August 2, 2025 • 13 mins
(Host: Samantha)
Ladies, do you ever feel frustrated by the lack of pockets in your clothes? Gentlemen, have you ever heard a woman friend complain about her pockets or been asked to stow a phone or a wallet for a companion? This phenomenon isn’t new. Since the introduction of the three-piece suit in the seventeenth century, men have had a near monopoly on pockets. Tune in this week to learn more about the origin of the pocket in western dress and to consider why women’s pocket game is so limited.
For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Ladies, have you ever begrudged having to find a bag that perfectly matched your outfit? And,
gentlemen, have you ever been asked to carry someone’s keys or ID? I bet you
have and that’s because women frequently don’t have pockets,
and when we do, they’re often not fully functional. Today on Footnotning History
I’m going to think about where pockets come from and why ladies don’t have them.
(00:24):
Hi. I’m Sam and I’d like to welcome you to Footnoting History. If you like the work we do,
consider joining our Patreon or buying some merch from our store which you can find
along with additional materials relating to our podcast on our website www.footnotinghistory.com.
I usually don’t this, but for this episode I’m like to start with a word or two about myself or,
(00:46):
rather, about my kids. You see, when my son turned 4 he started collecting pocket treasures.
And every day I would find an abandoned stick that had transformed into a sword through the
magic of imagination, or a few rocks, and at least 4 snack wrappers lovingly carried
home and then forgotten in the laundry. But my daughter never had pocket treasures. And
(01:07):
it’s not because she was less curious, or less inclined to collect. The reason
my daughter never got to bring things home was that girls’ clothing rarely has pockets. And so,
because I had blindly decided to shop in the girls’ department, my inquisitive younger child
didn’t have any place she could stash the various sundries that she encountered throughout her day.
(01:27):
I noticed this lack of pockets and was annoyed by it, but it didn’t occur to me until I was doing
research for this podcast that through all of this my daughter was being conditioned to
expect less from her clothing. By the time she was two years old she was starting learn that
she would need a bag to carry her things. And in the process, she would have to sacrifice a
(01:48):
hand or brave the chafing of a cross-body bag and if she dared to put her precious bag down,
she would risk losing the things she loved. Either she will grow into a pocket having rebel like her
mom, or she will continually have to expend her precious executive functioning skills keeping
track of her stuff while her brother can expect to carry everything safely close. I am, of course,
(02:09):
by no means the first person to have the realization that the possession of pockets and the
design of clothing is a feminist issue. My goal right now is to take a few moments of your day
to explore the history of pockets to figure out how ladies ended up with such poor pocket game.
Inset pockets seem to have developed first in Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages. If
(02:29):
you want to learn more about medieval fashion, I strongly recommend Kristin’s episode on the
topic. But for now, I suppose it suffices to know that in Middle Ages both men and women wore belts
that held both tools and purses. Indeed, the purse was a mark of status and it was often
constructed from comparatively expensive and finely decorated materials. For medieval poets,
(02:50):
the positioning of the purse was also sometimes highly eroticized.
The earliest pockets were simply small bags – in fact the word pocket comes from the Anglo-Norman
poke (meaning bag) to which the suffex -ette (meaning small). These small bags,
could fall into the wrong hands, and so by the middle of the twelfth century there some who
decided to hold them the inside of the long, loose robes or tunics that were worn by both
(03:16):
sexes at that time. As tailored dresses became more popular tailors sometimes included a slit
in the seam between the front and the side panels at hip level to allow a bag to be positioned under
the garment. Wearers could rest their hands in the openings and keep their pockets inside of
them. We can see an example of these slits in sculpture of Joan the daughter of King Edward
(03:37):
III at Westminster Abbey, which you can find linked in the show notes. These pockets, however,
were sewn into the main garments. Most likely, pockets were not permanently attached because
they would have been comparatively fragile and would not have stood up well to the rough washing
methods that were used at that time, which would have meant that a sewn in pocket would need to
(03:57):
be regularly repaired or replaced, so instead of sewing them in, they just kind of hold them.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, clothing became more and more gendered and men started wearing
padded garments, called hose – and again, if you would like more detail about this shift I will
refer you to Kristin’s episode. There were many styles of breeches across Europe but eventually
they begam fuller and puffier. To achieve this rounded effect tailors stuffed breeches with hair,
(04:23):
or with quilted lining or with a cotton padding known as bombast. It’s actually from this stuffing
that we get the word bombastic because men with particularly large breeches compensated by
adopting a distinctive walk that became associated with a militaristic and pugnacious attitude. By
the 1560s these pants were so ridiculous that the English crown began to issue edicts intending to
(04:47):
limit their “monstrous and outrageous greatness” by limiting the amount of filling that tailors
could use. It appears that sewn in pockets first appeared in these overstuffed pants and in fact
there is even record of a man who was chastised for breaking the sumptuary laws limiting the
size of pants. He was, however, exonerated from any payment when he revealed the contents of his
(05:13):
pockets and demonstrated, thereby, that his pants were not over stuffed – they were full of useful
things including (apparently) four spare shirts, a pair of sheets, two table cloths, ten napkins,
a brush, a mirror, and (of course) a comb, along with various other sundries that were not listed.
