A women's right to bare arms

Every day I look forward to getting on my porch my Marion, Indiana small-town newspaper (the Chronicle Tribune). Not because I get much news there (I don’t) but I get a great chuckle almost daily at their junior high spelling and grammar. Today’s editorial affirmed our “right to bare arms” in the headline. I wonder if the editor even knows the difference between baring arms and bearing arms?

If the editorial had been written by Ken Schenck or Bob Black I would have guessed it was one of their clever turnings of a phrase…

I thought it would be a GREAT headline for conservative holiness people if I were writing columns in the summer.

For instance I’d trace the history of how conservative holiness women used to be expected to wear long sleeves (as late as the 1950’s). But even in the 1950’s women started pushing against this “collective conviction.” The more racy women (often “song evangelist’s” wives) started wearing long sleeves of material that was see-though so that men could ogle their skin peaking out through the material.

By the end of the 50’s these racy women moved to “¾ length sleeves” and bared their lower arms for others to see—it was getting sexy.

Sure enough the women’s “right to bare arms” continued so that at Sunday school picnics in the 1960’s some came in “short sleeve” dresses showing off to the public the skin on their arms from the wrist all the way up to within 4” of their shoulders. It was stimulating to the men who had never seen so much skin of their church women!

Of course it wasn’t long until women took their "right to bare arms" all the way. Some started wearing “sleeveless blouses” to regular church services! Yikes—full appendage nudity! I recall sitting in Lakeview church (Marion) with my 75 year old mother in the 1980’s when a girl came into the service late and plopped down in front of us wearing a slinky blouse and only spaghetti straps—my mother was as shocked as if she had come in topless. By now I had accepted the women’s right to bare arms but she was so distracted that she talked about it the rest of the afternoon. She angrily responded when I just chuckled at her conservative standards but she argued back with this: “If things change as much in your lifetime as they have in mine, women will be coming to church completely naked by the time you're 75.”

I turn 75 in 2020… ;-)

. --keith drury