The new statue celebrating women’s suffrage they just put up at Centennial Park was put up by a group calling itself The Perfect 36 Society. You can buy yourself a celebratory t-shirt with “The Perfect 36” on it if you’re happy about women being able to vote. The curriculum the state museum shares about the ratification of the 19th Amendment is called “Understanding Women's Suffrage: Tennessee's Perfect 36.” The reason the slogan is being used is that, in order to ratify the 19th Amendment, thirty-six states (three-fourths of the forty-eight states of the union) had to get on board with it. Tennessee was the thirty-sixth state.
But women’s suffrage wasn’t universally popular. Women who wanted to vote were seen as, at best, kind of unnatural and possibly cancelling out their husband’s more informed vote. At worst, they were seen as incredibly unnatural underminers of our country. When the editorialists and cartoonists of the day referred to the number of states needed to ratify as “The Perfect 36,” they were being jerks to women.
That phrase? “The Perfect 36?” It had another, more popular use — as the ideal bust size for an attractive woman. Loveman, Berger and Teitlebaum, a Nashville store, ran an ad in The Tennessean in 1921 — ”4 Models Wanted at Once/Must be Young and Attractive/Each Must be a Perfect 36/ No Others Need Apply.” In the Emporia Gazette from July 7, 1923, in a story headlined “Lima Bean Figure Dethrones Venus as Style Model,” we learn that “In recent years the ideal of perfect womanhood has dwindled from a ‘perfect 36’ to an imperfect 34.” As the flapper look became more fashionable, the number of articles about the lamented fall of the Perfect 36 increased. By 1929 the Kokomo Tribune was lamenting “the passing of the ‘perfect 36’” and saying “plumpness [is now] a synonym for dowdiness.”
You can see how, when editorialists and cartoonists used the phrase to refer to women getting the vote, they were dismissing the quest as a kind of frivolous fashion thing and kind of reducing women to their bodies and whether those bodies were attractive.
So, I have really mixed feelings about Tennessee’s women taking it up as a slogan of pride. I’m trying to think of an equivalent now, and maybe it’d be a little like if someone in 90 years decided to make up a bunch of t-shirts celebrating Clinton’s victory with a “Vagenda of Manocide” t-shirt. Like, it’s fine if everyone knows they’re taking a really shitty term and reclaiming it for the sisterhood, but do we know that “The Perfect 36” is a term that was used to push women to conform to a certain body type?
Can a term outlast its original, bullshit connotation? If we want to use the term to mean “Woo-hoo, Tennessee delivered the vote to women” and no one remembers that it used to mean “Look like this or you’re not really valuable,” does it still carry the negative connotation?
I’d like to think “yes” but I have this unsettled feeling that the women we’re trying to honor with the phrase would, at best, find it a strange phrase for us to glom on to and would, at worst, think that we, too, were making fun of them.
