What is the Feminist View of the History of High Heels?

Summary

Feminists have argued about high heels for over a century, and they still don’t agree. Everyone starts from the same odd historical fact—heels were once men’s footwear before being reassigned to women—but they draw opposite lessons from it. The most critical view, associated with thinkers like Sheila Jeffreys, holds that heels are a patriarchal device: they slow women down, damage their bodies, and reshape them into objects for a male gaze, so no woman “freely” chooses them. A competing view says heels can genuinely express confidence, authority, and pleasure, and that telling women what not to wear is its own form of control. Sitting between these is the “choice feminism” debate: even if a woman enjoys her heels, is the choice real when employers, red carpets, and professional norms quietly demand them? Feminists also disagree about whose voices have historically defined the heel—usually men’s, whether medieval preachers or modern designers. What makes the topic endure is that the same shoe can read as submission or defiance depending on who wears it and why. There is no single feminist verdict, only a long, unfinished argument about bodies, beauty, and freedom.

Details

Why feminists keep returning to a shoe

It might seem strange that a piece of footwear has occupied serious feminist thinkers for generations, but the heel works as a kind of pocket-sized case study. It sits exactly where the biggest feminist questions intersect: the body, beauty, labor, sexuality, and who holds the power to define what a woman should be. Writer Summer Brennan, in her book High Heel, uses the shoe deliberately as a lens to examine rape culture, pain, femininity, and beauty culture all at once. Because heels are simultaneously glamorous and painful, chosen and imposed, sexual and professional, they refuse to settle into a single meaning—and that instability is precisely what makes them such fertile ground for argument. The Representation Project frames the whole inquiry as a way to ask a deeper question: what are women even like outside of patriarchy?

The case that heels are a tool of oppression

The sharpest feminist critique treats the heel as a mechanism of control dressed up as fashion. In this reading, heels physically constrain women—preventing them from moving as quickly or freely as they otherwise might—while exacting a documented bodily toll. The most uncompromising voice here is third-wave scholar Sheila Jeffreys, who describes the foot damage caused by heels in deliberately shocking terms, calling such mutilations the exaggerated stigmata of aggressive masculinity and laying the blame squarely on men rather than on the women who wear them. Feminist Current writer Meghan Murphy makes a related material argument: that heels are a performance of femininity imposed by patriarchy, harmful to women’s bodies, and irrelevant to women’s actual liberation. For this camp, the heel’s deepest function is to mold women’s bodies to please others—a concern sharpened by evolutionary-psychology research showing that heels exaggerate the curve of the lower back in ways that increase perceived attractiveness, which critics read as the body being literally reshaped to meet a standard set by the male gaze.

The case for agency, power, and pleasure

A very different feminist tradition resists the idea that women in heels are simply victims of false consciousness. Historically, this view has deep roots: when suffragettes weighed into fashion debates in the early 20th century, the assertive wearing of heels was part of their protest, not something they rejected. Many women report that heels deliver real psychological dividends—higher self-esteem, a sense of authority, the commanding posture of “power dressing.” Defenders argue heels can function as instruments and symbols of female self-determination rather than submission. University of Melbourne historian Catherine Kovesi captures the paradox at the heart of this position: women may use heels to project power even as they risk surrendering power over their own bodies, and some women are not merely shaped by culture but are themselves potent shapers of it. From this angle, a feminism that forbids heels simply replaces one set of instructions to women with another, and the genuinely liberating move is to let women decide for themselves.

The “choice feminism” problem

Between these poles lies the thorniest part of the debate, and arguably the most relevant one. Even granting that a woman enjoys her heels, is the choice truly free when so many forces push her toward them? For critics like Jeffreys, the personal “choice” women claim is largely illusory—a product of cultural coercion in which women remain the political losers. The argument that “I just like them” can obscure the structural pressures bearing down on women in workplaces and public life. This is not hypothetical. A London office worker was sent home without pay for refusing to wear two-to-four-inch heels under her employer’s appearance code, and her petition to change the law drew tens of thousands of signatures. At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, women were reportedly turned away from the red carpet for wearing flats. The Representation Project points to how professional authority for women gets tied to painful footwear—noting Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing on bags of frozen broccoli to soothe her feet after long days in heels, and women basketball coaches wearing stilettos courtside while their male counterparts wear suits and flat shoes. When the shoe is effectively mandatory, “choice” starts to look like a comforting fiction.

Whose voice has defined the heel?

A recurring feminist observation is that men have usually controlled the conversation about what women wear on their feet. Kovesi’s research into Renaissance Venice found that debates over women’s shoes were heated but consistently dominated by men—at one point noblemen favored towering platform shoes specifically as a way to restrict the mobility of their wives and daughters. The pattern persists in modern form: the most celebrated designers of women’s heels have overwhelmingly been men, and when scholars interviewed men about heels, the men associated them almost entirely with eroticism and sexual power rather than with the wearer’s confidence or competence. This gap—between what women say heels mean to them and what men read into them—sits close to the center of the feminist complaint. The heel becomes a surface onto which others project meaning, and historically those others have rarely been women themselves.

An argument that refuses to resolve

What ultimately makes high heels such a durable feminist subject is that the disagreement never closes. The same pair of shoes can signal empowerment or subjugation, defiance or compliance, depending entirely on context: who is wearing them, why, in front of whom, and whether refusing was a real option. Second- and third-wave feminists have remained genuinely conflicted over whether the heel empowers or disables, objectifies or frees. Tellingly, Brennan herself declines to issue a verdict at the end of her book; she lays out the contradictions and leaves the reader to decide what the heel means. That refusal may be the most honest feminist position of all. There is no unified “feminist opinion” on high heels—there is instead a serious, ongoing conversation about autonomy, beauty, and power, one in which a single shoe manages to hold all the tension of being a woman in a world that still has strong opinions about her feet.

References

1. The politics of high heels — Pursuit, University of Melbourne
2. Are High Heels Feminist? — The Representation Project
3. Sorry, wearing heels doesn’t help women with anything — Feminist Current
4. Occasions and non-occasions: Identity, femininity and high-heeled shoes — SAGE Journals
5. Why Women Wear High Heels: Evolution, Lumbar Curvature, and Attractiveness — NCBI