To begin, I love Halloween. I love candy, getting dressed up, celebrating the dead, and decorating with skulls and crazy colors. There are witches, wizards, candy corn and pumpkins. All of my favorite things in one place. However, my favorite thing about Halloween is being able to dress up as something or someone you love and showing it off to the world. I wish that it were more socially acceptable to do every day of the year, since I love dressing up like the Black Widow because it gives me a reasonable excuse to wear my leather pants.
Dressing up on Hallowen is as important to me now as it was when I was a Telletubby in pre-school, a CSI agent in middle school, and the Phantom of the Opera in high school. It’s just as important to my thirteen year old sister who was able to design her own Greek goddess warrior costume this year, picking out each piece individually. My mother also loves to dress up, even though she’s been the Wicked Witch every year since she was a teenager herself.
Kindergarden Halloween at Saint Francis Academy, 2000, featuring cats (that’s me!), devils, hippies, and that guy from Yu-Gi-Oh
Kids of all ages get to choose who their greatest role model is and dress up like them during the Halloween season. This is the person they like and look up to the most, and they want to show the love they have to their friends, neighbors, family, and anyone that will see them in their costumes. The week after Halloween in 2014, Disney reported that over 3 million Anna and Elsa costumes were sold, proving the fact that little girls loved the movie Frozen so much that three million of them dressed as one of the two princesses for Halloween.
However, 2016 is an important year for little girls everywhere: it’s the first year when superhero costumes outsold princess costumes, because little girls are finally being given media-based models who are more than princesses. The upflux of comic books, superhero movies and TV shows, and the fact that most of these contain women of all backgrounds, female “super models” are starting to have a new meaning. This includes (much to the delight of my sister and quite a few of my Suicide Squad loving friends) many Harley Quinns, which is great. She’s not necessarily seen as a “hero,” but perhaps an “anti-hero.” However, she’s a strong female lead in a blockbuster, record-breaking movie and that has not gone unnoticed.
Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad,” 2016
Costume companies across the country are reporting that their bestselling costumes are super heroes and Star Wars costumes– both franchises that include important female leads that give little girls (and big girls alike) someone to look up to.
In the newest Star Wars movie, Leia Organa is the General over the entire army, and is still portrayed by the wonderful and gorgeous Carrie Fisher. Natalie Portman played Queen Padme Amidala, the youngest queen ever. She did a stunning job, which included standing up to other world leaders, becoming a kick-ass fighter, and pretty much saving the whole universe from destruction (not to mention being the mother of Luke Skywalker, the savior, and Leia Organa, who has already been mentioned.) Lastly, Daisy Ridley did a fantastic job as the newest female Star Wars lead, Rey, whose background is still a mystery, but who can fight, fly, and knows the ways of the Force.
Daisy Ridley as Rey in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” 2015
Among the superheroes, then, sit women like Peggy Carter, the Black Widow, the Scarlet Witch, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and many more. They all have imperfect pasts, have grown strong in the face of adversity, and are super bad-ass fighters. Not to mention, their costumes are becoming more appropriate for fighting women, showing less cleavage and actually protecting parts of their bodies sometimes.
I’ve always felt like Halloween was a time when I could finally drop the fact that I didn’t want to be a princess or a fairy or a mermaid, and that I was being judged for having a costume that was usually seen as a “boy costume.” For example, in the third grade, I was a solider. But since the uprise of female character costumes who aren’t princesses, I’ve been given the chance to find somebody of my gender that can be my hero, and other girls around the globe have been given the same chance. I recently wrote about this on my blog, both about female presence in television and on Ghostbusters! In a time when the gender binary is slowly disappearing and less little girls want to be princesses, it just makes sense for pop culture to take over and allow little kids of all ages to be whatever they want to be: Captain America, Harley Quinn, Han Solo, or Chewbacca.