Maria Makiling is the most widely known and beloved diwata (fairy or nymph) of the Philippines. As the guardian spirit of Mount Makiling, she is depicted as a beautiful young woman in radiant white clothing, surrounded by the natural flora and fauna. She is shy but gracious and generous, often helping the local people. Stories abound of her giving away baskets of ginger that turn into gold. Other stories tell of her falling in love with mortal men. But she will not tolerate abuse, either of herself or her mountain, and punishes evil-doers by playing tricks on them.

It’s very likely that Maria Makiling is the modern folkloric version of a pre-Christian deity. Diyan Masalanta was the ancient Tagalog goddess of love, whose home was in the forest. When the Spanish arrived, it seems that Diyan Masalanta was renamed Maria Makiling (meaning, in the local parlance, “the woman of Makiling”) and recast as a fairy. And so she lives on, as enchanting as ever.

Think we should add a Maria Makiling costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

Baba Yaga is the legendary witch of Slavic folklore, especially Russian fairy tales. She lives on the edge of the forest in a hut that stands and moves on chicken legs. Baba Yaga herself fills the hut from end to end, stretched out on her stove with her nose growing into the ceiling. She travels through the air in a mortar, pushing herself along with a pestle and sweeping away her tracks with a broom. She also likes to eat people.

Is Baba Yaga just a witch, or the debased form of an earlier Slavic goddess? Nobody knows for sure, but it’s interesting to speculate. She certainly is very powerful, and some of the details in the fairy tales suggest deity-like attributes. She’s also not entirely evil; sometimes she can be downright helpful. This has led many scholars to see her as the remnant of a pre-Christian goddess with both benign and malevolent aspects. Whatever the case, Baba Yaga is one of the most delightfully weird and intriguing figures in European mythology.

Think we should add a Baba Yaga costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a brilliant essayist and poet whose husband was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. While stationed with him in Constantinople, Lady Montagu made friends with Turkish women and learned about their practice of smallpox inoculation (deliberately grafting a small amount of smallpox virus onto a healthy person’s skin to induce immunity to the disease). The technique was widespread in the Ottoman Empire, and in fact was well known in China, India, and parts of Africa. When Lady Montagu returned home she embarked on a campaign to introduce smallpox inoculation in Britain. Despite some setbacks she was ultimately successful, and by the mid-18th century inoculation was an accepted part of British medicine. (Edward Jenner, a country doctor who practiced Montagu’s method of inoculation, subsequently developed vaccination as a safer alternative. Jenner used cowpox virus—vaccination is from the Latin vacca for cow—to induce immunity to smallpox, which worked because the two diseases produce similar antibodies.)

In addition to being a major pioneer of public health, Lady Montagu was a feminist and a fashion innovator. The two things went together in her mind, and on both counts she felt that Turkish women were far better off than their European sisters. She did much to introduce Ottoman dress to western Europe, and numerous portraits show her decked out in the glorious yet comfortable fashions of Constantinople.

Think we should add a Lady Montagu costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

Movie star by day, genius inventor by night: it sounds unbelievable. But it’s true. Hedy Lamarr was an extremely intelligent woman with the mind of an engineer. Being a movie star bored her; what she really wanted to do was invent things. She set aside a room of her house as her workshop, with a drafting table and shelves of books on electrical engineering. Her great idea in World War II was what she dubbed “frequency hopping,” which involved switching the frequencies in radio transmissions to prevent jamming. Hedy’s plan was to develop this into a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, one that would be impervious to Nazi interference. She mentioned the idea to composer George Antheil, who proposed using a player piano-like roll of paper to synchronize the frequency hopping. Hedy and George patented their invention and offered it to the Navy, but Washington balked. Fifteen years later, though, the idea was taken up by engineers at Sylvania, who replaced the piano rolls with electronics. Frequency hopping became the basis for secure military communications systems, and was used on the ships that blockaded Cuba in 1962. And now, of course, it’s the technology that underlies cellphones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Hedy never made a dime off her patent, but she did receive the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997.

Think we should add a Hedy Lamarr costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

Before James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Eli Whitney, there was Huang Daopo. This Chinese peasant woman, who lived some 500 years before the industrial revolution in the West, almost single-handedly revolutionized the textile industry in the East. Huang introduced a whole raft of new technologies to mechanize the production of cotton: a two-roller cotton gin, an improved fluffing bow, and a three-spool, pedal-driven cotton-spinning machine. It was the most advanced cotton technology in the world. Huang’s innovations transformed cotton production in China and laid the foundations for the entire East Asian cotton industry.

