As mysteries go, this will never enjoy a BBC production. After all, it features no bodies, no stolen jewels, and no charismatic detective. Just an aging professor, dressed in well-worn L.L. Bean basics, trying to figure out what happened to the women's clothing range formerly known as "half sizes".

Half sizes were designed for "mature figures" -- women with fuller, lower busts, waists that were larger in proportion to bust and hips than "Misses" sizes, and shorter from neck to waist than "Misses" or "Women's" figures. Half sizes were seldom sleeveless, and the sleeve seam and upper arm were roomier. Skirts were usually longer than other size ranges. Shoulders were more rounded. In other words, half sizes were for postmenopausal women. Until they disappeared in the late 1980s. 

So what? Why should anyone care? 
Here's the thing. If sizes associated with age (half sizes) do not exist, women over fifty must select clothing from the remaining size ranges based on the size, shape and proportion of their bodies. This sounds like a good thing, but there's this reality: we are not all Helen Mirren. We are also not 20-something plus-size models. Some of look like this, or will, if we live long enough:

And so, I wonder, how did the elimination of half sizes change the ways in which older women see themselves? As baby boom women age, what options will we have, and and what will we choose?

I am tempted to post this without comment, but decided against it. This was my world as a young woman. Not just for secretaries, but for just about any woman seeking employment. The author, Ruth Millett, was not particularly conservative; she made her reputation early in her career as an advocate for working mothers during World War II. The advice she dispenses here was what we heard from our mothers, teachers, and mentors, because it was just the way things were. 

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton heard this advice at least as much as I did. Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone complain about "her voice, her clothes, her smile". 

Day three of my research trip was a real eye-opener. I am still settling in and feeling my way around, so what I learned was pretty random, but still interesting.

For the next few weeks, I will be visiting my old home town, North Platte, Nebraska, in search of answers to a long (and growing) list of questions. Some of the questions are personal, and I will be blogging those elsewhere. But they intersect with questions related to my current book project about women, fashion, and identity across the life course. Those questions -- and whatever answers I find -- will be posted here.

Intersectionality -- defined as "the complex, cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect" -- has played an increasingly important part in my research. Decades ago, it was sufficient to focus on gender and sexism, but the realities of discrimination and have led scholars to also incorporate racism, classism, and other oppressive ideologies into their work. My interest is in how ageism works in these mixtures.

At the same time, I am fearful of trying to take on too much -- too many variables. So this trip reduces the complexity to the intersectional life courses of white women of my own age, but with whom I share a common origin. I lived in Nebraska for the first eight years of my life, seven in the bustling railroad town of North Platte. How would my life have been different if my family had not moved to the New Jersey suburbs, and then to rural New England? What was it like to grow up in North Platte?

Specifically, I expect to begin with questions like these:

• Who have been their style influencers/icons?
• Where do they shop?
• Do they sew or knit?
• What were high school dress codes like in the 1960s?
• What do they wear to work? To church? Grocery shopping?
• What do they think of Advanced Style

It took me a while, but I have settled on the paper topic I will be presenting (fingers crossed) at the Popular Culture Association conference in San Diego next April. Since I am in the middle of a giant research project, I had lots of choices, but this one kept calling to me. Here is the abstract I submitted. What do you think? 

I am on research leave this fall semester, working on Age Appropriate. So far, that has meant a mix of reading, very rough drafts, and daydreaming. But today I took a huge step, but reaching out to people who -- hopefully -- can help me with a vital part of my research. In just over a month, I will head to North Platte, Nebraska, the town where I lived as a little girl. The burning question on mind is, "Who would I be, if we had not moved away?" 

You may wonder what this has to do with gender and fashion. So do I, sometimes. But deep inside, I know there is a connection. My journey from infancy to the edge of old age is not just temporal; it is also geographical, social, and cultural. I have reached out to the local paper, the high school I would have attended, the town library, and the church where my family worshipped. Now I just have to hope that at least some of the kids I knew stuck around.

​Wish me luck!

Oh! I love your hat
I love your shoes
I love your sparkly unicorn
I love your leggings with the big red hearts
I love everything about you!

Except the person inside.

​I did not write the first five lines. I overheard a grownup saying exactly those words to a little girl not even two years old.

​    Children are born into an intersectional network of culture. In addition to being surrounded by racism, classism, religious and political beliefs, and myriad other norms, children learn to define and shape their gender identities according to prevailing gender rules which are predicated on a binary. According to the binary view, there are two sexes: male and female, and two genders: masculine and feminine. (The first is anti-science, and the second defies common sense, but the binary exists, nonetheless.) However, boys AND girls are influenced by girly culture, and girls AND boys are shaped by masculine culture. Consider the cultural landscapes and boundaries marked by pink and blue. A firm knowledge of girly culture is required for boys to avoid being contaminated by femininity or anything associated with women and girls. Pink identifies “girly culture” for both girls and boys. Pink is visual femininity repellent for the very young boy.
    If all we need to protect the fragile masculinity of boys is a visual culture (pink-unicorns-sparkles) that signifies GIRL so clearly that no child under the age of six months will ever mistake one for the other, why do we need blue? In some ways, we don’t; we just need not-pink. It’s been clear for me for some time that pink and blue are not just opposite equivalents, functionally.

What do men learn from boy culture? (Little macho culture? Machito culture? Still looking for the right word!)

According to some of my male friends and former students (a very small convenience sample)* , they learn:

• a boy is not a girl
• a boy should never be mistaken for a girl
• boys should have nothing to do with girly things 
• boys should play with boys doing machito things
• machito things are more exciting and interesting than girly things
• boys are better than girls
• boys who are like girls or who like girly things are sick/bad/scary

,*Many thanks to ZS, CC, and WW for their contributions!

I would add to this my own observation that boys also learn that girls who are like boys or who like machito things, can be good friends, but that boys should never allow them to win.