, I had (I am mortified to admit) a far more mundane battle to fight with my wardrobe.
At the best of times professional women are beset by fairly consistent low-grade anxiety about their image and presentation.
The problem is exacerbated for ambitious academic women, who have a very fine balancing act to walk — the tendency, particularly in neo-liberal English universities, and often especially in faculties of humanities, is to favour a spectrum ranging from deliberate dressing down, through the ageing hippie leather sandal (or tweedy twinset-and-bad-shoes look, depending), to the bottom-of-the-clothes-basket-I-have-more-important-things-on-my-mind option.
On higher-level executive committees in the university, however, this image does not serve one as well, tending to reinforce the existing patriarchal assumptions that place women on the periphery of the serious business of running the university.
On the other hand, pay too much attention to your grooming, dress too smartly and your academic colleagues start deducting points from your IQ. Heaven forbid that you look like a “corporate cookie” — the huge risk of the dress-for-success guidelines that are such safe standbys for Cosmo and Fair Lady readers is their potential for making you risible in a scholarly setting.
And even talking about clothes or image is regarded as deeply unintellectual (unless it’s the paper on The Semiotics of Clotheiognomy in English Departments presented at an MLA conference in the Eighties) — so it’s not like you can even ask a mentor or role model for advice.
All of which can combine to make getting dressed for work in the morning a strategic and semiotic exercise the complexities of which would normally — in university environments anyway — require a small committee to be constituted.
So, that’s at the best of times.
What about the worst of times? Where one has unwittingly, naively, blundered into the murky zone of sexual danger and misinterpretation? Where one is haunted by the stern injunctions of the Kimberly-Clark tract handed out with one’s first pack of sanitary pads: “It is important to acknowledge that you, as a young woman, have a very special responsibility to the young men in your life.
“Male sexual feelings are aroused, in general, much more quickly and easily than your own. A sweater that seems merely fashionable to you may appear sexually provocative to your date. Obviously, the best way to cope with this unwanted state of affairs is to avoid setting the stage for it or irresponsibly provoking it.”
How? By wearing a chador?
And how on Earth does one armour oneself for a court appearance as plaintiff in a sexual harassment case, attempting to look serious, scholarly, credible, dignified, but nevertheless not such a dowdy dog that one’s claims to have inspired such behaviour in a man are treated with hilarious disbelief? (“You wish someone would gryp you! In your dreams, doll.”) And how does one even raise the issue without sounding like a piece of fluff?
My senior counsel was not much help. Apart from kindly pointing out to me that women are not generally required to wear gloves and hats in court these days, he offered as guideline a very unreassuring anecdote about an adultery-based divorce case in the Pretoria court many years ago where, as the “other woman” came forward to testify, the judge dismissed her, saying: “Ag nee wat, sy hoef nie te getuig nie. Ek kan sommer sien sy’s die soort vrou wat dit sal doen [Oh no, she doesn’t have to testify. I can clearly see she is the type of woman who would do that].”
A female colleague and I did a fair amount of travelling together in the two and a half years of the case’s duration and in giddy moods we would window-shop for positively the worst outfit to wear to court. (I think the winner was a pink snakeskin leather mini with matching zipped bomber jacket and ankle boots with spike heels. Close runner-up was a designer-ripped T-shirt with the legend “Bad Girl”.)
Transgressive and challenging as I was prepared to be on issues of principle, I knew I had to play it safe on packaging. And so, in the end, I wore a sober suit (with legs well-covered) and — what else? — my grandmother’s pearls.