“Granny Huang” is still the subject of a popular nursery rhyme in Shanghai, and her life has been dramatized in operas, ballads, and TV movies. A memorial hall dedicated to her in Shanghai has fascinating exhibits, with replicas of the machinery she introduced.

Think we should add a Huang Daopo costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

You’ve heard of Amelia Earhart, but do you know about Bessie Coleman? She was the world’s first black female pilot. The child of sharecroppers in Texas, she overcame incredible odds (poverty, racism, sexism) to pursue her dream of flying. PBS has a good biographical sketch:

It was soldiers returning from World War I with wild tales of flying exploits who first interested Coleman in aviation. She was also spurred on by her brother, who taunted her with claims that French women were superior to African American women because they could fly. In fact, very few American women of any race had pilot’s licenses in 1918. Those who did were predominantly white and wealthy. Every flying school that Coleman approached refused to admit her because she was both black and a woman. On the advice of Robert Abbott, the owner of the “Chicago Defender” and one of the first African American millionaires, Coleman decided to learn to fly in France.

Coleman learned French at a Berlitz school in the Chicago loop, withdrew the savings she had accumulated from her work as a manicurist and the manager of a chili parlor, and with the additional financial support of Abbott and another African American entrepreneur, she set off for Paris from New York on November 20, 1920. It took Coleman seven months to learn how to fly. The only non-Caucasian student in her class, she was taught in a 27-foot biplane that was known to fail frequently, sometimes in the air. During her training Coleman witnessed a fellow student die in a plane crash, which she described as a “terrible shock” to her nerves. But the accident didn’t deter her: In June 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded her an international pilot’s license.

When Coleman returned to the U.S. in September 1921, scores of reporters turned out to meet her. The “Air Service News” noted that Coleman had become “a full-fledged aviatrix, the first of her race.” …

Over the next five years Coleman performed at countless air shows. The first took place on September 3, 1922, in Garden City, Long Island. The “Chicago Defender” publicized the event saying the “wonderful little woman” Bessie Coleman would do “heart thrilling stunts.” According to a reporter from Kansas, as many as 3,000 people, including local dignitaries, attended the event. Over the following years, Coleman used her position of prominence to encourage other African Americans to fly. She also made a point of refusing to perform at locations that wouldn’t admit members of her race.

Tragically, Bessie Coleman was killed in a flying accident in 1926. Her legacy lives on, though, and has inspired generations of women and girls. When astronaut Mae Jemison made history as the first black woman in space, she was carrying a photograph of Bessie Coleman with her.

Think we should add a Bessie Coleman costume to Take Back Halloween? Make sure you join our Kickstarter project so you can vote!

New Goal = $4,800 = 16 new costume designs

And remember, backers will get to vote on exactly which costumes do. We have a spreadsheet a mile long of suggestions and requests—everybody from Baba Yaga to Catherine the Great, from Annie Oakley to Zsa Zsa Gabor. All it takes is a $5 pledge and you’ll be enrolled as a voter.

(For the worrywarts: Note that Kickstarter stretch goals really are completely informal. Our project is considered officially successful at $4,500, and if we don’t make the stretch goal, it’s okay.)

The scene at Take Back Halloween headquarters.

WE MADE IT! Thanks to all our wonderful backers, our Kickstarter is 100% funded! And still with 6 days to go!

We’re so overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude right now, we’re just burbling incoherently. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As soon as we can pull ourselves together we’ll see about a stretch goal so a few more people can join the party in this last week. We’ll also start posting details about the “Costume Candidates for 2013″ — that’s the list of suggested costumes all our backers will be voting on for next year.

So verklempt. Thank you forever.

Abigail Kluska as Freyja, the chief goddess of the Norse pantheon.

Doesn’t she look wonderful?

Abby was inspired by our Freyja costume design, and she did an absolutely fantastic job with it.

Here are the individual photos of Abby in her costume, looking very much like a Norse goddess:

Beautiful!

