“Suits To Self-Sufficiency”

“Dress for Success” and Maternalist Frameworks

In the past 15 years of “postwelfarism,” Dress for Success has expanded to 115 locations, primarily throughout the United States, but also to several international affiliates (Dress for Success 2013). While not an explicitly feminist organization, Dress for Success is firmly women-run and women-centered, and it is iconically titled to signal second-wave feminist gains. Soon after antidiscrimination legislation opened doors to women in the 1970s, author John Molloy (1977) published a follow-up to his bestselling The Woman’s Dress for Success Book geared explicitly for women entering the corporate world. More than 30 years later, his book remains a bestseller, and the organization named after Molloy’s book accepts donations specifically to fit his prescription for neutral-colored suits—though pantsuits now outnumber those with skirts.

While a nonprofit organization not subject to state regulations, eligibility to participate in the Dress for Success program is based on income level and a referral from a state agency or other nonprofit. In contrast to state offices, however, Dress for Success aims to treat referred women clients to a consultation that resembles a personal shopping experience. Each client is paired with a volunteer called a “consultant” or “personal shopper” and during a one-hour session is shown a selection of business attire. A client leaves with an interview outfit, always a suit but often with shoes and accessories, and may return for up to a week’s worth of additional clothing if she secures employment. Donated clothing is displayed in the program’s “boutiques,” complete with dressing rooms and 360-degree mirrors. The boutique where Cummins volunteered also included displays of donated jewelry and handbags, cosmetic samples, and racks of high heels. The walls were lined with posters of women of multiple races, all in crisp black or gray suits, faces smiling, arms crossed confidently over their chests.

Dress for Success, in providing “consultants” to numerous low-income women, shares many features common to the woman- or mother-centric voluntarism of an earlier era. Many feminist scholars have addressed the contradictory implications of such relations, crediting Progressive Era maternalism in the United States and Europe with the origins of important welfare state provisions. These include widows’ and mothers’ pensions, and public health and child welfare bureaus, all ostensibly private needs to which male politicians had been unresponsive (Koven and Michel 1993; Ladd-Taylor 1994; Skocpol 1995). Such efforts by more privileged women, some contend, involved “class-bridging visions” aimed to improve the well-being of all families (Sklar 1993, 78). Yet other scholars have emphasized that the maternalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was akin to patronizing or paternalist employment relations between men: Never simply a case of elite benevolence, such paternalism aimed to quell potential militancy and generate greater profits under exploitive conditions. Maternalism, to such scholars, was a similar site of social control in which middle-class and elite women gained status as professionals through the “Americanization” of immigrant working-class women and the surveillance of their homes, homemaking, and reproductive bodies (Abramovitz 1996; Gordon 1994; Klaus 1993).

Feminist scholars currently disagree on whether maternalist discourse—or the analytic framework to examine its contradictions—has continued relevance in a neoliberal era. Ann Orloff (2006) argues that the discourse is little used, and the framework irrelevant, when wealthy democratic nations increasingly center policies on “employment for all” and include single mothers in this mandate. We, however, suggest maternalism remains an important frame to understand pivotal sites in which macro-social and global forces of inequality influence are reinforced, or sometimes disrupted, by micro-level interactions between women. Though Dress for Success does reproduce a notion of “employment for all,” our fieldwork reveals that the interactions underpinning this message remain motherly and intrusive. Feminist sociologists have found such contradictory, “matronizing” relations between women persisting in private domestic work, mother-to-mother support organizations, and in the postreform welfare office—relations that significantly resemble the tensions in early maternalist interactions. Historian Brent Ruswick (2013, 72) examined these early interactions in Indianapolis, finding that the friendly visitors of the 1880s and 1890s established neighborly ties; instructed poor mothers in hygiene, thrift, and sobriety; and reported on the state of their homes to city-wide committees, sorting those deserving relief from those of the “defective [and disease-carrying] classes.” Yet, he maintains that affluent women visitors became concerned with chronic unemployment and growing inequality, “struggl[ing] to integrate their growing appreciation of social complexity with traditional notions of individual autonomy and moral worthiness” (Ruswick 2013, 90).

Judith Rollins may have been the first multiracial feminist scholar to employ the term maternalist to describe employment relations in private domestic work (1985). According to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001, 207), who later extended such analyses to account for greater transnational migration, such scholars “roundly and rightly condemned” a relation in which affluent women gained an enhanced sense of privilege through the exploitation and (perceived) deference of women of color and immigrant workers. Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001), however, demonstrates that workers could sometimes gain leverage through personal ties (though they also wished these were more reciprocal); benevolent or genuinely caring employers at times helped with critical family needs ranging from legal assistance to medical care. More recently, such ties galvanized employers in New York to support organized domestic workers in gaining passage of significant employment rights legislation, also pending in California (Buettner 2010; see also www.domesticworkers.org).

