When appearances are not deceptive: A Comparative History of school uniforms in Argentina and the United States (nineteenth–twentieth centuries)

Abstract

Appearances are deceptive, the saying goes. However, we devote much time to the presentation of ourselves, and ties and necklaces can take up more energy than other ‘substantial’ matters. This article analyzes the history of the presentation of selves in schools through the study of school uniforms. It will be claimed that modernity configured a ‘regime of appearances’ that had powerful effects on the ways that people relate to themselves and to others, and that schooling played a significant role in shaping it. The article will deal particularly with school uniforms as part of this regime of appearances, focusing on the development of vestimentary codes in Argentina and the United States of America. In Argentina, white smocks, which were adopted as the mandatory dress code around 1910 on the basis of an egalitarian rhetorics, were part of a politics of the body closely tied to Hygienism and linked to ideals of moral and racial purity. White smocks established a homogeneous and austere, monochromatic aesthetics of the school space that quickly identified transgression and indiscipline. In the US, uniforms were used for the schooling of minorities (Native Americans, women) as a way of rigorously training unruly bodies and of learning other aesthetic and bodily dispositions. Recently, urban public schools have adopted uniforms to counter‐balance gangs' and rappers' dress codes. I believe that both cases show the fertility of analyzing school appearances for the history of school daily life and for understanding the effects that schooling produces in our societies.

Notes

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Which, on the other hand, he had been doing since 1886, when he wrote articles with a feminine pseudonym in the Teachers' Association journal condemning luxury and ostentation. At that time, he was opposed to any sort of dress code: “The female teacher cannot tell the mother: ‘Dress your daughter with “this” dress, of this material, and with these shoes, and this hat’. Yet the female teacher can and must require cleanliness of their bodies and clothes; she must not tolerate ripped or filthy clothes, because personal cleanliness, considered as a virtue, does not only exercise a moral influence upon mores, reflecting always the purity of the soul, but it is also compatible with poverty, because nobody lacks a needle or some water and soap” (Pizzurno, Pablo. El educador Pablo Pizzurno. Recopilación de trabajos. Más de medio siglo de acción cultural en la enseñanza secundaria, normal y primaria. Buenos Aires: Congreso Nacional, 1938: 268).

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It should be noted that these series juxtapose themselves: the egalitarian discourse involves practices upon the body, and the education of the body involves hygienic and egalitarian ideals. This distinction is analytic and not ontologic, but is helpful to clarify discourse formation that has a certain stability and common rules over time. Other series that could be traced would be the ideas regarding childhood and adult authority, nationalist discourses in themselves, sumptuary laws and the regulation of dress and aesthetic regimes, among others. I have dealt with them extensively in my PhD dissertation: School Uniforms and the Disciplining of Appearances: Towards a Comparative History of the Regulation of Bodies in early Modern France, Argentina, and the United States. University of Wisconsin‐Madison, Madison, WI, 2001.

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