Descriptions like this one demonstrate that sixteenth-century pockets must have been both
(05:35):
sturdier and larger than the ones we typically see today. Some were attached to the exterior
of clothing and were closed with drawstrings, but others were stitched into side seams much
as pockets are today. So pretty much as soon as pockets were first sewn into clothing,
they were most commonly an addition to male ensembles. Women could have pockets attached
to their skirts – in fact Queen Elizabeth I’s wardrobe accounts indicate that a few of her
(06:00):
casual gowns had pockets – but it remained much more common for women to wear purses suspended
from belts. To be fair, sometimes men had both so they would have the pocket and a purse on a belt.
It is, perhaps, worth noting that at first the reason that men were more likely to have
pockets than women is not just the patriarchy (though the fact that men wore the breeches was
(06:23):
already recognized as a symbol of their authority within the family unit). Instead, it appears to
have been a fashion decision (06:28):
pockets helped achieve the ideal inflated look for pants,
just as today cargo pants have a broader silhouette than many other cuts of trousers.
Also, almost as soon as pockets were routinely included in male costumes, however, people began
to worry about what might be concealed within them. By the early sixteenth century, there was
(06:49):
concern that people might be sporting small-scale handguns (known as pocket dags), which had only
recently been made possible by the innovation to the wheel-lock mechanism within the firearms.
As fashions evolved, men’s clothing continued to have more pockets than women’s clothing.
The middle of the seventeenth century saw the introduction of the three-piece suit,
which has remained the standard in menswear to the present day. From the beginning these
(07:13):
suits sported a myriad of inset pockets of varying sizes and purposes. Whereas at one
time men had to pay to have pockets added or repaired, by 1700 there was an expectation
that men’s clothing would have pockets and that expectation remains true to this day. I will note,
at this junction though, that there was an exception to this rule about men having pockets.
(07:37):
The least fortunate men in society, that is to say the enslaved and formerly enslaved,
did not have pockets and many came to view the integration of pockets into clothing as
a symbol of freedom. There are even a few accounts of enslaved men adding pockets to
their clothing in order to deflect suspicion from them when they escaped from their owners.
Pockets became so omnipresent among men’s clothing that there was a drive
(08:02):
to miniaturize instruments so that men might want things like pocket watches,
pocket compasses, pocket knives, and even pocket books – which were not bags at this juncture,
but rather books small enough to fit comfortably in the pocket. The addition of the word pocket
is still short hand for anything that has been miniaturized to fit into small spaces
even if they no longer literally fit in a pocket, so pocket games are small games.
(08:25):
As men’s clothing underwent this radical transformation to the suit, women’s styles
remained more consistent and continued to feature bodices and full skirts. Most commonly
women continued to carry purses but there were some tie-on pockets that women could wear and
it was even possible to tie them on under one’s skirts. These tie-on pockets could be large and
(08:46):
they could even be highly decorated. But they did not have the easy access to them in public because
you would have to pull up your skirt to get into your pocket (though to be fair, men were also
discouraged from accessing their pockets in public well into the 18th century because it was seen as
unseemly – this pocket space was private space that should be accessed in private). Moreover,
(09:07):
ladies’ pockets were not sewn in so that there was much higher risk of the knot holding them
in place slipping or coming undone entirely, so the pockets could fall out and be lost,
and we actually have advertisements of women looking for their lost pockets. I’m including
a link in the show notes to show you what the tie-on pocket looked like, and you can
also google just “tie on pockets” to see what I mean and how they would have been attached.