Thank you, everyone, for entering our contest. We were blown away by all the gorgeous, creative costumes that people sent in, and we really wanted to award a whole bunch of prizes. We’ll have a contest again next year, and we’ll probably do different categories so more people have a chance to win.

Speaking of next year, our Kickstarter campaign is heading into the final stretch. Please contribute whatever you can so we can have a wonderful 2013 season. And remember, all it takes is $5 and you’ll get a chance to vote on next year’s additions to our line of costume designs!

The big day is finally here, though in several states battered by Hurricane Sandy, the celebrations are on hold. Lots of communities are putting off Halloween until this Saturday, while New Jersey has officially postponed the holiday until Monday. On the other hand, many New Yorkers have decided to just have Halloween tonight anyway, which is awesome. Who needs electricity when you have chocolate?

For everybody outside the apocalypse zone, it’s business as usual. And if you’re still trying to decide what to wear, check out our ever-popular Last-minute costume suggestions. Also check out our Bedsheet costumes, a list of all the costumes you can make with a bedsheet.

As for us, the Halloween season is still in full swing. We have two big things going that will keep us in Halloween mode until Thanksgiving:

• Our Kickstarter has three more weeks to run. We have until Thanksgiving Day to meet our goal of $4,500. We’re already 40% of the way there, but we need your help to bring this puppy home. And the more money we raise, the more costumes we can add. So if you like what we do and want us to do more of it, please pitch in!
• Our Halloween costume contest is open for submissions until Friday, November 9. Thanks to a very kind sponsor, we’re able to offer a very cool prize for best costume: a $50 Amazon gift card! Perfect for Christmas shopping or just loading up on books or anything you like. We’ll announce the winner the week of November 12.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. The cheerful Halloween picture at the top of the post is from the How-To Geek Halloween 2012 Wallpaper Collection [Bonus Edition].

Valentina Tereshkova

Whenever I look at Halloween costumes for women these days, I think of Valentina Tereshkova.

Tereshkova was the first woman in space, a Soviet cosmonaut who made history when she flew the Vostok 6 into orbit on June 16, 1963. The Soviet press at the time made much of Tereshkova, highlighting her proletarian background and party loyalty. They also made a big point of stressing her femininity. News reports explained that a vanity mirror had been installed in Tereshkova’s space capsule, presumably so she could check her makeup while in orbit. The real reason was just to demonstrate to the world that, though Tereshkova might be a cosmonaut, she was still first and foremost a girl: an appropriately feminine woman who conformed to expected gender stereotypes.

See, here’s the deal: in a patriarchal society, women are defined by their sexuality. They are, to put it bluntly, the breeding stock. Men are the real people and women are just their wives and mothers. As Napoleon said:

“Nature intended women to be our slaves…they are our property, we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener. What a mad idea to demand equality for women!…women are nothing but machines for producing children.”

And to this end, Rousseau explained,

“…the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them – these are the duties of women at all times and should be taught them from their infancy.”

You couldn’t ask for a better description of pure patriarchy. It’s a world in which women’s number one job is to serve men, sexually and domestically.

Thankfully, we no longer live in a pure patriarchy. The past two centuries of feminist activism means that we now live in what I call a transitional patriarchy. It’s transitional because women have won a large measure of legal equality and the right to pursue full lives. Yet our society’s unconscious mores and biases are still rooted in the patriarchal past.

The hallmark of this transitional state is that women are still expected to fulfill that number one job of serving and pleasing men. Sure, we can do other things—we can be astronauts and doctors and lawyers and police officers—as long as we continue to uphold our traditional obligation to be sexy and/or domestic.

That’s why Tereshkova’s space capsule had a vanity mirror. It’s why Amelia Earhart was pressured to wear feminine clothes, and why Babe Didrikson felt compelled to reassure the public that she liked all the “woman’s things,” such as sewing and cooking.

It’s why women today still do the majority of the housework and childcare, even while holding down full-time outside jobs. It’s why women professionals are routinely described as “moms,” and why women, but never men, are quizzed on whether they can handle their careers and be parents at the same time.

It’s why Hillary Clinton was judged on her cankles, and why pundits on national television actually discussed whether the nation could stand to watch a female president age in office.

It’s why Dorothy Parker said 75 years ago that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” And why, still today, teenage girls worry that going into STEM will make them seem unfeminine.

