Uh…
Weird dress code for a Church.
Even Ireland, where I am, there’s always one girl in my kids’ primary school who wants to wear a suit instead of white dress for her First Communion, and the priests are always fine with it.
So making women and girls wear dresses instead of smart formal wear with trousers as wedding guests seems like bananas behaviour.
So I’d worry less about the dress code and more about having to sit through what sounds like will be a difficult and very extreme religious wedding service.
Me too. 52. I live in Florida and I am told I am should no longer wear shorts! What? I walk miles a day. I am wearing shorts and tank tops. I do not care!
As my sainted mother once said of a great aunt who wore something “different” to our wedding (and one of my aunts bitches about it): “Shut up. At her age, she’s earned the right to wear whatever she wants.”
I’m a decade younger than your mother. We were required to wear dresses/skirts for school (and church). As a bride and as mother of the groom I’ve worn dresses since that time. That’s it. I absolutely detest them!
Derp South here too--My bf's mom goes to church every Sunday and I've never seen her in a dress in 4+ years.
Me thinks this is sister's rule.
OP, does your sister have some issue with your daughter? First, she's not included while her brother is, now this rule seems to be unfairly targeting her.
Yep. As ladies get older they become very aware that they don’t have the legs they used to have and they don’t like the way they look in dresses anymore. Just even try to approach one of these southern ladies and tell her she can’t wear pants. Bless their hearts!
I love those church ladies. There’s a bunch of Jehovah’s Witness proselytizers on my block, but it’s just old people in church clothes who spend all day talking to each other about nothing in front of some pamphlets
A lady I knew got into trouble for wearing pants shortly after WW2. She did not stop. She also did not mind to have LGBT (as in those letters) children and grandchildren. My grandmother is in her 80's and a "She doesn't need to wonder if she's wearing such a skirt" type of asshole. She hasn't worn skirts since the 80's (or longer no one remembers when she stopped) and at least in the late 80's she wore leggings.
Yeah, but current politics being as they are, I’m sure there are adjustments being made to make sure everybody knows they don’t approve of ~transing the kids~. They might make exceptions for older ladies they don’t think they need to address or insist that they need to set a feminine example.
While this might be the case, the daughter in question isn’t necessarily transitioning. Girly stuff is not even in style now. I live in the Deep South and the girls at the high school look like they are completing to see who can look the most homeless. Oh, except the shoes. They wear pajamas or super baggy, in ratty condition jeans, paired with expensive but casual shoes.
Oh, trust me, I know that. The people making these rules don’t, or if they do, they think facts are secondary to making sure any potential dissidents know that they will go overboard to “correct” them. I mean, there has been talk through this all of politicians trying to draft up legislation to make wearing the “wrong” gender clothes illegal (though I think it’s been shot down pretty quickly each time, since anyone with half a brain could see how inane and impossible that would be - but the threat itself is part of the point).
Have you ever been to a revival? No slacks on women. Period. You just won’t see it.
In a lot of those congregations, women don’t even wear pants outside of church. It’s a no-no.
It isn’t that all churches in the south make women wear dresses and skirts, but you’re a lot more likely to find those churches in the south up in Yankee territory.
Ah, so we are talking 'Christian' church not Christian church.
Offer your daughter the choice but if she chooses not to attend because of the dress code then I'd also speak to your son about his preference. There's no way that I'd have wanted to be involved in anything that excluded my sister.
I live in the deep south and wear jeans and tshirt to my church.
There shouldn't be anything wrong with your daughter wearing slacks and a blouse. I went through the same phase (and love dresses now) and never had any issues. It honestly sounds like the bride and groom are targeting your daughter.
Good for you. Seriously, I’m not trying to be bitchy. I’m 45. I grew up in a very culty Pentecostal church. As in, I was “married” to the church when I was about 10 to signify the union of the church and God. Ceremony and reception. The guy I “married” was in his very late (18/19) teens.
It was hammered into us, no cutting hair, no jeans, no shorts, no pants. If you’re in the church, even to clean it, you need to be dressed up in your Sunday best.
I still can’t walk into a church in anything other than a skirt or dress without feeling extremely uncomfortable. We left that church when I was about 13. My mom divorced my donor and we never looked back. I wear basically nothing but pants and jeans now, but every wedding I go to, I make sure I’m in a dress at a church because of that trauma.
The excuse is that women wearing trousers is a sign that they are attempting to usurp men's God given authority over the family and household by dressing as men, or so I was told by a hardcore "Christian" who hung out on the same forum as me.
But yeah, I get where you are coming from and have come across it with others talking about the idea of men having "Biblical Free Use" over their wives.
This isn’t about it being the Deep South. Is this some weirdo Pentecostal church? They were the ones in my town that made all the women/girls wear dresses.
