Forum Flashback: 1974

We continue our series of Forum Flashbacks with an article from the March 1974 edition written by alumna Marguerite Horberg ’75. 

It seems quite futile to write an article regarding the school dress code.  But as the days go on the issue becomes so increasingly ridiculous that only out of great frustration and anguish can I write this.

You may say, “So what’s the big deal?”  Valid.  But personally I find it an issue that must be discussed and rehashed until its extinction.  As it stands, girls are allowed to enter school in pants but must change before their first period class, and again are allowed to change before braving the zero temperatures.  This means, to secure any reasonable comfort outside such as 5^th or 6^th periods a girl must change in and out of her skirt between two and five times depending on if she’s a member of the polar bear club or she has no sign-outs.

However the dress code does not apply to the faculty who are free to wear pants (females) and blue jeans (males).  This is no complaint directed toward the faculty for as I understand when the issue was brought up the faculty voted against the dress code.  Well, this is a matter of “passing the buck.”  If the students, and faculty don’t want a dress code then who does?  Perhaps the parents.

The Latin School is the only private coeducational high school in Chicago where the dress code is still in existence. 

It is obviously a huge headache for Mr. Hare to play “policeman” to this “ridiculous archaic rule.”  I and several of my female friends have “gotten away” with wearing pants all day.  Not one class was disrupted and on some lucky days not one faculty member complained.

It would be my understanding that this school is an academic institute concerned with the quality of classes rather than the current dress of the student, which I feel do not conflict.

It is quite within reason for the school to require that students dress for the weather donning skirts in the spring and fall and appropriately pants or slacks in the winter.  This is only fair.  It is blatant discrimination to insist women students wear skirts.

However, in closing, I can only take the frustrated, pessimistic attitude:  “It’s typical;” which I find self-explanatory.