I’m going to step on my soapbox here for a minute.
Have fun, hopefully you won’t be nichshol anybody, read at your own risk… – Interrupting Mod
See, my question is – where does it say a woman has to wear anything at all? The answer is really nowhere. The only thing you’ll find is the fact that a woman dressing in an immodest fashion is grounds for divorce, but it doesn’t say anywhere “a woman is obligated to cover any area which is called erva.”
The discussion of erva in Halacha is about what causes men to become sidetracked and focus on certain thoughts, which one must avoid during kerias shema. This discussion is a good indicator of what is or isn’t modest for a woman to show, which is how it got caught up in the whole tznius sugya. But the truth is that the erva sugya is not about a woman covering up, and nowhere in that discussion is it mentioned that a woman is obligated to cover up.
A Jew dresses modestly. Modesty means developing your inner self to the extent that you don’t need other people’s validation every second of the day. Drawing attention to yourself by flaunting the physical side of you and playing on people’s base desires is the opposite of modesty. A truly modest person doesn’t need to dress that way. Modesty is something which enters into every area of life, of men and women. This is just how it pertains to dress, and particularly the way women dress.
Tznius is not about what is technically called erva (assuming there is such a thing). The sugya of erva was never meant to be brought into the tznius discussion as anything more than a conceptual comparison. Tznius is about the motivation behind what you are doing, and how it will be taken by others. It is very subjective, lechumra and lekula.
(And people who give specific, technical guidelines for tznius, and say that they are not subject to change, are machshil the community.)