Tradition for thee, but not for me

We went to visit a high school today; one that aims to prepare elite Vietnamese students for the post-WTO world by ditching the passive rote style favored by many Asian educational institutions for a more interactive, American style of teaching.

I do not venture to say whether or not this will be successful, though the students were extraordinarily bright and engaging and nice; one shudders to think what would have happened had a gaggle of Asian journalists who spoke no English invaded a posh suburban high school in America. But one, completely unrelated thing stuck out:

The girls have three uniforms.

They have ordinary uniforms that look much like American school unifroms of an earlier era: blue skirt and white middy shirt with blue ties.

They have dress uniforms, consisting of a white skirt and white middy shirt with red trim and a red tie, and a fairly snazzy red beret to rest on top.

Then they have traditional white ao dais. What are those for, I asked.

Those are for Mondays, I was told. Mondays, apparently, are when the school salutes the flag and sings the national anthem.

And do the boys have a special uniform for Mondays?

Giggles. Nooooooooooooo. The boys always wear the same short-sleeved shirt, blue pants, and tie.

This is a really common pattern in almost every non-western country; the girls wear traditional clothes, while the men wear western suits and ties. It is not universal, but it is nearly universal enough to make me ask what integral part of the human psyche this stands in for, the men wearing the garb of the economically successful, while the women remain mannequins for the past.

I think the ao dais are much more attractive than western school uniforms (and don't get me started on the dress policies of the Riverdale Country School. But surely the men would look equally fetching in whatever the Vietnamese elite males wore 200 years ago?

Comments

Men can partake of culture, they can lead it, they can transform it but they do not get to be arbitrators of what is and is not to be valued and preserved. That role is reserved to women. It's an aspect of child rearing, early childhood education and being an arbitor of what is and is not acceptable pulic male bahavior. This repesents an enromous power of women over the behavior of men. Whould sparta have been sparta without mothers telling their sons the return with thier shields or on them?

Men are free to experiment in the wolrd of work precicly because the culture is preserved in the home.

Posted by Stan Forrester | November 14, 2007 12:50 PM

This is not necessarily true of Chinese immigrants to the United States. However, it does appear from my viewing of older (pre-1960) photographs that it is the Chinese men who are adopting suits before women adopting other Western dress. Maybe all women prefer a sharp-dressed man?

I've noticed Megan's phenomenon on the streets of LA's Indian enclaves.

Posted by Klug | November 14, 2007 1:11 PM

But surely the men would look equally fetching in whatever the Vietnamese elite males wore 200 years ago?

Based on my quick googling, that would be the ao dais cut more appropriately for male figures.

Posted by Christina | November 14, 2007 1:26 PM

" (and don't get me started on the dress policies of the Riverdale Country School."

Whoa...you went to school with "The Archies"?

Posted by Njorl | November 14, 2007 1:30 PM

This is a really common pattern in almost every non-western country; the girls wear traditional clothes, while the men wear western suits and ties.

The girls were wearing "western" clothing on non-Mondays, so it would seem more accurate to say that the girls sometimes wore traditional clothing, but that the men never did.

I think the ao dais are much more attractive than western school uniforms

Perhaps the men are less interested in wearing pretty clothing?

Posted by ad | November 14, 2007 1:44 PM

I've often thought that, in the US, men simply had less variety and fewer options in terms of clothing. Teaching in a business school, I sometimes hear my male colleagues ask each other whether they wear ties to teach. It's a stark choice - with tie or without. For women, there's more of a continuum and more variation.

As ad pointed out, the girls in Vietnam are wearing 'western' clothes, they just also wear other things. Men get one uniform, and little choice.

Posted by Ann | November 14, 2007 1:55 PM

One more thing - one striking aspect of traveling around the world now compared to 100 or more years ago is how standardized clothing is. Most of the world now wears 'western' clothing, whether it's suits or t-shirts. One of my fondest memories from visiting India was seeing a woman walk through a field in early morning wearing a lovely bright flowing sari, and it was always fun to see the straw hats that the Hakka women wore while working outside in Hong Kong. But unusual clothing is surely less common than it once was.

Posted by Ann | November 14, 2007 2:00 PM

This is definitely a worldwide pattern. You see it in India and Pakistan. Men in traditional clothing typically are working class or rural. Woemn retain tradtional clothing much longer. Another example of Western = power is in military uniforms worldwide - not pants and shirts which are just more practical in vehicles, but in dress uniforms where function doesn't matter.