Sharon Hays (2003) also adapts the term maternalism to characterize interactions between women clients and caseworkers in the postreform welfare office. Hays identifies the negative disciplinary aspect of instilling “personal responsibility” at the core of the neoliberal mission of moving women from public dependence to work, but she describes this maternalist relation with a positive cast. Many caseworkers, she argues, come to care about clients and try to bend the structure of sanctions and limits so that clients might better care for their children. Also, Ellen Reese (2011) found that Massachusetts’s welfare caseworkers allied with welfare rights activists to fight for better postreform services. Yet, while the asymmetry of privilege between women in the welfare office is less than that found in most domestic employment (or in Dress for Success boutiques), Reese (2011) found New York offices pervaded by “paternalist” interactions between women without such alliances developing. Neither Celeste Watkins-Hayes (2009) nor Judith Levine (2013) explicitly engages the maternalist (or paternalist) framing, but each demonstrates the importance of the interactions among women. Most often, as Levine (2013) details, these interactions between client and staff lead to distrust and hostility, and Watkins-Hayes (2009) agrees for those caseworkers she identifies as “efficiency engineers,” but she still locates some room for alliances in instances of shared racial solidarity.

Forms of maternalism also come with related body politics, ways in which privileged women attempt to discipline the bodies of othered women, reinforcing boundaries and social distance. For example, the early maternalists aimed to instill “American” norms of hygiene to immigrant women, who did not always wish to be taught “the error of their ways” at a time when immigrants were associated with disease, dirt, and immorality (Ruswick 2013, 77). Similarly, larger family sizes were suspect and mothers’ pensions were routinely denied non-white women for being promiscuous or having illegitimate children—common assumptions about those whose “unrestrained breeding” was shifting population growth away from the white, native-born (Mink 1995, 38; see also Abramovitz 1996; Klaus 1993). A century later, neoliberal maternalism in the postreform welfare office continues to exert discipline over the reproduction of low-income, racially othered women, with family caps excluding additional children from coverage, echoing older punitive measures (Hays 2003; Roberts 1997). Though the primary mission of neoliberal maternalism is to move mothers from welfare to paid work, some contemporary instances attempt to re-valorize the white, middle-class domesticity and reproductive norms reinforced by early maternalists. This characterizes the mother-to-mother sites on the blogosphere analyzed by Mezey and Pillard (2010). ² And it is central to the large maternalist breastfeeding support organization La Leche League analyzed by Blum (1999), which ignores the resources and respectability required to engage in the practice, judging those unable to do so less caring or fit.

We suggest, however, that neoliberal maternalism also carries a distinct body politics: In moving mothers to paid work, it aims to instill the productive feminine appearances required for jobs in the service economy. The U.S. economy, like other Western economies over the last several decades, has shifted from manufacturing to services; and with this shift, several feminist scholars make central the place of gendered appearance requirements. British social geographer Linda McDowell (2009, viii, 18) notes that service work “demands the co-presence of provider and purchaser,” with providers’ bodies on display: “Height, weight, looks . . . are part of the exchange, as well as part of the reason why some workers get hired and others do not.” British sociologist Carol Wolkowitz (2006, 6) uses the term “aesthetic labor,” arguing similarly that employers seek women workers with the ability to “look good” and “sound right,” standards largely drawn from white middle-class norms (see also Warhurst et al. 2000). Such work demands may stand out most in upscale environments like the retail stores studied by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell (2010), environments in which employees must literally embody the brand image; nonetheless, Williams and Connell (2010, 352–53) contend that “it is probably the case that every interactive service job has an aesthetic component.” Indeed, in private domestic work, Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001, 110) suggested that young, slim, light-skinned women tended to win the best jobs, with agencies instructing prospective workers to dress in “tailored, calm clothes” in order to appear attractive but not too alluring Hondagneu-Sotelo. And McDowell (2009, 8), after specifically studying low-status service work, argued that “a well groomed, preferably slim body, produced through exercise, adornment and self-improvement . . . is [increasingly] seen as an essential requirement of many, if not most, forms of employment.” Postreform welfare offices may outsource the intrusive task of instilling the racialized classed body norms Raewyn Connell (1987) termed “emphasized femininity” to volunteers in nonprofits like Dress for Success—and our most striking finding may be the extent to which the volunteers circulated such norms to “help” their low-income clients.

Methods

Cummins, a white, middle-class graduate student, conducted ethnographic research over the course of eight months at an office of the Dress for Success program in the eastern United States. As a volunteer, she participated in sorting donated clothing, filing paperwork, conducting follow-up calls to clients, and sending thank-you notes to donors. She was able to observe nearly two dozen personal shopping experiences generally involving one to two longer-term volunteers helping an individual client try on outfits. Further, Cummins observed six follow-up appointments, scheduled for clients who had successfully secured a job; she also placed approximately 90 follow-up calls, reaching 22 former clients to inquire about the success of their job search. Field notes were briefly recorded on-site and then elaborated immediately after leaving the site.