(09:32):
Moralists poked fun at women’s tie-on-pockets, but when women did try to don clothing with
sewn in pockets they expressed alarm. Women’s riding habits, for example,
frequently included over coats with pockets sewn into them, and the women who wore them were
dismissed as unfeminine or as Amazons. In short, until the 18th century women did have pockets but
(09:53):
their pockets were less useful than the ones men had. As art historian Hannah Carlson has noted,
it’s not that women weren’t pocketed but rather that they were differently pocketed.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, as men’s clothing began to be mass produced more
frequently, the narrative surrounding pockets shifted. The satirist William Livingstone Alden
described pockets as a biological given for men just as facial hair was natural to men. But,
(10:18):
since pockets allowed independence, they were not appropriate for women
or for children and one mark of adulthood was when a man got clothing with a pocket.
Unsurprisingly, the availability of pockets for women depended a lot on which fashions
happen to be in at any given moment. When formfitting dresses became popular at the
(10:39):
beginning of the nineteenth century, tie-in pockets – which are naturally
bulky – fell out of fashion and were replaced with reticules, which were effectively purses
worn on the wrist. Women who retained their tie-in pockets were seen as old-fashioned,
and those who opted for the reticule were often denigrated as silly or frivolous.
In other words, whatever choice they made women were subject to mockery.
(11:00):
The narrow silhouette did not last and by the 1820s women began wearing wider skirts
with tie-on pockets again. There were even a few women who experimented with adding inseam pockets
but when fashions shifted again to favor flat fronted dresses with large bustles at the back,
women’s pockets moved into the bustle of the dress, which was obviously not
(11:20):
an easy place to access. So while women could still carry their stuff with them,
unlike men they could not pull out a watch from their pocket and check the time,
which I guess would have been fine since they were not supposed to be carrying practical things like
compasses and watches, they were supposed to be carrying domestic things (like their sewing).
By the turn of the twentieth century, pockets had become a political issue. Male writers largely
(11:42):
blamed women for women’s lack of pockets and used the fact that they had not demanded pockets as
one more reason to dismiss women as silly and frivolous. It wasn’t always that easy to get a
pocket though. While men’s clothing was being mass produced long before, women were still reliant on
dressmakers to make their clothing into the 20th century. As such, you would think it would be
(12:05):
possible for women to get what they wanted, but that wasn’t always the case as Elizabeth Cady
Stanton discovered to her chagrin in 1895 when she asked her dressmaker to add pockets to her dress.
The dressmaker objected saying that pockets would “bulge you out just awful” still Stanton persisted
and left thinking that she had won the argument and that she would get a dress with pockets. When
(12:29):
she came back to collect her dress, however, she discovered that not one single pocket had
been added. In short, even when women were having their clothing individually tailored they didn’t
always have control. Arguably we have even less control now that most of us are buying ready-made
clothing. If the store doesn’t carry clothes with sufficient pockets, our only recourse is to learn
(12:50):
to sew or to shop in the men’s department and neither of these options appeal to most women.
Unlike men’s clothing, where pockets are an assumed staple, pocket fashion fades in and out
for womenswear. Sometimes women are discouraged from having pockets lest it mess with fine lines
and body-hugging silhouettes, other times women are given pockets that are purely decorative,
(13:12):
or oddly placed. None of these things is the norm with men’s clothing. This issue is not
just one of fashion, it is a feminist issue and it has been for a long time.
That’s where I’ll leave you today. I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning just little
bit about pockets and that you’ll come back to join us again soon for another episode of
Footnoting History. In the meantime remember, the best stories are always in the footnotes.
Ladies, have you ever begrudged having to find a bag that perfectly matched your outfit? And,
gentlemen, have you ever been asked to carry someone’s keys or ID? I bet you
have and that’s because women frequently don’t have pockets,
and when we do, they’re often not fully functional. Today on Footnotning History
I’m going to think about where pockets come from and why ladies don’t have them.
(00:24):
Hi. I’m Sam and I’d like to welcome you to Footnoting History. If you like the work we do,
consider joining our Patreon or buying some merch from our store which you can find
along with additional materials relating to our podcast on our website www.footnotinghistory.com.
I usually don’t this, but for this episode I’m like to start with a word or two about myself or,
(00:46):
rather, about my kids. You see, when my son turned 4 he started collecting pocket treasures.
