My Smart Mouth: Vintage fashion, not vintage attitudes

By now, just about everyone in town is aware I am a vintage enthusiast. Most specifically, I have a passion for vintage clothing, but my love for the remnants of days gone by is not limited to fashion - I am also a fan of vintage dishes and kitchen implements, old furniture and home décor, vintage books and classic movies.

What I am not a fan of, is vintage attitudes.

Let me elaborate. It’s true that I love and often lament the “old fashioned’ manners of bygone eras when people sent thank-you cards, RSVP’d, and didn’t think it was okay to wear their pajamas in public. I usually carry a handkerchief, try to observe table etiquette, don’t take my kids or pets to parties if they aren’t invited, and always wear a slip under my dress. (Okay, that last one is simple practicality and I cannot stress it enough because, ladies, I CAN SEE YOUR BUTTS!) However, I am not laboring under the illusion that a return to 1950 would solve all the world’s problems.

Many people in my age demographic have successfully straddled the gap between the way things “were” and the technology boom and cultural changes of the past twenty-five years. I can recall when the principal had a paddle in his office, remember phone booths, was in my teens when the internet became common in households across America, and successfully resisted purchasing my first cell phone, on principle, until about 2005 or so. But I’m also comfortable with technology and don’t generally find it difficult to master its newer applications and uses, and I take a progressive stance on social issues.

I realize for many, all the changes we’ve seen in the past few decades are at best uncomfortable and can be overwhelming and a little frightening. It’s only natural for people to mistrust change; we’re all prone to feel comfort with what we know, and nostalgia for the way things were when we were kids and felt secure in our knowledge of the world and its workings. I’m certainly not immune to wishing, occasionally, that we could go back to “simpler” times – times when we didn’t have to worry about our kids being bullied on social media or shot in the classroom, subdivided farmland dotted with McMansions didn’t lurk around every bend in the road, and life did not require a credit card.

But what I think we need to remember is that the times have always been changing, and that’s not always a bad thing.

My grandmother was born in 1924, just six years after the end of World War I. The year she was born, Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential address to go out over the radio. Hemlines were rising, automobiles were becoming more and more common, and jazz music was scandalizing the older generation. Women had just gotten the vote, yet a woman’s security, safety and future still depended largely upon the men who would support and protect her; her worth, in the eyes of others, centered almost solely on her ability to attract a man and produce babies. There were people alive who had been born into slavery, blackface was considered entertainment, and children died of polio and would continue to do so for more than thirty years.

In 1951, my grandmother’s youngest brother enlisted in the Air Force and was sent to Texas for basic training. In his memoirs, which he recently delivered to me on a flash drive, he writes of his first experience of segregation.

“We spent several hours in the depot at Fort Worth, and I was amazed and shook up when I saw the two drinking fountains – one for whites and one for colored – I had never experienced blatant prejudice before.”

My dad was born in 1953. By then, nearly every home in America had a refrigerator and a radio, and televisions were making their way into the mainstream. Automobiles and heavy machinery had nearly completely replaced horse-power, and air-travel was a thing. A 1953 issue of Canadian periodical MacLeans ran an article entitled “Remember When Radio Was the Rage,” with a byline that read: “Before television shoves radio into the limbo hark back to the dizzy decade when we all twiddled knobs to get that squeaky music and roared with delight when the announcer forgot the mike was `live.’”

At the time of my father’s birth, however, there was still no vaccine for polio. Schools were still segregated in the south, while out west, Native American children were still forcibly removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, where they were beaten for speaking their native tongue and stripped of their cultural identity. Though technically legal on the federal level, access to birth control and family planning was limited by state laws, and women in the workforce made, on average, less than 65 percent of a man’s wages.

Twenty years later Dad and eight million others like him had come home from the Vietnam war, yet despite three major wars in the past fifty years, the public had little to no knowledge or understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it’s causes, or what to do for the G.I.’s who suffered from its effects.

By the time I came of age in the 1990’s, segregation, if not discrimination, was a thing of the past. The wage gap was narrowing, more women than men were earning bachelor’s degrees, and women’s health services and family planning were widely available. Stigma around mental health issues was being challenged and environmental and social activism was on the rise. With growing access to the internet, the Information Age was taking off at the speed of…well…information.

In this same era, the year after I graduated high school in 1997, gay college student Matthew Shepard was beaten, tortured, and left to die alone near Laramie, Wyoming, in a crime motivated by hatred and fear of that which was different.

As much as I might miss rotary dial phones, drive-in movie theaters, and the due-date cards inside of library books that told you who had checked the book out before you, I am ultimately grateful for the progress that has brought us to where we are today. I sometimes wish I didn’t live in a time when leggings are considered an acceptable substitute for pants and it’s possible for the babysitter to let our five-year-old watch The Walking Dead, but I feel lucky to be from a generation so far removed from the reality of watching a child die in your arms that we consider vaccinations to be a parenting “choice.”

I’m glad to be living in a time when resources and treatment are available for people suffering from PTSD, depression, and other debilitating mental illness, women of color hold seats in Congress, my friends and loved ones are free to love whom they choose and live a happy and fulfilled life, and when asked what she aspires to be when she grows up, our eight-year-old pauses thoughtfully then says “maybe a rancher or a horse veterinarian,” not automatically, “I want to be a rancher’s wife.”

Despite the strides we’ve made, however, America still finds itself divided along lines of race, religion, and class. Hate-fueled political rhetoric (or is that politically-fueled hate rhetoric?) is rampant, fear and suspicion flourish, and amidst it all our children have a front-row seat, lit by the screens of the devices that are their version of security and normalcy.

My point is this: although we all experience moments of nostalgia for the “good old days,” the good old days were never all good, and not all change is bad. What change is, is inevitable. You can resist it, embrace it, or strive to limit, control or manipulate it to your advantage, but you cannot avoid it. The world moves on - no one has stopped it yet, and we’re all along for the ride.

The question is, when the story is told, as it inevitably will be, what part do you want to play? Orval Faubus, the Arkansas Governor who called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the steps of the Central High School in Little Rock after the historic ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, might have done a lot of other things in his life, but he’s only remembered for one. Don’t be that guy. Don’t let hatred, mistrust, and fear of the unknown be the legacy you leave behind.

Vintage fashion, folks, not vintage attitudes.