One challenge of participant observation as a primary research method stems from making judgments about ethnoracial identity. Without collecting demographic information, categorization came only from the first author’s interpretation of visual cues, some more perceptible (or culturally marked) than others. Feminist researchers have been at the forefront of methodological debates about intersectionality, the multiple forms of inequality shaping women’s divergent social locations, and how this might impact the research process (Baca Zinn 1990; Hill Collins 1986, among many). Because race and ethnicity are in part constructed through interaction, we realize we participate in “fixing” certain identity categories on the women observed. Despite this limitation, only participant observation allowed access to the everyday interactions and routine practices in the “natural” setting of the Dress for Success organization.

All data were analyzed using an iterative process, where open-ended coding identified our overarching themes as well as the types of interactions that took place between women. In the following three sections, we draw on these data to make three interrelated claims. First, following other feminist scholars, we interrogate the potential for cross-class, cross-race alliances in maternalist interactions, revealing both condescending and genuinely caring aspects of the relations between clients and consultants. In particular, we find that clients and consultants find connection in motherhood and the shared pleasures of shopping. Second, we scrutinize the divergent lived realties of clients and consultants, finding that the boutique floor allows privileged women at times to reinscribe hegemonic values of personal responsibility, but at other moments to disrupt such values. Finally, we explore the suiting sessions that brought new and old aspects of maternalism intimately together, allowing volunteers to circulate neoliberal body politics and assert their class and race privilege as the naturally superior taste and body discipline required for the postindustrial economy. ³

Sharing Motherhood and Shopping

Though clients and consultants arrive from divergent experiences, the boutique floor often allowed for genuinely caring interactions to develop. Elinor, Maryanne, Dorothy, and Jean volunteered as personal shoppers at our site. All four women were white and married, each living in more affluent neighborhoods near the program’s location. Maryanne and Elinor in particular volunteered frequently, often during the same shift, and were highly committed to the organization. Elinor had three nearly grown children, the youngest, whom she spoke of often, nearly out of high school. Although she had been a teacher before she left the workforce to raise her children, she more often spoke about her work with various philanthropic and community organizations. Maryanne was somewhat older, a mother and a grandmother; she and her husband each had enjoyed successful business careers before retiring. Like Elinor, she now devoted much of her time to nonprofit and foundation work in her community.

During boutique fittings, clients and consultants often engaged in lively conversation, sharing details of their home lives. In particular, shared motherhood sparked moments of connection, and talk of children broke the ice in the initial awkwardness of a fitting. In one such fitting, Elinor chatted with a single mother who had just secured a late-afternoon interview. Both complained of the high cost of child care and the difficulties of coordinating work and family. Elinor shared that she had been largely a stay-at-home mother and spontaneously offered to babysit the client’s child during the upcoming interview. During another fitting, a young Latina woman shared that she had recently left a troubled relationship and needed to find work to care for her young son. Dorothy praised the client for breaking free, exclaiming, “Now it’s time to focus on you!” In such moments, the boutique was not simply a place to choose clothing, but a space to share struggles that touch many women. In more lighthearted interactions, Elinor often shared stories about her high-school-age daughter, gushing about her accomplishments and wistfully discussing her approaching graduation. Likewise, Maryanne pulled out her cell phone and scrolled through pictures of her grandchildren while a client looked on, smiling and laughing, offering anecdotes about her own young children who, Maryanne confirmed, were nearly the same age as her grandchildren.

The boutique floor also may have allowed privileged women to see beyond broadly circulating stereotypes of low-income women as they chatted with and enjoyed helping clients. In this way, we might view the program as a positive response to both growing inequality and the harsh reality that welfare reform and accompanying cutbacks created. Consultants, interns, and staff at Dress for Success genuinely seek to create a space of pleasurable consumerism, a foray into the world of exclusive venues and personal shoppers that are indeed off-limits to many women. The physical space of the boutique is modeled after any retail venue of more expensive mass consumption; however, rather than simply reasserting capitalist consumerism or the disciplining bureaucracy of the welfare office, it provides a setting where those from divergent worlds might truly recognize each other.

Consultants take care to re-enact real shopping experiences, standing behind a folding table (the makeshift “counter”), wrapping clothing in tissue paper, and placing items in handled bags. After a particularly lively suiting session, Amy, a college-age woman who occasionally volunteered, helped a young woman pick out earrings from a small rack of donated jewelry. The two joked about the clip-on earrings on display, the client commenting that they looked like something from a child’s dress-up box. When they finished, Amy eagerly brought the client’s suit over to the table with the selected necklace and earrings. She laid them carefully on a piece of tissue paper, then wrapped and placed them in a shopping bag. Amy included a few samples from a high-end cosmetics brand, placing them in the bag and handing it over to the client, as in any upscale boutique. The client beamed, clearly touched by such attention, participating briefly in an interaction that was more reciprocal than charitable.