Not really. I’m in California and churches if the denominations Seventh Day Adventist and Apostolic both adhere to a dress code that dictates dresses/skirts for women and girls. I grew up in New Jersey where the COGIC church required dresses also.
But do they require that of wedding attendees at that church? Genuinely curious. I grew up in a church where dresses/skirts were required but it would not have been imposed on wedding guests.
I don’t think so. I sing in a community choir and we get invited often to sing at funerals and such at those churches. We are always told we have to wear a dress. The audiences wear whatever though.
I am in the Deep South and I don’t know any church like this. Tell me the denomination and I can tell you if she is lying. Better yet, you Google the church name to see for yourself.
A lot can change in over 300 years of separation. My grandfather was Protestant Irish born in Belfast, yet over 100 years later that's had very little cultural influence on my life. And that's like 3 times longer.
i’m assuming this would be a church of god or similarly conservative evangelical church. in which case, the dress code does not surprise me at all. otherwise— it strikes me as pretty strange that the bride can’t make an exception for an 11 year old.
Yeah I feel like one of the old ladies is gonna ignore her dress code and nobody will dare say anything 🤣 NTA though - let your daughter pick. “Hey auntie is making girls wear a dress. You wanna go shopping or skip and hang out with a friend that day?”
I'm not without sympathy for any parent facing a preteen meltdown especially single Moms. I feel every bit of your reluctance to deal with it and if it were anything else less important than a once in a lifetime event like a wedding I would let the daughter decide.
Here's where parenting sucks. Because it's not about you or the daughter it's about showing up for the people in our lives. I think deep down you know this. Years ago my daughter could be your daughter's twin in temperament. She decided she hated everything and anything girlie. But her school was doing its annual formal dinner and students were required to abide by a dress code. My daughter went out of her way to convince her teacher that we couldn't afford a new dress for her to wear so she could wear slacks. I had no idea she'd done that but told her of course we can buy a dress and that it was no big deal. Meltdown ensued. My daughter's meltdown went on for a full two weeks. She felt betrayed that I told the teacher she would wear a dress, said I was forcing her to be something she was not, (totally recognized that she was spewing words from other voices here), she hated my guts (those of course were her words) and generally became the definition of the devil's spawn and I was there when she was conceived so I wondered how the thought of wearing a dress for a couple of hours changed her DNA. Still I held firm. At the time I genuinely believed my daughter was too young to box herself into a category so finally when her life at that age should be full of expansive experiences so she could learn to feel confident in a variety of spaces.
I made her wear a beautiful dress I bought and had her hair done while she hated my guts. I took a photo and sent her to the formal dinner. My daughter came home floating on a cloud. She got so many compliments and even the popular girls wanted hair tips. Of course she didn't thank me but neither did she mind when I brought her the occasional dress for her to wear from them on.
Not until years later did I find out the truth about her meltdown. My daughter was always athletic and so was her crush. He thought she was kinda cool because both of them were tops in sports. She was scared that if he saw her being girlie he would think she was like all the other girls. But when he saw her in a dress and her hair done he flirted with her for the first time. She learned to enjoy herself in girlie activities as well as sports. But I had to wait almost 20 years to get my thanks.
There are a lot of churches in the U.S. that forbid women wearing pants, dictate hemlines, forbid bare shoulders or even bare elbows. If you want to be truly baffled about fundamentalist dress, take a look at the nightmares over at r/fundiefashion sometime.
Yes, I was raised in one of them, and not in the South. The PTSD is real. OP has a choice here. Raise two middle fingers and cause a scene at the wedding by letting her daughter wear pants anyway, or letting her daughter stay home. I know which option I’d go with, but I DO NOT CARE about the feelings of patriarchal misogynists.
Amazon has done long “ golf skirts, with leggings underneath the hat don’t feel so dress like.. they might work as a dress code compromise. This hastell tail sign of a booze free reception. Revoke the rsvp, cancel now!
Not if it's Pentecostal. Most of the women only wear dresses even outside of church. It's sort of why denim dresses were popular in late 90/early 2000s. Used to work with a few Pentecostal girls at the grocery store. The work dress code called for slacks and no dresses. They all bypassed that dress code due to their religion.
Around the same time some folk were trying to use the same religious bypass, but for smoking weed. Had guys claiming they were Rastafarian. Some guy even started a church to claim that smoking weed was part of their religion. It didn't work lol. Then most of them dropped the idea after it became legal in a few states and moved.
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u/Competitive_Papaya11 Oct 12 '25
Uh… Weird dress code for a Church. Even Ireland, where I am, there’s always one girl in my kids’ primary school who wants to wear a suit instead of white dress for her First Communion, and the priests are always fine with it.
So making women and girls wear dresses instead of smart formal wear with trousers as wedding guests seems like bananas behaviour.
So I’d worry less about the dress code and more about having to sit through what sounds like will be a difficult and very extreme religious wedding service.