The realization that there were no organized athletics or sports scholarships for girls of my generation in public schools seems unfathomable in today’s world. Considering this prompted yet another story.
All through grade school and middle school, no matter the weather, we were required to wear dresses or skirts every single day. I remember talking to my friends who lived in town and had to walk to school, asking them if they froze while trudging through snowy streets in the bitter cold. Most had learned to wear thick leotards under their dress, adding a pair of jeans which they would be required to remove immediately upon entering the school.
It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that the school board, made up of all men, listened to complaints of students and parents alike. We were a very rural district, and many young girls were waiting at the end of long lanes for the bus to pick them up. “Can’t we allow girls to dress in pants at least through the winter?” was the one question asked again and again.
Pants tests
The first trial test involved allowing girls to wear pants only on Fridays. The school board’s written rule clearly allowed dress pants but not jeans. With further input from the community, the board decided to allow dress pants on days the temperature dipped below a specified point, the fine print allowing for wind chill to be factored into the equation.
After my older sister and I were the only ones to wear pants to school one particular morning, proving that our mother had figured the wind chill correctly, our home phone began ringing on those freezing winter mornings.
After that school board meeting, Mom had called the regional weather station to ascertain the formula used to determine wind chill. She kept this formulation beside our radio, and listened for the full weather report after we left to do the morning milking. If wind speed was not given in the broadcast, our mom would call the radio station to find out, then she would do the math.
“Yes, Mom listened to the weather and according to the temperature and wind gust speed, it brings air temperature down to where she said we are allowed to wear pants today,” is how the quick phone conversations often went. “Pass it on!”
This was how our mother became queen for a day a great number of times over the course of that experimental first year of allowing girl students to wear pants, but only if meteorological science approved it.
Freedom
I will never forget, reaching for a top-shelf book in the library, feeling I had achieved massive freedom wearing wool pants in that I didn’t have to worry about yanking my dress down with one hand while reaching up with the other. My joy was shot down quickly when our librarian Mrs. Murray said to me, “The end of ladylike behavior is surely on the horizon now that you girls can wear pants to school.”
Earth continued to turn in spite of this groundbreaking change in our dress code, and when winter gave way to spring, our dresses returned to everyday wear. I remember wishing to wear one particular pleated skirt, and my mother said the entire time spent ironing it she composed a letter in her head to the school board regarding the common sense in the dress code for all female students.
I’m not sure how much longer we followed this winter temperature/wind chill formula for our dress code, but it remained in place for some time, eventually giving way to girls given the option of dresses or pants in everyday wear.
It felt like an enormous triumph, I promise you that. But to this day, when I hear wind chill temperatures given as part of a weather broadcast, I think of my mom, pencil to paper, figuring it out for our community girls.
This is so amazing to me. Your mother was a warrior. I love it!