The boutique provided genuine fun for both clients and consultants, despite coming from different worlds, and many sessions were characterized by joking and laughter. During one session, a client and consultant bonded over their hatred of the color brown, poking fun at a pair of outdated brown suede heels. Another client turned energetically to the small group of volunteers present, inciting shared laughter when she exclaimed, “I’m so happy to have a suit that doesn’t look like I took it out of my mother’s closet back in the ‘70s!” Another client, scanning the racks of shoes with a consultant, was thrilled with a stylish pair of black designer pumps that, she reported excitedly, she also planned to wear on an upcoming date. During a fitting for a middle-aged African American woman who had spent months attempting to secure an interview, Maryanne stayed on past her usual shift, rummaging through boxes of pantyhose in search of the perfect color, seeming almost as nervous about the impending interview as her client and sensitive to all that was at stake. Such interactions suggest that proximity, as for the early maternalists, can bring class-bridging moments of connection between women.

Social Distance and Suits

Sharon Hays demonstrates that in the immediate aftermath of PRWORA, caseworkers expressed initial optimism at the prospect of reform, a sense of possibility surrounding new opportunities for low-income clients (2003). Though volunteer consultants at Dress for Success are not formally associated with welfare reform or state bureaucracies, the enthusiasm they expressed about furthering the neoliberal mission of work and independence was similar. We found that volunteers excited by the suiting program’s promise to empower women for the workforce tended, wittingly or unwittingly, to magnify social distance, both between each other and between themselves and their clients.

The Dress for Success program relies on clothing donations from large numbers of relatively privileged women and the committed volunteer efforts of a smaller number of such women. Potential volunteers apply for these positions, explaining their interests in the program and their past volunteer experiences before they meet with staff members. Becoming a consultant or personal shopper, the most coveted of the volunteer positions, often requires waiting for an available opening, creating an informal hierarchy among affluent volunteers, evidenced in the repeated culling and sorting of donated clothing stored in the organization’s stockroom. On the one hand, the entrance to the stockroom displayed the slogan “Just ask: Would you dress your best friend in this?” reminding volunteers to make selections for low-income clients while minimizing social distance. On the other hand, we learned from interns, local university students running a donation drive, that the condescension might be shifted to them instead, with the contents of the stock room screened by more experienced volunteers discarding items deemed too “flashy” or inappropriate. As interns or other lower-status volunteers steamed items of donated clothing in an adjacent back room, consultants often demonstrated their superior taste over the younger volunteers. In one such negotiation, as Jessica steamed a plain brown pantsuit, Elinor looked up, squinted at the outfit, and exclaimed, “Oh, I don’t know about this! This one doesn’t look good to me. This doesn’t work. Ditch pile, right?” Elinor then turned to Anna, an unpaid intern, who sheepishly agreed, “I guess that color isn’t very feminine.” Jessica, steamer frozen mid-air, silently removed the suit from the mannequin, tossing it aside.

With such boundary-making even among volunteers, we wondered how sensitive the program, as a whole, might be to the divergent opportunities facing their clients. We wondered, in particular, if clients who participated in the program, for the most part interviewing for low-paying retail or temporary work, actually required suits or the display of such upscale aesthetic labor. There were a few clients who secured interviews in office or secretarial work, a sector where a suit likely contributes to a successful interview and proves beneficial at work. During one fitting, Lisa, a middle-aged woman seeking to reenter the labor force after struggling with family troubles, secured an interview at a large firm requiring formal dress of all employees. Lisa selected, with Elinor’s assistance, a formal black suit with conservative black heels. We later found out that Lisa accepted this job, her success in the interview partially due to meeting the firm’s standard of dress.

Several other exceptional clients also found such office jobs: Sandra, a middle-aged women, returned for her follow-up fitting requesting dressy blouses for suits with skirts. Sandra explained that her new job on an administrative support team required formal dress and she worried aloud about dressing too casually. One morning, a staff member also shared the story of Rebecca, a young woman who had visited the program several years prior. Set to interview for a cashier position at a big-box retailer, volunteers worked with Rebecca to select a pantsuit. Rebecca maintained contact with the program and revealed that she quickly worked her way up to a management position. Indeed, Rebecca’s success story signals the organization’s belief that one can present favorably during an interview, but also attain upward mobility with the proper business attire.

But for most clients there was no discussion of whether suits were actually appropriate for the available jobs. To avoid challenging the program’s core beliefs, we decided to go outside Dress for Success, to several local career counselors. They provided mixed evidence. Only one of the four suggested that a suit is always appropriate at an initial interview, though a temp-agency staffperson echoed advice columns recommending “dressing one notch up” or “dress[ing] for the job you want, not the job you have” (Post 2013, 2014). More likely, as another counselor offered, potential employees should dress according to the “standards of the industry,” and while a “no jeans” rule was unanimously endorsed, no such consensus emerged for or against the suit.

