Yoga Pants Put the Squeeze on Evangelical Colleges
As another school year begins, many evangelical women continue to wonder why this fashion choice, which fully covers their skin, is being treated practically like lingerie.
Hannah Schultz was fed up, once again, with men trying to control what women should wear in her evangelical community. She was a student newspaper editor at the time, at Asbury University, a Christian college in Kentucky. And she had grown exasperated with the debate over whether yoga pants and leggings were too “immodest” to wear on campus. This was back in 2014, and the university’s administration had finally lifted the ban on such clothing — as long as women also wore a long “tunic-style” shirt that dangled past the waist, down toward the knees.
Schultz, a fan of leggings, was preparing to write an editorial on the topic for the student paper. But first, she sent out an anonymous survey to gauge campus reaction. “As we all know, anonymity is when people really show their true colors,” Schultz said. “I specifically remember one comment made by a male student that read somewhere along the lines of, ‘Girls should not be allowed to wear leggings because I want to be surprised by the beauty of the female body on my wedding night.’ As if the female body is a prize that men win in marriage.”
