A Return to Modesty?

UPDATE: Mona Charen also wrote about Wendy's new book at National Review Online.

The good news is that a small but significant backlash is underway. Eleven-year-old Ella Gunderson became a minor celebrity when she wrote to Nordstrom complaining that she could not find a pair of jeans that didn’t show her underwear. Sixteen-year-old Taylor Moore travels the country advising girls to follow their dreams. She tells them, “There’s nothing wrong with being a good girl . . . . You put yourself in a position of being a girl who’s classy and having dignity, and eventually people will treat you as such.” The “Girlcotters,” a group of Pennsylvania teens, pressured Abercrombie & Fitch to pull T-shirts with sayings like, “Who needs brains when you have these?”

You wouldn't know it living out here in Southern California, with the motto of the beaches being "Less is More" and all the fuss over Brittany, Paris, and Lindsay, but seems there might be a trend towards more modesty in our culture. At least that's what Chuck Colson said in today's Breakpoint Commentary.

Eight years ago, a young writer named Wendy Shalit took the culture by storm with a radical book called A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. While many people embraced the idea of a return to modesty—especially the young women whose struggles and aspirations Shalit wrote about—others were appalled. “I knew that my arguments . . . might be challenged,” Shalit recalls now, “but nothing prepared me for the tongue-lashings I would receive from my elders. . . . [Feminist writer] Katha Pollitt called me a ‘twit.’ . . . The Nation solemnly foretold that I would ‘certainly be embarrassed’ and regret my stance ‘in a few years.’”

Well, it’s now been a few years, and Wendy regrets nothing. On the contrary, she has a new book out, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. As the title proclaims, Shalit is still convinced that true strength and happiness come not from deadening one’s emotions and having sex for fun, but from practicing modesty and self-restraint.

AND

As Shalit studied trends like modest fashion shows and boycotts of sexually explicit T-shirts, she discovered that for every girl who’s bought into the cultural myths about sexuality, there’s another who is refusing to go along. While acknowledging the negative, anti-woman forces in this sex-obsessed culture, she focuses refreshingly on the women who choose to protect their own “dignity” and “vulnerability.”

Let's work to encourage our daughters to exhibit their modesty for the world to see, not their bodies.