Some measure of clients’ actual job opportunities, whether in offices or big-box retail, was found in records kept by the affiliate office. Volunteers sometimes assisted with this record-keeping, documenting success rates and maintaining contact with former clients. With only a small paid staff, stacks of former clients’ files awaited attention. The follow-up records available at our site demonstrated that 75 of 90 files listed interviews in low-paying service or retail work, making it unlikely the client would need a suit in the long run. Women, however, were all “suited” in similar clothing and encouraged to return to expand their professional wardrobes without reference to these realities of the low-wage workplace.

During a telling follow-up conversation with Nora, a former client who had missed a second appointment, she relayed that she had gotten a job at a large retail outlet. She explained, “I really appreciated the program. But, I mean, the dress here is pretty casual. Actually, it’s kind of a uniform deal. So I guess I don’t think I need to do my follow-up appointment, if that’s okay.” Nora’s words stand in contrast to the disappointment some volunteers expressed when clients missed appointments, lamenting their absence but seemingly unaware of the circumstances many clients faced. During a quiet shift without any clients, Sara, a white college student studying marketing who had been a volunteer for several months, described why she believed women ended up needing the program’s help:

We get a lot of women who come from bad situations. Sometimes from abuse, sometimes they had drug problems. A lot of times they’re using food stamps or unemployment of some sort, or some kind of benefits. All of these things make it hard to get a job. So our job is to empower women, so they can make good choices and get on the right track.

Sara’s words, though well-meaning, reflect problematic aspects of antiwelfare discourse, most centrally that public assistance and bad choices are what “make it hard to get a job.” Occasionally, volunteers and staff expressed disapproval when clients missed appointments, lamenting “no-shows” or women who rescheduled with little notice, “You can’t do much about it.” Though no direct polemics against welfare or entirely unsympathetic remarks about clients were overheard, such expressions of disappointment reinforced their social distance from clients and reflected naïveté about potentially punitive consequences: “Sometimes I call the counselor or social worker to ask [about a no-show].”

One morning while organizing stacks of client follow-up calls, Angela, a white, middle- aged consultant with a stylish haircut and gold hoop earrings, pulled out a referral form. Sighing, she said, “I remember her. She missed two follow-up appointments. She had an interview with some temp agency or something. I tried to follow up with her a few times but I could never get a hold of her.” When asked why she thought this client never returned, Angela suggested, “We can’t help everyone, I guess. A lot of factors might go into getting a job. Maybe some people don’t really want to do this? I don’t know.” Pressing her further, she replied, “You mean, some people don’t want to do the program? Yeah, that too, but I mean, some people don’t want to put in all it takes. The economy is bad out there.” While sympathetically acknowledging the impact of the recession, Angela still implied that the client’s “no-show” might indicate an individual failing, a woman unwilling to “put in all it takes.”

This sentiment was further echoed by a volunteer who was annoyed when a client canceled the morning of her appointment: “It’s irresponsible in any forum!” she admonished, her vehemence suggesting she meant in the workplace. A stylishly dressed brunette intern typing rapidly looked up from the screen to adamantly agree, complaining that women often missed or canceled appointments with little notice, wasting time slots that could be allotted to other clients, perhaps insinuating this signaled poor work ethics.

Sadly, many former clients may simply be trying not to waste the program’s time. During a follow-up conversation another former client, Jennifer (referred by a social worker eight months earlier) explained she had been scheduled to interview with a temp agency. When asked if the interview went well and if she’d like to return for more clothing, Jennifer replied, “Well, the job I interviewed for was terrible—I mean, the pay. So I didn’t take it. It’s not really more money than I get from benefits [TANF]. And who would watch my kids? I’d have to pay someone.”

Social distance was also evident in volunteers’ offhand remarks about the recession. One young volunteer, a college student about to graduate, worried aloud that she had not yet lined up a job; she had recently leased a new car and how, she wondered, would she make the payments? On another morning while sorting shoes, Emily sat with Elinor and Maryanne. While Elinor scrolled through her Smartphone, a gold and diamond bracelet slid down her wrist as she gestured with her hands. Elinor and Maryanne compared their experiences with various financial management firms, deliberating the pros and cons of different investment plans during such a bad economy, until a staff member alerted them that a client was waiting in the reception area. In another interaction between the two consultants, Maryanne assisted a client while talking loudly about her upcoming vacation to Cancun, emphasizing her difficulties finding four first-class seats together on a flight. This conversation seemed particularly insensitive in the presence of a low-income client.