Posted by Jim | November 14, 2007 4:47 PM

Interesting.

What I picked up on wasn't the traditional aspect, but the fact that girls (later women) are expected to have and wear three times as many outfits. That's a pretty significant extra cost being imposed on the girls while the boys skate with one suit for everything.

Posted by Jannia | November 14, 2007 4:53 PM

so, how many different ways can we slice this bread?

How 'bout the most important one first.
guys in general don't care about their clothes.

Jannia... the boys aren't exactly skating. They are simply not given an option. The women have 2 options and 1 requirement.

Where unis are required in the US it is largely the same... The girls have many options, and can mix as they wish, the guys can generally wear long pants and a shirt, sometimes a tie.

the thing is: do the guys ACTUALLY care about this lack of choice? Probably only a few do.

In the work world, a guy usually wears something similar to what the male bosses wears in the comp wear. Boss in a suit, guy has suit. Boss dresses casually? guy mirrors. If there are all female bosses, guy will be as formal as they. Women have tons of lattitude, and they ALSO seem to care about that. If you told me I had to wear suits to work everyday starting tomorrow, I'd probably get 6 very similar suits. It's work, I'm not there to look good, just presentable.

So there is this certain idea that women aren't ALLOWED to wear the same blue pants and white shirt every day to work, but it's not that simple. They could, it is usally they who WANT to wear different things. The guy just wants comfort and clothes that don't wear out too soon, even if it's school.

Posted by D | November 14, 2007 5:35 PM

Jim wrote: Another example of Western = power is in military uniforms worldwide - not pants and shirts which are just more practical in vehicles, but in dress uniforms where function doesn't matter.

Well, when you consider that the modern business suit is derived from the British high-collar military tunic, and even looks a lot like one if the collar and lapels are flipped out...

Posted by anony-mouse | November 14, 2007 7:38 PM

Chinese primary school students have two uniforms for boys and two for girls. Formal and p.e. with variations for weather. In Shenzhen the excercise uniforms all light blue and white, mostly light blue for boys, mostly white for girls. Nice uniforms are slacks and skirts. Oh, and red scarves for the young pioneers (all of them). Sometimes they have even have casual Fridays.

College students wear whatever, sometimes with odd results. I asked a student if she knew what the gigantic pot leaf on her t-shirt was, and she ventured "Canadian flag".

Posted by Doc | November 14, 2007 8:32 PM

Look, this has nothing to do with power, tradition, or economic opportunity. It's very simple:

Women look good in a wide varity of clothing styles.

Men only look good in one thing.

Indeed, the economic and political dominance of the West can be directly traced to the discovery of the one outfit men actually look admirable rather than just slightly less ridiculous: the power suit and tie. So it shouldn't be surprising that men the world over are adopting Western garb.

Posted by Tom Ault | November 14, 2007 9:06 PM

Hi Megan:

As a East Asian myself, I think I have an explanation you might enjoy. It is long, but I believe it completely.

While you're in Vietnam, find a Vietnamese world history textbook, and ask a friend to explain it. You should find that 80% of the text focuses a few topics - the Greek and Roman empires, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of America. Topics such as Egypt and the Middle Ages are entirely ignored. My guess is probably 50% focuses on Europe, post 1800. Why? Because to the East Asian, the only relevant question in world history is how and why we came to be so comprehensively outclassed by Europeans.

For most East Asian nations, Westernization is viewed as a necessary evil. Modernization was forced upon us, and in a response to this external foreign force, we must gain economic power parity to survive. Most of us take the example of the Meiji restoration to heart - to fight fire with fire, although hopefully without the excesses of prewar Japan.

Asian nations had and continue to have an existential dilemma. We could not survive without modernization, lest we be cut up and parceled out like Africa or South America. Yet Westernization would kill us as well. Capitalism has always been with us, but Western contract capitalism, that puts litigation before human relationships, that pits juniors against seniors, that cleanly separates the public from the personal, is deeply contradictory to our natural inclinations.

So we are either damned to be consumed by the West, or to join it.

