In the New York Times, Visiting Assistant Professor Hilary Levey Friedman explores the evolution of the sash. "What lay behind the choice of the sash for the suffrage movement? Why does it come out today for events like bachelorette parties and beauty pageants, even as it has been more or less retired from official feminism? The answer lies in the sash’s peculiar properties, which managed to make it emblematic of the careful line the suffrage movement had to walk: it allowed women to make a statement, while still retaining social acceptability."
Levey Friedman's newest book, Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, will be released on August 25, 2020.