Indeed, Maryanne and Elinor were always well-dressed, wearing outfits easily conforming to the standard in higher-paying sectors of the workforce. That the suit is a key component of the program despite its misfit for many jobs suggests its symbolic importance as a representation of liberal feminist gains and women’s neoliberal empowerment. Like John Molloy’s manual, the program seizes on the supposed power of a neutral-colored two-piece suit, effacing the realities of class and race divides between women clients and volunteers, as well as the growing gap in opportunities in the postindustrial economy. Rather than seeing poor women in need of moral uplift in the home, as in early maternalist activism, these interactions emphasize the need for an improved, empowered work ethic for low-income mothers.

Body Politics on the Boutique Floor

Like the negotiations that took place behind the scenes between consultants and volunteers over stockroom and display rack selections, it seemed clients were not to be trusted to choose professional outfits or to understand workplace norms. On the boutique floor, consultants often scrutinized clients’ bodies, engaged in intrusive interactions, and signaled their own naturally better taste. Like the early maternalists’ intrusiveness and condescension in their preoccupation with home hygiene and other women’s sexual impropriety, the emphasis on disciplining the body for productivity and postindustrial employment distinguishes the neoliberal maternalism of Dress for Success. Consultants aim to prepare clients for entrance into “forms of employment that depend on visible, interactive, and embodied exchanges in which the physical shape of bodies [and] their adornment . . . matter” (McDowell 2009, 9).

One especially illuminating example of such body politics involved an unusual client at her first appointment. Educated at an Eastern European university, Sofija had been living in the United States for several years and was referred to Dress for Success through a job-training seminar. Elinor and Jean, a new volunteer, led Sofija into the boutique, exclaiming, “We’ll find you some better-fitting stuff,” presumably meaning better-fitting than what she was wearing at the moment. Meanwhile, Maryanne sat flipping through her cell phone while Emily, at a table just outside the boutique floor, diligently placed stickers on the bottoms of high heels to mark their size. After a few moments, Elinor and Jean returned from the boutique floor, Sofija now dressed in a gray pantsuit. Maryanne, noticing Sofija for the first time, advised her, “You know, you should really wear some makeup. You’d look so much better with some rouge on your cheeks!” Elinor, in agreement, brought out a small box of sample cosmetics. Maryanne grabbed Sofija’s chin, lifting it to the light, and smeared a streak of reddish lipstick across her lips, instructing, “Okay, rub them together, like this.” After pressing her own lips together, she turned to Jean to explain, “She’s not used to wearing lipstick.” While this comment may have been intended to further Jean’s instruction as a personal shopper, it certainly also asserted the superior tastes of the consultants to their client.

Jean, the new consultant, stood awkwardly to the side while Elinor and Maryanne buzzed around Sofija. When Maryanne and Elinor were out of earshot, Sofija turned to the table where volunteers sat and tried to elicit support to reassert her own taste: “I don’t like to wear this much makeup. I mean, it’s silly, right?” Though Sofija arguably holds considerable educational capital, her appearance was challenged by consultants who, even inadvertently, called attention to her failure to conform to norms of emphasized femininity (Connell 1987). Although feminist scholars have found that appearing “made-up” at work signals credibility and competence in a broad range of occupations (Dellinger and Williams 1997), the interaction also revealed a kind of intimate bodily intrusion consistent with earlier forms of maternalism, an intrusion into the bodily privacy or space of the client. In a neoliberal era, this serves to instill the display of productive femininity rather than the respectability of the home.

Sometimes body politics on the boutique floor unfolded in ways that were more visibly racially coded. During one fitting, Maryanne was working with Lorraine, an African American woman on her way to an interview later that day. Maryanne looked disapprovingly at Lorraine’s hair and declared, “You need to look professional.” Then she turned to the other volunteers and commanded, “Someone get her a ponytail holder and a brush!” Turning back to Lorraine, Maryanne smiled and said, “You just need to smooth it out a little, especially the top.” As Maryanne began to smooth the top of her hair, Lorraine cringed slightly, turning her head away from the brush, though she remained quiet. This particular interaction is quite troubling in its racial dimension. As many Black feminist scholars have argued, in the United States, women’s hair has long been a particularly racialized site, with norms of feminine beauty and good taste reinforcing white privilege (Craig 2002; Wingfield 2009; also Weitz 2004). Black women have also at many historical points made hair a powerful political symbol and object of struggle, challenging white ideals in the Black Power movement, for example, and in lawsuits contesting specific workplace requirements (Banks 2000). Thus, when Maryanne brushed Lorraine’s hair, she not only seemed to assume that her class advantage rested on her superior tastes, but that her white privilege rested on a similar basis and justified the benevolent yet belittling physical intrusion. Moreover, as Ingrid Banks reminds us, such actions reveal “the fascination and discomfort white mainstream U.S. society continues to feel regarding African Americans in general, and particular Black hairstyles and what they signify, whether real or imagined” (Banks 2000, 17).

