¹ Peterson, Iver, “Princeton Students Who Say ‘No’ and Mean ‘Entirely No,’” New York Times, April 18, 2005, page B3Google Scholar Late Edition, East Coast. The Anscombe Society weblog (http://blogs.princeton.edu/anscombe/, retrieved on September 3, 2009) features fifteen links to articles on modesty, all but two of which focus on women's attire.

² Israelsen, Sara, “Modesty is Fashion Statement,” Salt Lake City Desert News, October 8, 2005, page B1Google Scholar, Morning edition.

³ “Where Fashion Meets Modesty,” Marketplace (American Public Media), January 9, 2006. Available from http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/01/09/PM200601097.html.

⁴ “Rebels With A Cause: Good Girls Lead a Revolution,” interview of Wendy Shalit by Ferguson, Lisa, Our Sunday Visitor 96 (4):12, May 20, 2007.Google Scholar

⁵ DeMoss, Nancy Leigh, The Look: Does God Really Care What I Wear? (Buchanan, MI: Revive Our Hearts, 2003)Google Scholar; Gresh, Dannah, Secret Keeper: The Delicate Power of Modesty (Chicago: Moody Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Pollard, Jeff, Christian Modesty and the Public Undressing of America (San Antonio, Texas: Vision Forum, 2004)Google Scholar; Vaughan, David and Vaughan, Diane, The Beauty of Modesty: Cultivating Virtue in the Face of a Vulgar Culture (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2005).Google Scholar

⁶ American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 14–15.Google Scholar Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html on July 1, 2007.

⁷ Responding to the view that provocatively dressed girls are “playing out male fantasies … without risk,” Susan Bordo writes, “22 to 29 percent of all rapes against girls occur when they are 11 and younger … The reality is that young girls are much more likely to be raped by friends and family members than by strangers and that very few men, whether strangers or acquaintances, are unaffected by a visual culture of nymphets prancing before their eyes, exuding a sexual knowledge and experience that preteens don't really have. Feminists used to call this ‘rape culture.’ We never hear that phrase anymore.” Susan Bordo, “The Empire of Images in our World of Bodies,” Chronicle of Higher Education vol. 50, issue 17, December 19, 2003, p. B6.

⁸ Pollard, , Christian Modesty, 71.Google Scholar

⁹ Vaughan, and Vaughan, , Beauty of Modesty, 128–41.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., 128 and 134.

¹¹ Ibid., 134.

¹² Ibid., 191.

¹³ Shalit, Wendy, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (New York: Free Press, 1999), 67.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ “There was in the antebellum South a kind of institutionalizing of female-slave/slave-master sexual liaisons that was maintained through something called the ‘fancy trade.’ This was a special kind of slave trading involving the sale of beautiful black women for the exclusive purpose of becoming the mistresses of wealthy slave owners.” Williams, Delores, Sisters in the Wilderness: the Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (New York: Orbis, 1993), 69.Google Scholar

