Lauren Todd ’03 was browsing Facebook on August 30 when a link posted by a friend directed her to retail giant JC Penney’s website. The page sold a t-shirt with the phrase “I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me” written in flowery prose. Target demographic? Girls as young as seven.
“Even as a young girl, I would have been mad about that shirt,” Lauren says. “I was raised with the radical notion that I was not only pretty, but that I was also smart – I didn’t have to choose to be just one.”
Lauren quickly registered her outrage with change.org, where users can rally socially-minded people to action. And it worked – fast. Within 12 hours, the petition had received the support of over 1,600 people and JC Penney had scrubbed the product from their website. The company agreed the shirt “does not deliver an appropriate message… we would like to apologize to our customers and are taking action to ensure that we continue to uphold the integrity of our merchandise that they have come to expect.”
“There are a lot of shirts that are really similar to this one that DO sell,” Lauren says. “If you look at the comments on some of the articles that have popped up around this particular controversy, parents mention they have seen tons of inappropriate clothing marketed to girls. The mistake JC Penney made was in crossing the line of ‘acceptable’ sexist messaging; there were so many gender stereotypes in this one phrase that it was impossible to ignore.”
Lauren and change.org women’s rights director Shelby Knox were featured on the September 1 CBS Early Show as proof of activism using social media. “Consumers are supposed to get together and tell corporations when they’re unhappy with what they’re doing,” she said during the interview. “It’s crazy how fast everything happened. I was… floored.”
Did Scripps College influence Lauren’s passion for social activism? “Absolutely,” she says. “Scripps helped me to think critically, challenge social norms, and speak my mind. Anyone who knows me well knows I will always speak my mind when something strikes me as wrong. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
“You don’t have to be famous or rich to make change; just use your brain, and use your voice.”
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Photo: C. Bay Milin