Wearing A Dress

To fund-raise for "The Dressember" Campaign, I wore a dress every day in December.  (Thank you to everyone who gave and helped me reach my goal!!) It was a surprisingly meaningful experience, so I thought I would write about it. Because I'm the sort of person who worries about my participation in this sort of campaign being cliche. It might be. Perhaps writing about it serves to absolve my worry.

5 Reasons Why I Chose to Wear a Dress Every Day in December

1. To try to raise awareness of women's plight around the world who are robbed of human dignity and rights. Working for the dignity and rights of women is one of my deeply held values.
2. To try to do something about the plight of women around the world robbed of human dignity and rights.
3. To remind myself that I have enough. More than enough, actually.
4. To force myself to focus on something other than gifts and greed during the Christmas season.
5. To experience from a new perspective.

5 Things I Learned from Wearing a Dress Every Day in December

1. It is really hard to wear a dress every day. I am a jeans kind of girl.  Now I don't live in Syracuse anymore, but I don't live in Florida either. And people wonder why you're so dressed up.
2. It is really easy to wear a dress every day. When you have 5 choices, you take a lot of guesswork out of the getting dressed equation. You are also never under-dressed. And sometimes you get compliments.
3. People really don't pay attention to what you wear (if you switch out different scarf/cardigan combos especially). Seriously, unless I mentioned it, no one noticed! Or they didn't say anything and kept quietly thinking to themselves that I am odd. Entirely possible.
4. It made me think about other people more.
5. Once again, I never ceased to be amazed by the total generosity of people.

Now, let me say that this in no way endorses the idea that women SHOULD wear dresses; I am saying that CHOOSING to wear a dress can be a powerful thing. Whether or not this whole thing was a feminist activity was actually a discussion I had, and I'm pretty sure that the person who had the discussion with me did not walk away persuaded that it was. (And she is amazingly smart so I walked away not entirely persuaded it was either). I did not, however, get into any discussions about whether or not this was a Christian thing to do. Maybe that was obvious. Maybe I avoided those.

And I think I will probably end up wearing dresses more often. Which doesn't really have anything to with anything.