So this brings us to the clothes. We follow the Japanese example - to absorb Western knowledge, but retain our culture. This is an awkward compromise, but it is our only choice. The metropolitan cities will be sacrificed to the West, filled with glittering Western skyscrapers, Starbucks, and the branch offices of Standard Chartered, staffed by suited men who will compete with West. But they will return to homes and rural areas, maintained by women who continue in the traditional way, raising their children to perpetuate and replenish the culture.

We must have both - men who will wear suits to fight in the global competition, and women who will make sure that the men are not themselves consumed.

Posted by altoids | November 15, 2007 1:40 AM

Um, this is blindingly simple, and any feminist ought to be able to figure out. altoids has it, but unintentionally:

The metropolitan cities will be sacrificed to the West, filled with glittering Western skyscrapers, Starbucks, and the branch offices of Standard Chartered, staffed by suited men who will compete with West. But they will return to homes and rural areas, maintained by women who continue in the traditional way, raising their children to perpetuate and replenish the culture.

We must have both - men who will wear suits to fight in the global competition, and women who will make sure that the men are not themselves consumed.

This is simply sex discrimination: men for the office, women for the home. It exists for the same reason that Hmong men today wear Western clothing while women all wear traditional clothing; that Muslim women wear veils; that Turkish men living in Berlin send home to Anatolia for a traditional village bride.

Vietnamese society has extremely rigid sex-role assignations for women. Women are to be married by 28 at the latest; otherwise they start to smell "like an old fish", as the Vietnamese expression has it. They will have a child within 1 year after marriage. If their husband is the oldest child in his branch of the family and thus expected to carry on the lineage, then they will continue having children until they produce a son. They will if necessary use ultrasound and selective abortion to ensure this. (Vietnam has what is sometimes estimated as the world's highest abortion rate, and the male-female birth ratio has climbed to over 110 to 100 in some urban areas according to a recent UNICEF study.) After marriage, they move to their husband's house, where they will live with their mother-in-law for at least a year. They are expected to keep house and to follow their mother-in-law's instructions on how to do so.

Vietnamese women participate in the workforce and have considerable fiscal autonomy, especially as small business owners and traders; this is a traditional characteristic which makes Vietnamese women less insecure and more autonomous than women in many other societies. In many marriages, women are the breadwinners, and they often have practical if not legal control over family finances. But they almost never reach managerial level in large businesses and organizations. There are plenty of female members of the National Assembly, as this is largely a showcase body; there are no female members of the Politburo.

Note that as is usual in things like these, the "traditiona" Ao Dai is actually a recent, modernizing outfit. The first outfits which one would recognize as an "ao dai" date to the 1930s and were intended to fuse the traditional imperial Vietnamese "ao ngu than" with French fashion.

I'm very glad you noticed this. I think few male writers would have even picked it up.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 2:21 AM

It's not about the men getting all the success while the girls become mannequins. It's about the women being stewards of tradition and the culture's values. I'm not judging, but I am saying: since the dawn of time, women have had this special role in society.

In Japan, women wear kimonos during ceremonies. But they wear business suits when they work.

Posted by PEG | November 15, 2007 2:33 AM

Note, also, that I don't think many girls would choose NOT to wear the ao dai on Mondays. Within the cultural context, it's true that assigning the role of symbolic cultural/national preservation to women does give them a kind of power. Similarly, there is a kind of social power embodied in the cheerleader's uniform in a traditional US high school. I know of grassroots women's groups here where there is nothing the women consider more empowering than putting on ao dais to appear at a public event: it signals that they are respected, legitimate members of society.

But it's an absolute giveaway that women are required to don ao dais on the day everyone salutes the flag. They instantiate the nation's idea of its own tradition. And God forbid you should want to be a non-traditional woman in such a society -- to wait until after 28 to get married, to divorce your husband, to stop having kids after one or two girls, or to go for a managerial position at PetroVietnam. The women who go for that stuff tend to be either hard-core Communists with their commitment to serious equality, or the offspring of ancient Mandarin/royal families, or raised in the West, or (like Mme. Ton Nu Thi Ninh) all three. Though as the country modernizes, women's traditional roles are becoming increasingly untenable, and more and more women are pushing to change the boundaries.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 2:43 AM

Tom Ault is wrong that this has nothing to do with power or economic opportunity. Where I live, close to an Arab area in London, you see men out with their families. The men and boys are wearing western dress. The women wear the head-to-toe hijab or niqab which covers them completely including the eyes (often there is a grille to allow the women to see out partially but not completely). This has nothing to do with what looks good. Quite the reverse as the point of these garments is to render women unviewable (I can't say invisible as the clothing is too striking, even in multicultural London, to pass as invisible).

