Gender Wars: Sex, Power and Resistance

The most persistent form of sumptuary law was directed at the regulation of dress. Since dress is one of the central mechanisms through which gender is reproduced, it follows that a central feature of any inquiry into sumptuary law must be to explore the part that it played in the gender wars. Sumptuary law exhibited considerable variability in its presentation of gender; sometimes it was gender-nelltral (e.g. ‘no person, man or woman, may wear ...’), at other times it was explicit in directing its restrictions against a particular sex (e.g. ‘no woman may wear ...’), while on occasions wO:Q1en were specifically exempted from the sumptuary rules.1 It is significant that the target sex changed over time. Sometimes men and at other times women were the explicit target. On the surface no pattern is immediately discernible. This chapter will be concerned to explore whether or not it is possible to make sense of this variability and to do so in the context of the historical dynamic of gender relations.