Friday, October 26, 2007

How About Some Non-Sexist Halloween Costumes for Girls?

Each Halloween, parents of girls have a choice to make. They can either use the holiday to encourage their daughters to be excited about all the different things women's lives can be, or moms and dads can take the opportunity to indoctrinate their daughters with destructive sexist stereotypes. For parents preferring the first option, here are some feminist costume ideas that should be pretty easy to put together:

Marie Curie Costume



Make a lab coat out of a large white button-up shirt. Long hair can be put up in a bun. Dab glow-in-the-dark face paints into test tubes for props (representing the radio active elements, polonium and radium, that Curie discovered). For a more morbid take, the glow-in-the-dark paints could be smeared directly on the hands - it is Halloween, afterall.





Hermione Granger Costume


All you need for this one is a child-sized white button-up shirt, a red and gold tie, and a black robe (although a choir robe would work best). Hair can be braided in many small braids for a few hours beforehand, so that when the braids are taken out a proper Hermione mane can be easily achieved. Books and a stick for a wand make great props.



Amelia Earhart Costume


A leather jacket, an aviator's cap, and a scarf to tuck into the jacket are the main components of this costume. To make the aviator's cap, a skull cap or swim cap and some goggles could be used.







Billie Holiday Costume


This one is easy to pull off. A fancy dress, some fake pearls, and white face-framing flowers. A microphone is a good prop.






Janis Joplin Costume

Yeah, with styles being as retro as the are right now, your kid might already have all the long necklaces, huge sunglasses, and little bracelets she needs to dress as Janis Joplin every day. Achieving the mane might take some mouse and and a blow-dryer.





Of course, some parents seem to prefer to dress their children as trollops and tramps for Halloween. For those, I recommend this site, where you can find the:

Baby French Maid Costume












and the "Adult Woman Dressed as a Trollop in a Cat Costume" Costume












Ridiculous. I might have mentioned my annoyance with this sort of thing before.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this post. Although I will never forget the year I made Scrabble sexy.

Casmall said...

Scrabble-a-Go Go

habladora said...

The world remembers when you made Scrabble sexy. And they said it couldn't be done...