¹⁶ “… in the early 1800s, all the [recreational] water activities were strictly segregated with each sex either on its own secluded stretch of beach or alternating in springs or pools at different hours.” Pollard, , Christian Modesty, 36.Google Scholar “A man of honor was someone who respected female modesty—that is, every female's modesty, whether she was rich or poor, from the country or the inner city [followed by an anecdote about a nineteenth-century duel sparked by one man's impugning the virtue of another man's wife].” Shalit, , Return to Modesty, 149–50.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In a recent summary of scholarship on nineteenth-century women, Barbara Cutter describes this account of “true womanhood” as the current dominant scholarly view of nineteenth-century white women. While she and other historians are currently nuancing and complicating this view, demonstrating that women's public roles were highly contested through the mid-nineteenth-century and the Civil War, she agrees that at least in theory, “gender ideology … divided women into the rigid categories of good and evil” and that there were many who believed strongly that the ideal woman was confined to the domestic sphere, even as its boundaries remained unclear. Cutter, Barbara, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of Redemptive Womanhood, 1830–1865 (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 4–12, at 5.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The mid-nineteenth century saw the move of “respectable” native-born women away from factory work when immigrants, especially Irish women, moved into these jobs. Such work lost prestige as wages dropped, and it also lost its association with female virtue. Alice Kessler-Harris records the following statement by a dashing young man in A. I. Cumming's 1847 novel Factory Girl: “Acquainted with factory girls? What do you ask me such a question for? Do you suppose I would disgrace my character by associating with that class? Not I, unless it were for a little fun or a—conquest.” In Harris, Alice Kessler, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, 20^th Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford, 2003), 65.Google Scholar Nancy Woloch confirms this literary evidence: “For late nineteenth-century working girls, paid work was irregular and interchangeable; it shifted from shop to mill to factory to unemployment in rapid succession. Urban migrants who lived apart from their families or employers … were considered ‘women adrift’ … Women adrift sometimes ventured into jobs as chorus girls or dance hall hostesses. This ‘sexual service sector,’ historian Joanne Meyerowitz suggests, was part of the urban economy.” Woloch, , Women and the American Experience: A Concise History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 156.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The image of “Black women as ‘loose, oversexed, erotic, readily responsive to the sexual advances of men, especially white men’ derives from the antebellum southern way of putting the responsibility for this liaison upon ‘immoral’ slave women—black females whose ‘passionate’ nature was supposed to have stemmed from their African heritage. Deborah Gray White discusses the making of this image under the rubric of ‘Jezebel’ … bell hooks contends that this kind of white, antebellum image-making about black wom en's sexuality has contributed greatly to the process of devaluing black womanhood that continues to this day.” Williams, , Sisters, 70–71.Google Scholar

More recent scholarship confirms that whites viewed even free black women in the antebellum period as incapable of modesty: “Blackness marked them [African Americans] as outside the boundaries of middle-class circles, and caricatures depicting black women's fatally flawed attempts to appear to be ‘ladies’ were used to fix such lines of demarcation. Whatever their ambitions, free black women could never achieve the pious, refined, demure, and modest brand of womanhood reserved for their white counterparts.” Jones, Martha S., All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Popular Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 18.Google Scholar

²⁰ Omolade, Barbara, “The Unbroken Circle: A Historical and Contemporary Study of Black Single Mothers and Their Families,” 3 Wisconsin Women's Law Journal (1987) 239–74, at 242.Google Scholar

²¹ I am indebted here to Delores Williams' analysis of “social-role surrogacy,” in which African American women have been forced and/or persuaded to accept responsibilities that properly belong to white women. See her chapter entitled “Social-Role Surrogacy: Naming Black Women's Oppression,” in Williams, Sisters.

²² For a fuller discussion of this history see “Nativism and Racism,” in Barbara Andolsen, Hilkert, Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

²³ Patrick, Anne E., Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology (New York: Continuum, 1996), 73.Google Scholar

²⁴ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica IIa, IIae, q. 141Google Scholar, a. 1, reply obj. 1 in The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Second Part of the Second Part, QQ CXLI - CLXX, Literally Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1911–1925), 2.

²⁵ Patrick, , Liberating Conscience, 89–90.Google Scholar

²⁶ Keenan, James, Moral Wisdom: Lessons and Texts from the Catholic Tradition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 2004), 148.Google Scholar

²⁷ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica IIa, IIae, q. 160, a. 2Google Scholar, response in The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Second Part of the Second Part, QQ CXLI - CLXX, Literally Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1911–1925), 213–14.