Posted by charlotte | November 15, 2007 8:46 AM

There are a few things that need to be clarified.
1. The uniforms also designate whether or not the childs parents were associated with the US backed government, ARVN, or christianity. If they were blue they will not have the opportunity to attend higher education schools.
2. This is an extreme police state. People are watched and punished.
3. Genocide is occuring as they try to destroy the hill people (Montgnards).
4. Corruption is still rampant in government.
5. The south is still far ahead of the north in terms of economics, political freedom, and corruption.
6. If the commies hadn't got involved Vietnam would have been the first South Korea of SEA.

Yea all this is debatable. I heard it from our guide on a Milspec tour so consider the source. Four of his five uncles died in re education camps as they made stone into rice so he might be bitter. We were surprised at his comments since he does work for the government.

Posted by bman | November 15, 2007 10:15 AM

Brooksfoe, others:

At some level, it is sex discrimination. But I think it is unfair to expect Asian nations to move much faster that this towards your Western ideals. Modernization created large stresses in Asian societies, and you could argue that adoption of communism was a direct consequence of modernization and the rural response to modernization. (It's ironic that the clash of Western philosophies, communism and liberal democracy, was fought by spending millions of lives in Asia. It would be absurd if it were not so pathetic.)

Again, modernization is considered a necessary evil, similar to war. Just as men do most of the fighting, men deal with most of the multinationals. This is not to say that women are barred from business - hard-headed middle-aged women are often known for their brusque negotiation skills. But there are two kinds of business, that which is internal, and that which is in direct competition with the West. There is a societal consensus that, like in war, men should be used for this particular struggle.

Besides, I thought that in post-modern America, non-judgmental tolerance, understanding and feelings trump everything else.

Posted by altoids | November 15, 2007 10:36 AM

At some level, it is sex discrimination. But I think it is unfair to expect Asian nations to move much faster that this towards your Western ideals.

altoids, I don't really think there's any point in the West "expecting" anything -- Asian countries will do what they will do. But as a simple observation, I see Vietnamese women increasingly unhappy with the fit between "traditional" cultural expectations and a rapidly changing, capitalist modern economy (and mass culture). This jibes with what happens in just about every country in the world as the economy takes off and women enter the workforce. A culture that doesn't handle this transition well ends up with social stresses like, well, Japan's, where failure to create egalitarian gender roles is partly responsible for a birthrate falling to 1.1 kids per woman.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 1:07 PM

failure to create egalitarian gender roles is partly responsible for a birthrate falling to 1.1 kids per woman.

Can you expand on that? Because the most radically egalitarian/androgynous model would involve women not getting pregnant, ever, whereas a hard-core traditionalist model would involve women not doing anything but getting pregnant.

Posted by Rob Lyman | November 15, 2007 2:20 PM

It's solely and exclusively about the objectification and oppression of women. End of story. This "guardians of culture" stuff is the rhetoric by which that objectification and oppression happen.

Many complicated questions of public policy and cultural practice are aired in this blog, but this isn't one of them.

Posted by Rich | November 15, 2007 2:28 PM

Because nothing proves your case as conclusively as strong and empathic assertion. Especially if you use the phrase "solely and exclusively".

Posted by ad | November 15, 2007 2:45 PM

Can you expand on that? Because the most radically egalitarian/androgynous model would involve women not getting pregnant, ever, whereas a hard-core traditionalist model would involve women not doing anything but getting pregnant.

As I understand it, Rob, young woman in Japan are choosing not to marry because the traditional role of a wife and mother in Japan is more circumscribed than that of a single working girl. Hence the drop in the birthrate.

Posted by sprite | November 15, 2007 2:53 PM

So in other words, if the role of "working mother" were culturally available to Japanese women, the birthrate might rise because they wouldn't have to give up as much to have kids.

OK, that's at least plausible.

Posted by Rob Lyman | November 15, 2007 4:20 PM

Brooksfoe:

Japan has falling birthrates for many reasons, although the bleak choice between housewifery and everything else is certainly one of them.

