Going Mormon for Modesty
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen January 24, 2010
I’m going Mormon.
After all, I do love watching “Big Love,” and I can’t deny the appeal of having a “sister-wife” who wouldn’t mind doing the laundry for everyone in the family.
But mainstream Mormons no longer practice polygamy — it’s been against official church policy for more than a century — so the “sister-wife” situation is off the table. And anyway, there’s no way I could join a religion whose leaders sanction converting dead Jews to Mormonism for “the benefit” of their eternal souls.
But I have converted to their shopping.
You see, my older daughter, Girlchik, is now a tall 10-year-old and at that hard-to-fit age where kids’ sizes no longer work and she’s not ready for adult sizes. And mightily though I’ve tried, it seems impossible to find a junior-sized dress that doesn’t look like it’s made for “The Girls Next Door” or someone in a rap video.
Complicating matters further is that with my husband having grown up in a Chasidic family, we attend lots of frum weddings and other simchas where girls really need to be covered up — and a shrug over a spaghetti-strapped bit of tulle-y party froth just won’t cut it.
So off I set, in search of an appropriately modest dress for my Girlchik.
I looked high. I looked low. Multiple times I maneuvered through Macy’s and Mandee’s, and bobbed through Bloomies. I targeted Target, looked through Lands’ End and noted Old Navy’s too-casual offerings. H&M was hit or miss and Limited Too is now so limited it no longer exists. She’ll have to wait about 11 years before she’s ready to wear something from Forever 21, where the dresses look more appropriate for streetwalkers on 11th Avenue than an almost-11-year-old girl.
Combing through all of the girls’, juniors’ and even petite women’s departments for something appropriate, I came up with zilch.
So I turned to the domain of the desperate, that Magic 8 Ball for the modern. I Googled.
Googling “tznius (meaning modest) junior’s dresses” led me to a couple of Web sites touting products aimed at Orthodox Jews: “Funky Frum,” and “Modest World,” which says that it’s “the first rabbinical approved clothing store on the web,” but neither had anything other than boring, solid color long skirts.
So I branched out, Googling my way into the world of “modest junior dresses,” which got me to a bunch of Web sites for the Christian and Mormon sets.
I found a cute long denim skirt with silver grommets on this Web site tailored to the needs of Muslim women, though it wasn’t what we were looking for for Girlchik.
At the online store of “The Kings Daughters,” which seems to be run by and for ultra-conservative Christians, the dresses there look more like what the ultra-conservative Mormons favor – like those prairie dresses we saw so much of during the 2008 raids on the polygamous ranch run by Warren Jeffs of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I’m not much of a fundamentalist anything, so I preferred what I found on this mainstream Mormon clothing Web site, the slightly misnamed “Great Lengths Shorts,” which carries more dresses and skirts than shorts.
I ordered Girlchik a pretty skirt and a dress, and when both arrived this week, bingo — they fit and looked great.
Of course, the dress is way more covered up than what we saw at the super-fun bat mitzvah party of the daughter of friends that we attended last night, where Girlchik’s 5th grade friends were wearing spaghetti strapped, short party dresses. We’ll see if she’ll feel comfortable wearing the cute but not as bare dress to the next bat mitzvah party.
But at least now she’s set for the engagement party we’re going to in Crown Heights later this week.
And for the time being, at least, the Mormons have my business.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
