Kol Kevudah BAS MELECH Pnimah

A comment someone made a few weeks ago has got me thinking.  He said that Bais Yaakovs are "Educating young women to dress… like real life princess which means modestly."

A Bais Yaakov graduate commented on Facebook that in her school, they sang songs about being a princess, and shared this example:

"I am a princess
A Jewish princess
Because my father is a King
I'm a Bas Melech
A Jewish princess
From Hakadosh Baruch Hu"

A friend shared another:

Firstly, the frum world has an odd obsession with royalty.  Stories  and allegories are full of kings and queens, princes and princesses, noblemen and noblewomen. Sometimes these figures are the villains of the stories, but more often, they're stand-ins for God or models to be emulated. 

The nobility, and especially the royalty, obtained their positions by being the biggest bullies around. The early days of the aristocracy was a kleptocracy, not a meritocracy. The strongest, most fearsome warriors were the people  who rose to power. To be a king, to subjugate brutal warrior leaders, meant you had to be the most brutal of all. In the haggadah, the rasha,  the wicked son, is often represented as a  warrior.  Do we really want to look to the descendants brutal warriors for moral lessons?

Secondly,  it's just not true that princesses are or have ever been particularly modest, let alone  conformed to current standards  of tznius. The comparison to princesses almost certainly comes from the pasuk in tehillim, “kol kevudah bas melech pnimah,” "All the glory of the princess is inside." As I've written elsewhere this is really only half a pasuk, and it doesn't mean what Bais Yaakovs  use it to mean.  Nonetheless, this pasuk  is repeated ad nauseam in girls schools, and seems to lead to the idea that princesses are paragons of modesty.

 Are they, though?

Princess Diana was the quintessential 20th century Princess. She dressed elegantly and modestly  by the general standards of the western world, but she certainly wasn't tznius. No Bais Yaakov  would approve of that dress.

The woman on the right is her niece, Princess Eugenie of York. What she's wearing is perfectly acceptable by  general standards,  but is not  even close to being tznius.“Well,”  I can hear the Bais Yaakov  teachers say, “ Of course, today, the world is  degraded and immodest.  In the past, princesses really were exemplars a virtue and modesty.”

This is Mary Tudor, Queen Mary I of England, who ruled in the 16th century. Her sleeves meet current standards of tznius,  but her neckline, which exposes her collarbones, doesn't.

A century earlier across the channel in France, fashions were far more untznius. King Charles VII of France had a favorite named Agnès Sorel. Born to a minor noble family, Agnès  caught the king's eye while serving as a lady-in-waiting to his wife. She was soon given a place at court as the king's official mistress. It's alleged in several sources that she started a fashion in the French court for dresses cut below the bust. Jean Juvénal des Ursins, the archbishop of Reims, is on record complaining to the king about dresses with, "Front openings through which one sees the teats, nipples, and breasts of women."  This fashion is supposed to have lasted for nearly two hundred years, and  there is some evidence that Mary Tudor's sister Queen Elizabeth I commissioned a dress in this style.

A century after Mary and Elizabeth, noblewomen were still happily being untznius. We have paintings from the 1600s  such as the one on the left, which shows the Countess of Nassau Dietz with her three sons.

This nonchalance about nudity among the upper classes continued through the centuries. The painting on the right is from the 1700s,  and shows the princess of Lamballe. Incredibly, from the point of view of those concerned with tznius,  according to the caption on this image in Google,  her, “visible nipple indicate her birth and morality.” In other words, her nudity is an indication of her rank!

Even in the supposedly virtuously prudish 19th century, women of high  social rank  did not dress in accord with the standards of tznius. On the left is Amelie Augustes von Bayerne, Princess of Bavaria and Queen of Saxony. On the right is Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria. Like Princess Diana, they're both dressed elegantly, but by tznius standards, they're dressed like whores.

An even less tznius 19th century trend was the “emancipated duel,” fought  with swords by high-ranking women  who removed their shirts before beginning the fight. The first of these duels was fought in 1892 by Princess Pauline Metternich and the Countess Kielmannsegg. The baroness who presided over the duel suggested that the women remove their tops to prevent cloth from being pushed into wounds, which would make them more likely to become infected and could turn a  duel to first blood into a duel to the death.

Princesses and noblewomen  are not and have never been paragons of virtue and modesty, let alone tznius.

Bais Yakkovs encourage their young students to be like princesses!? For shame!  The average woman  of today is far more modest than the princesses of the past ever were. Bais Yaakovs should be encouraging their students to dress appropriately for the contexts  in which they find themselves. Not promulgating ahistorical nonsense about virtuous princesses that's more appropriate for Romantic fantasies than for any sort of serious moral pedagogy.