However, I don't think there is any inevitability to Asian nations following Western ideas of gender equality. For one, the most liberal nations have equally dismal birth rates (Germany? Denmark?). In the US, the demographic trends overwhelmingly point to liberal metropolitan areas having lower birth rates than their rural conservative counterparts.

And of course, lest we forget, the highly patriarchal societies of the Middle East, Africa, and South America have much higher birth rates than the West or the newly industrialized East.

In the long run, we'll find out what societies are viable, and which aren't. Confucian societies have a pretty good track record so far.

Posted by altoids | November 15, 2007 6:59 PM

In every advanced society where women enter the labor force, birth rates fall dramatically. Some wealthy Mideastern countries have high birthrates because women are so oppressed that they aren't even in the labor force. East Asian societies aren't going that route -- and it isn't realistic for Mideastern countries in the medium term, either.

There are certainly other factors that influence fertility in advanced country besides discriminatory gender roles for women. But the countries with the lowest birthrates in Europe, Italy and Spain, have the most restrictive gender roles. Northern Europe and France now have higher birthrates than southern Europe -- an extraordinary reversal of stereotype over the past 30 years. (Spain's birthrate fell from 2.86 in 1970 to 1.1 in 1995!) Flexible and egalitarian gender roles in northern Europe have played a big part in that.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 16, 2007 7:56 AM

The question is not "Why do the Vietnamese do this?" but "Do we do the same here?"

Data: My girls sometimes wear jeans & t-shirts, and sometimes wear frilly dresses almost like something out of a William Merritt Chase painting. The latter invariably elicit praise from both family and strangers.* Now, if a little boy wore a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit or a sailor suit to school (or anywhere), he'd be ruined. Just ruined. (Remember, both Chase & Fauntleroy come from the exact same place and time, white Europhile middle America c. 1886.)

Conjecture: Western boys & men have a fairly narrow range of historical & geographical styles to choose from. For the most part, they are expected to dress from the Here And Now, and even minor variations stand out. Western girls & women have much broader ranges of historical & geographical styles to choose from.

* Oh, and we do not live in some Handmaid's Tale backwater of Rich's fevered imagining. We live in Ground Zero of liberalism, the SF Bay Area.

Posted by steve | November 16, 2007 2:25 PM

Pretty much the same as for non-Westerners, then.

Actually, whatever a man or boy wears, people are unlikely to compliment him by saying the clothes are pretty, beautiful, fetching etc. He cannot afford to be seen to be trying to look pretty. However he dresses, it must be possible to plausibly claim he had some goal other than looking beautiful.

Such as looking important.

Hence the tendency to rely on suits, on any formal occasion.

Posted by ad | November 18, 2007 12:26 PM

Of course you're right, Ad, a boy wouldn't be caught dead being pretty.*

Just to be clear, while I observe that girls get social approbation & reinforcement when they wear "pretty" and "old-fashioned" clothes, I rarely hear boys getting any compliments on their clothes (e.g. "you look fine, you look sharp," etc.).

I can't explain the difference, but here are two possibilities: (1) If boys clothes really do come from a narrower range of historical & geographic styles than girls, then there's simply less variation from one boy to another, hence less reason to say that one boy looks much better than another. (2) Most of the boys at school now seem to dress either Operation Desert Storm or Marvel Comics. The older ones dress Hip-Hop. Like tough guys, in other words. But sloppy tough guys.** How can you praise that? "Oh, my darling boy, you look just like something out of a Tupac video!"***


* With the interesting exception of the gay children. Until I became a parent I would never have believed it, but some boys really are gay almost from birth. We know a boy who by age two was miserable playing trucks and happiest wearing dresses and dancing along with musicals.

** Honestly, a lot of males dress really badly now: highly successful adult men, and their offspring, unshaven, in t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. WTF?

*** Hip-Hop does offer some slight glimmer of hope, though. While upper-middle class white dads increasingly dress like beach bums, there has been some revival of sharp dressing among black performers.

Posted by steve | November 18, 2007 11:21 PM

Boys' names also seem to come from a narrower range of historical & geographical sources. (See SSA) Until fairly recently, the classics dominated boys' names much more than they did girls' names. Also, the distribution of girls' names has a longer tail than boys' names (i.e. "unusual" names are more common among girls than boys).

I promise I'll shut up now.

Posted by steve | November 18, 2007 11:41 PM