Bread, Roses, and Some Less Than Pragmatic Underwear

“As we go marching, marching
We battle too for men
For they are women’s children
And we mother them again
Our lives shall not be sweetened
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses“
From ”Bread and Roses” written for the 1912 Lawrence Textile “Bread & Roses” Strike

Shortly after we started offering showers almost 3 years ago we received a box of women’s underwear in our donations. All sorts of different colors and sizes were there, a nice selection to serve the many sizes and shapes of women who came through our space. This was great because no one wants to get out of the shower, all fresh and clean, and put on the same pair of undies they’ve been wearing for the past week. But we noticed one pair that was not like the others and for a couple weeks this fire engine red, sheer thong was the *Ahem* butt of a number of jokes.

The rest of the box of donated underwear seemed far more practical to my eyes. When people ask me what kinds of things make good donations I tell them to think about what might make sense on a camping trip gone terribly, terribly wrong. If something looks like it’d be handy on the worst camping trip of your life, chances are good that I know someone who could use it. This, however, did not look like the kind of underwear that would stand up to a particularly grueling existence lived outside. This was the kind of underwear that was going to get snagged on a zipper and rip, or whatever.

A couple weeks later one of our regulars was at our space for a shower. As she was sorting through the box of underwear (not a time I usually try and strike up a conversation) suddenly she gasps and holds up the thong and I’ve thought a lot about what she said to me next.
”You know, you almost never see these kinds of underwear in clothing closets, it’s always big ugly granny panties, or whatever they got for cheap or free.” As she puts them with the rest of her things she says “It’s such a treat to find something that I can feel sexy in”.

In college I met a young community organizer on a bus trip who told me about the book she was reading, about the early days of the Food Co-op movement here the United States and about the battle lines that got drawn between different factions within the movement. On the one side there were folks who said that these co-ops should be about getting people food for as cheap as possible; they should combat food scarcity by driving the cost of the food down as far as possible. On the other side were people who envisioned the co-ops as places where people might be better able to gain access to fresh fruits and veggies, reduce the distance from farm to table; people deserve to not eat garbage, they were saying.

When I was looking at that box of underwear I think I was embodying the philosophy of that first group. People need underwear and we need – our friends need – stuff that’s going to survive some of the use and abuse they’re going to put them through. What my friend reminded me when she pulled that red thong out of the box was that poor people also deserve to have fun, to have nice things, to feel desirable to an intimate partner (something we’ve talked a little bit about already before), to like the way that they themselves look in the mirror, to just feel good about their bodies. People are more than their most basic needs.

I constantly find myself at the place where these two come in conflict and we as a team often find ourselves on different sides of this divide. On the one hand, we don’t have enough of everything to go around. We don’t have the funds to have backpacks, and sleeping bags, tarps, and underwear always on hand. But on the other hand our people are people and they deserve to be treated with dignity, to be told in word as well as in deed, that they matter. They deserve to be given opportunities for a little happiness too instead of always the most practical and utilitarian of options.