²⁸ DeMoss, , The Look, 30.Google Scholar

²⁹ “Our culture is saturated with heterosexuality. One marker of this … ‘is the socially sanctioned right of all males to sexualize all females, regardless of age or status’ …. This sexualization occurs in many forms, ranging from sexual violence to sexualized evaluation …. The most subtle and deniable way sexual evaluation is enacted—and arguably the most ubiquitous—is through gaze, or visual inspection of the body.” Fredrickson, Barbara L. and Roberts, Tomi-Ann, “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women's Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 21 (1997): 173–206, at 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ “The potential for objectification fosters habitual body monitoring, leaving women with surpluses of shame and anxiety, a shortage of peak motivational states, and scant awareness of internal bodily states. We argue that the accumulation of such experiences could, for some women, contribute to psychological disorders,” Fredrickson and Roberts, “Objectification Theory,” 186.

³¹ Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” originally published in Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975) 6–18.Google Scholar Retrieved from https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/pages/diffpages.action?pageIdhttps://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/pages/diffpages.action?pageId=15988&originalId=59642580 on August 25, 2009. Although this study is over thirty years old, it remains highly influential in the field of aes thetics and is cited approvingly in many recent works; Worth, cf. Sarah, “Feminist Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Gaut, Berys and Lopez, Dominic Iver, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 444–45Google Scholar; Waugh, Patricia, Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 510.Google Scholar

³² For example, Bonnie J. Dow documents the rhetorical shift in the Miss America beauty pageant from simple rejection of feminist critiques to the claim that the pageant enhances women's economic and social status by affording them an opportunity to capitalize on their beauty and talent. Dow, Bonnie J., “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,” in Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 6, No. 1 (2003): 127–60.Google Scholar

³³ Farley, Margaret, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2006), 211.Google Scholar

³⁴ French, John R. P. and Raven, Bertram H., “The Bases of Social Power,” in Studies in Social Power, Cartwright, D., ed. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Institute for Social Research, 1959)Google Scholar. Dozens of subsequent researchers have used French and Raven's typology to ana lyze social power.

³⁵ Rudd, Nancy A. and Lennon, Sharron J., “Social Power and Appearance Management among Women,” in Appearance and Power, ed. Johnson, Kim K. P. and Lennon, Sharron J. (New York: Oxford, 1999), 153–72, at 155.Google Scholar

³⁶ Rudd, and Lennon, , “Social Power,” 155.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., 156.

³⁸ Fredrickson, and Roberts, , “Objectification Theory,” 178.Google Scholar

³⁹ The authors note that dominant (white male) culture prefers the beauty of white heterosexual women “and others seeking upward social mobility” and so these individuals may be more preoccupied with their appearance than women of color, poor women, and lesbians who are evaluated more negatively. Fredrickson, and Roberts, , “Objectification Theory,” 178.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Rudd, and Lennon, , “Social Power,” 156.Google Scholar

⁴¹ “[Women] should not … abandon evidence of femininity to the point of gender norm violation.” Margaret Rucker, Elizabeth Anderson, and April Kangas, “Clothing, Power and the Workplace,” in Appearance and Power, 59–77, at 61.

⁴² Rudd, and Lennon, , “Social Power,” 157.Google Scholar

⁴³ Lennon, Sharron J., “Sex, Dress and Power in the Workplace,” in Appearance and Power, 103–26, at 104–05.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ogle, Jennifer Paff and Damhorst, Mary Lynn, “Dress for Success in the Popular Press,” in Appearance and Power, 79–101, at 89.Google Scholar Rejection of “feminine” clothing for working women represented slightly less than half the articles the authors surveyed; nevertheless, these findings document a perceived conflict between wielding different types of social power.

⁴⁵ Lennon, Sharron J., “Sex, Dress and Power,” 119.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Patrick, Anne E., Liberating Conscience, 73.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Berry, Wendell, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 134–35.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Patrick, , Liberating Conscience, 84Google Scholar, citing Valerie Goldstein, Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960) 100–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “The ‘Loves’ and ‘Troubles’ of African-American Women's Bodies: The Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Townes, Emilie (New York: Orbis, 1997), 232–49, at 238.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Copeland, M. Shawn, “Memory, Emancipation, and Hope: Political Theology in the ‘Land of the Free,’” The Santa Clara Lectures 4, no.1 (Santa Clara University, November 1997): 7.Google Scholar