Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [41]
Mr. Miller, at the same time, found a way to get along here without being a member. He wasn’t the only one.
But to do so he and his family, and the others, had made certain concessions. Most conspicuously, they had adopted the local code of dress. For the Millers this was not too drastic a change because they had followed a similar one in Pennsylvania. For us, though, the matter was different. The onus fell particularly on the woman.
When I gazed at a Minimite matron’s white, pleated cylindrical head covering, I saw a small barn silo overturned on her head. Was she overweight or not? This you would never know, given the bulky apron that drapes, like a piece of chain mail, over the midriff. Her eyeglasses are small, dark, and round, like those of a gemologist. She can see you, but you can’t see her. In public she wears a thick black bonnet with tie-strings at the neck that wiggle like spider legs. Like the viceroy moth, which mimics the colorings of the bitter-tasting monarch butterfly, she thus renders herself visually inedible to the potential predator. To modern outsiders like us, such bodily bulwarks appeared to have been inspired by a puritanical desire to bind women in protective armor and keep them in their place. It seemed stilted to adhere to a fashion of dress from which everyone else had desisted a hundred years earlier.
For a while, Mary had made at least a modest attempt to abide by local sensibilities. We knew that core members of the community considered any dress higher than ankle-length a mini-skirt, and they recoiled from women in pants. So whenever she was out in the open, she wore a long dress that buttoned all the way to the neck. She didn’t keep up the practice. An adventurous grasshopper got under the folds of her skirt while she was gardening and ripped away her sense of modesty.
“Modest? That’s not modest!” she cried. Then and there, she threw caution to the wind and changed into her pants.
Mary now wore trousers in full view of the neighbors buggying by. This exhibitionism had gone on for several weeks. Was she bringing scandal? She couldn’t tell if the women had grown cooler towards her, or if the occasional pauses in conversation were the reticences that had always been there. Finally she asked.
“Immodest?” replied Sally, an older daughter of one of the neighboring farmers. “Oh, we’ve never been bothered by what you wear. For you, pants are modest. It’s people like Betsy or Clara that shouldn’t be wearing pants.” Betsy and Clara were two neighborhood maidens who were, shall we say, heavyset. What was this?
To Sally it wasn’t the svelte that were worrisome; it was the rotund. Thus Mary inferred that it wasn’t so much the looker who was being protected from lustful thoughts; it was the instigator of looks who was being buffered from embarrassment to herself and the witnesses. This threw her for a loop. If Sally’s feelings were any indication of the dress code’s intent, it wasn’t puritanism but something almost the opposite. Rather than compelling everyone to be the same, it was a means of embracing those who were different. Sally wanted to save the fat from becoming marginalized.
We had gotten it all backwards. Suddenly we realized that Minimite rules on dress shared something with other Minimite rules, like those on men’s beards, or for that matter on technology.
Mary returned to the garden in pants, her conscience clear. And she decided to continue wearing a long skirt when she visited other Minimite households, having grasped better the rationale for doing so.
With this misunderstanding removed, it became easier than ever to mix