It’s why a Halloween astronaut costume for men looks like this:

while the astronaut costume for women looks like this:

And allow me to point out that all the female astronaut costumes look like this. There are no normal astronaut costumes for women. If you’re female and you want to dress up as an astronaut, this is it.

Shades of Tereshkova’s vanity mirror.

Now, Dan Savage does not understand any of this. He’s on record with defending Sexy Halloween as a kind of Heterosexual Pride parade. He thinks that Halloween is a chance for straight people to express their sexuality, which apparently they don’t get to do the rest of the year. He acknowledges (barely) that women’s Halloween costumes are more revealing than men’s, but he chalks this up to evolutionary psychology, which he thinks means that women have naturally evolved to wear miniskirts and thigh-high stockings.

He’s wrong.

Look, Dan Savage is a gay man and a sex columnist. He understands very well the problems that patriarchy imposes on gay men. Patriarchy—at least our society’s form of patriarchy—denies the right of gay men to even exist as sexual beings. This is why gay liberation tends to take the form of Gay Pride, in which homosexuality is defiantly celebrated and claimed.

But that’s not what patriarchy does to women. Patriarchy certainly restricts women’s sexual freedom, but it doesn’t deny their existence as sexual beings. On the contrary, patriarchy tells women that they’re nothing but sexual beings. Wives and mothers. Breeding stock.

Astronaut costumes that look like Hooters Girl outfits, cop costumes with plunging necklines, firefighter costumes with bare midriffs: these are not the expressions of a long-oppressed sexuality finally being allowed to show its face. They’re just the modern-day equivalents of Tereshkova’s mirror.

The message is clear. Women can’t just be astronauts or cops or firefighters. They have to be sexy astronauts, sexy cops, sexy firefighters. They have to uphold that traditional patriarchal obligation to be sexually pleasing to men.

One reason I’m so sure of this is because I know what happens when girls and women try to buck the trend. College girls are heckled by guys for wearing “too many clothes.” One woman wrote to me about being harassed so aggressively for her unsexy costume that she almost felt afraid. That’s not liberation. It’s enforcement.

Does this mean that sexy costumes are intrinsically wrong? No, of course not. Sexuality is part of who we are. And a lot of women definitely do want to sex it up on Halloween, which is fine. When I say, as I did in our Kickstarter video, that “there’s nothing wrong with wanting to dress sexy,” I mean it.

What I want is for women to have the freedom to be sexy if they want to, and the freedom not to be sexy if they don’t want to. I want both of those things to be valid choices. It sounds ridiculously simple, but you know what? We’ve been fighting for this for 200 years, and we’re still not there.

Our 2012 Halloween costume contest is here! Send in a photo of yourself (or a friend or family member) in costume for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate from Amazon! (Prize courtesy of a very kind sponsor.)

Here are the rules:

1. The photo must be of you or a friend or family member in costume. If the photo is of a friend or family member, you must obtain their permission to submit it. You’ll need to tell us their name as well as yours, and note what your relationship is (sister, daughter, etc.).
2. The costume doesn’t have to be inspired by Take Back Halloween, but we prefer that it fall into one of our categories: a goddess or mythological figure, a notable woman from history, a queen, a glamorous star—you get the idea. You’ll notice that we don’t do fictional characters on our website (such as Princess Leia or Hermione Granger), so we’re more likely to be impressed by a mythological or historical costume.
3. Please tell us what the costume is, in case we are too dense to figure it out.
4. The costume may be from this year or any previous Halloween.
5. By submitting the photo, you are giving us permission to publish it on the Take Back Halloween website and on our Facebook page. You can send in multiple photos if you’re not sure what the best one is or if you need several angles to reveal the full glory of the costume.
6. Submissions should be emailed to contest@takebackhalloween.org.
7. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm EST on Friday, November 9, 2012.
8. The prize is a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Use it on anything you like!

We expect to publish the winner the week of November 12, 2012.

Of course, all of this is assuming we don’t get washed out to sea. We did not get washed out to sea! Contest is going strong, so email your pics to contest@takebackhalloween.org.

UPDATE November 10, 2012: Our contest is now closed, and we’ll announce the winner next week. We were absolutely amazed by the wonderful costumes people put together, and the judging will be hard! Check out the entries we’ve posted on our Facebook page and you’ll see what we mean. Thanks to everyone for sending in your pictures.