Issues of body size also demonstrated the stringent body politics of neoliberal maternalism—if perhaps inviting less physical contact with clients. During one particularly illuminating conversation, Kara, a slender college student with long blonde hair, sorted clothing that had just arrived from the donation drive. While arranging the garments in piles according to size, she lamented the lack of range, commenting that “the bigger girls never get anything.” In fact, items in sizes 12 through 16 are rarely donated. When asked why she thought so few women donated larger-sized clothing, Kara suggested, “I mean, it’s sort of not the designer’s fault because it’s just hard to make clothes this size that will look good. A pencil skirt just looks better on someone who’s a size 4.” Shrugging, she surmised, “I think professional women around here just wear smaller sizes.” This observation, again resting privilege in naturally better taste and what “just looks better,” was echoed by Elinor, who was organizing a rack of gray and black suits, wearing an expensive-looking and nicely pressed black shift dress. “You see, look at this awful blue 1980s thing!” she exclaimed as she grabbed a bright blue suit with large gold buttons off the rack. “Obviously no one has worn this in a long time. And see, it’s a size 14. This doesn’t look professional.” When pressed further about whether the most outdated clothing usually came in bigger sizes, Kara responded, “Not with everything, but a lot of times. Especially the really nice stuff [is usually smaller]. I mean designer, trendy stuff. That clothing is small! Like this! [holding up a skirt admiringly]. This is tiny. You better have a damn good figure to squeeze into this thing.”

This interaction clearly linked a stylish professional look to thinness. Kara seemed to admit that for many women a “damn good figure” is unrealistic, that one has to be “tiny” rather than average or even fit “to squeeze into” appealing business attire. Yet she praised the aesthetic value of the prohibitively small designer skirt. Though the majority of the clothing donated to the organization ranges from sizes 8 to 12, the slender college interns sorting piles of donations routinely admired the smaller-sized pieces even when identical in style to those in average and larger sizes. Thinness thus becomes a status marker, an aspect of class and race privilege masked as a representation of a sought-after aesthetic that many (or most) women lack the discipline to attain.

During one fitting, Dorothy, a middle-aged white consultant, tall and narrow-hipped and wearing gray pinstriped pants, was helping Rita, a new client and woman of color, select a suit for an upcoming interview for an office file clerk position. As Rita began trying on a jacket from the several options Dorothy had laid out, Dorothy cautioned, “You have a disproportionate shape on top, so the jacket is going to be a challenge!” Her arm midway through the sleeve, Rita stopped. Slowly, she pulled off the jacket and put it back on the hanger. Dorothy offered, “I kind of have a disproportionate shape too. Don’t worry.” Dorothy proceeded to select a different jacket. Rita interjected that she’d prefer a different style and color and was not likely to wear this selection, but Dorothy informed her, “The thing is, though, that’s just not really a professional look, that one you like. You have to button it up. I don’t think the one you like fits you right for this kind of thing, a professional thing, I mean.” Again Dorothy invoked the notion of an ideal body shape and size, assuming a “natural” link to professionalism, a linkage reinforced throughout the boutique with pictures of only slender women in their pressed black and gray suits on the walls.

Though Rita probably would have been unable to “squeeze into” the “tiny” designer skirt admired by Kara and Elinor, she was not overweight; Dorothy’s characterization of her body as “disproportionate,” while meant benevolently, implied Dorothy possessed the superior taste to assess Rita’s deviation from accepted norms. In this sense, both the volunteers and, indirectly, the women who donate clothing to Dress for Success are brokers of emphasized femininity, with its strict bodily aesthetic enforced through and on the clients. This belittling jacket intervention, however, is more complicated. On the one hand, Dorothy enforces a cultural obsession with female thinness; but on the other, her advice to better conceal a (perhaps minor) deviation from normative standards might still be helpful for instilling neoliberal disciplining, as indeed, research has shown that larger women are now less likely to be hired than their thinner counterparts (Cawley and Danzinger 2005; Fikkan and Rothblum 2012; Saguy 2013).

Because of the intrusive body politics we saw on the boutique floor, we wondered whether the volunteer consultants, especially those with long-term commitments to Dress for Success, like Elinor, Maryanne, and Dorothy, primarily saw themselves like the friendly visitors or settlement house volunteers of an earlier era, engaged in forms of social work—or, for the postindustrial service economy, as closer to the professional stylists and personal service workers studied by Rachel Sherman. In her ethnography of the “lifestyle management industry,” Sherman demonstrates how professional stylists are brokers in aesthetic labor, shaping “their [clients’] class performances and dispositions” through dress and demeanor (2011, 201); rather than the improved childrearing and homemaking instilled by the early maternalists, neoliberal maternalism may focus most on such external styling and demeanor. We observed suggestive evidence for this identification as stylists while assisting at a fashion show fundraiser. Several consultants from the broader region attended and appeared to listen attentively, taking studious notes on advice for dressing clients with low-cost alternatives to expensive accessories like computer cases and scarves. A representative from an upscale boutique modeled a high-end computer bag, but paused, rushing to explain, “You can do this with a cheaper bag, of course. But use this as a guide. Use this style when you’re looking for something at Target.” Just as intrusive and preoccupied with oppressive feminine norms—and thus in some sense just as “matronizing” to clients—those actually employed in such personal services, of course, work for very affluent, elite clientele. At Dress for Success, in contrast, the relation of advantage on the boutique floor is reversed, with volunteers as those with privilege. Perhaps identifying with professional stylists amplifies their sense of naturally superior taste and provides a sense of professional status, yet it may also signal insight into newly emerging job requirements for aesthetic labor across the service economy.

The neoliberal body politics bound up in suiting sessions, with volunteers assuming clients need their benevolent help, was reflected dramatically in the shop’s mirrors. These surround the client on all sides and become a metaphor made literal exposing the power of consultants to objectify and judge clients’ bodies. Interactions on the boutique floor were also striking articulations of postwelfare ideals of personal responsibility. Volunteers do not merely seek to change the outfit enclosing a client’s body to move them from dependence to self- sufficiency, but, like the early maternalists, to instill clients with a sense of self-discipline. Though early maternalists also sought professional status through their intrusive supervision of low-income women, the neoliberal maternalism in Dress for Success signals, in contrast, that such internal change in other women is better promoted by first tending to external appearance.

Conclusion

Under neoliberal reform, wealthy, industrialized nations have increasingly promoted “employment for all,” targeting single mothers in particular. Orloff (2006) argues that maternalist frameworks are thus no longer relevant. We differ with Orloff’s claim; ethnographic research reveals the complexity and micro-political aspects of cross-class and cross-race interactions between women from divergent social worlds. Our case study of the women’s nonprofit Dress for Success suggests that a revised maternalism has accompanied U.S. welfare retrenchment. Although the Dress for Success program differs from the voluntarism of a century ago by promoting work outside the home, it does so through intimate, motherly interactions that macro- and policy-oriented research cannot easily capture. We suggest that the continued importance of a maternalist framework is twofold: First, it reveals sites in which privileged and marginalized women are brought into close contact and helps us uncover the effects of larger macro-structural forces. Second, as a century ago, it orients us toward possibilities for solidarity and alliances that might lead to broader social critique.

To our first point, we demonstrate that interactions between clients and consultants on the boutique floor frequently reinforced social distance and neoliberal mandates. Despite their enthusiasm for empowering low-income mothers, consultants voiced unsympathetic remarks about clients, their missed appointments, or questionable commitments to self-sufficiency. Rather than seeing homemaking mothers in need of moral uplift as in historical encounters between poor women and friendly visitors, interactions between women insisted on empowerment through an improved postindustrial work ethic. Yet affluent volunteers seemed little aware of the realities of these postindustrial jobs or even of their expected standard of dress.

We also found that much like the industrial-era maternalism, motherly benevolence leads to intrusive body politics. In the present era, however, consultants scrutinized clients’ appearance, with low-income women’s bodies to be disciplined for (re)entrance to the labor market. Although in the industrial era surveillance focused on regulating motherhood quite explicitly, neoliberal maternalism implicitly regulates single mothers through the norm of productive femininity, the disciplined embodiment required to meet new demands for self-sufficiency through paid work and aesthetic labor. Most strikingly, we found the volunteers at Dress for Success eager to circulate such class-ed and racialized norms for “professional” appearance and demeanor along with the requirements of emphasized femininity.

To our second point, of possibilities for solidarity and alliance, we found genuinely class-bridging moments between women, as volunteers and clients shared the pleasures of shopping and pride in their children. On the boutique floor, such connections with clients allowed consultants to see beyond broadly circulating stereotypes of low-income women. What is less clear is whether such moments might once again inspire calls for public resources or broader social reform, the outcome of such proximity a century ago. Dress for Success now includes offices in Mexico, Jamaica, and parts of Eastern Europe, indicating the global diffusion of discourses insisting on mothers’ self- sufficiency and neoliberal empowerment. At the same time, global feminist scholars find a persistence of mother-centric voices in a range of national contexts, similarly contradictory but sometimes able to challenge cutbacks in public provisioning. In each instance we must scrutinize whether maternalism is compatible with broader calls for social justice, or whether it instead allows elite women to assert their authority over others while “cloaking that authority in the mantel of maternal concern” (Plant and van der Klein 2012, 5). For feminist scholars, this question remains crucial as we continue to challenge assumptions about marginalized women as victims of their own lack of discipline and morality and seek ways to broaden equality in a postwelfare, postindustrial context