And every day I would find an abandoned stick that had transformed into a sword through the
magic of imagination, or a few rocks, and at least 4 snack wrappers lovingly carried
home and then forgotten in the laundry. But my daughter never had pocket treasures. And
(01:07):
it’s not because she was less curious, or less inclined to collect. The reason
my daughter never got to bring things home was that girls’ clothing rarely has pockets. And so,
because I had blindly decided to shop in the girls’ department, my inquisitive younger child
didn’t have any place she could stash the various sundries that she encountered throughout her day.
(01:27):
I noticed this lack of pockets and was annoyed by it, but it didn’t occur to me until I was doing
research for this podcast that through all of this my daughter was being conditioned to
expect less from her clothing. By the time she was two years old she was starting learn that
she would need a bag to carry her things. And in the process, she would have to sacrifice a
(01:48):
hand or brave the chafing of a cross-body bag and if she dared to put her precious bag down,
she would risk losing the things she loved. Either she will grow into a pocket having rebel like her
mom, or she will continually have to expend her precious executive functioning skills keeping
track of her stuff while her brother can expect to carry everything safely close. I am, of course,
(02:09):
by no means the first person to have the realization that the possession of pockets and the
design of clothing is a feminist issue. My goal right now is to take a few moments of your day
to explore the history of pockets to figure out how ladies ended up with such poor pocket game.
Inset pockets seem to have developed first in Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages. If
(02:29):
you want to learn more about medieval fashion, I strongly recommend Kristin’s episode on the
topic. But for now, I suppose it suffices to know that in Middle Ages both men and women wore belts
that held both tools and purses. Indeed, the purse was a mark of status and it was often
constructed from comparatively expensive and finely decorated materials. For medieval poets,
(02:50):
the positioning of the purse was also sometimes highly eroticized.
The earliest pockets were simply small bags – in fact the word pocket comes from the Anglo-Norman
poke (meaning bag) to which the suffex -ette (meaning small). These small bags,
could fall into the wrong hands, and so by the middle of the twelfth century there some who
decided to hold them the inside of the long, loose robes or tunics that were worn by both
(03:16):
sexes at that time. As tailored dresses became more popular tailors sometimes included a slit
in the seam between the front and the side panels at hip level to allow a bag to be positioned under
the garment. Wearers could rest their hands in the openings and keep their pockets inside of
them. We can see an example of these slits in sculpture of Joan the daughter of King Edward
(03:37):
III at Westminster Abbey, which you can find linked in the show notes. These pockets, however,
were sewn into the main garments. Most likely, pockets were not permanently attached because
they would have been comparatively fragile and would not have stood up well to the rough washing
methods that were used at that time, which would have meant that a sewn in pocket would need to
(03:57):
be regularly repaired or replaced, so instead of sewing them in, they just kind of hold them.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, clothing became more and more gendered and men started wearing
padded garments, called hose – and again, if you would like more detail about this shift I will
refer you to Kristin’s episode. There were many styles of breeches across Europe but eventually
they begam fuller and puffier. To achieve this rounded effect tailors stuffed breeches with hair,
(04:23):
or with quilted lining or with a cotton padding known as bombast. It’s actually from this stuffing
that we get the word bombastic because men with particularly large breeches compensated by
adopting a distinctive walk that became associated with a militaristic and pugnacious attitude. By
the 1560s these pants were so ridiculous that the English crown began to issue edicts intending to
(04:47):
limit their “monstrous and outrageous greatness” by limiting the amount of filling that tailors
could use. It appears that sewn in pockets first appeared in these overstuffed pants and in fact
there is even record of a man who was chastised for breaking the sumptuary laws limiting the
size of pants. He was, however, exonerated from any payment when he revealed the contents of his
(05:13):
pockets and demonstrated, thereby, that his pants were not over stuffed – they were full of useful
things including (apparently) four spare shirts, a pair of sheets, two table cloths, ten napkins,
a brush, a mirror, and (of course) a comb, along with various other sundries that were not listed.
Descriptions like this one demonstrate that sixteenth-century pockets must have been both
(05:35):
sturdier and larger than the ones we typically see today. Some were attached to the exterior
of clothing and were closed with drawstrings, but others were stitched into side seams much
as pockets are today. So pretty much as soon as pockets were first sewn into clothing,
they were most commonly an addition to male ensembles. Women could have pockets attached
to their skirts – in fact Queen Elizabeth I’s wardrobe accounts indicate that a few of her
(06:00):
casual gowns had pockets – but it remained much more common for women to wear purses suspended
from belts. To be fair, sometimes men had both so they would have the pocket and a purse on a belt.
It is, perhaps, worth noting that at first the reason that men were more likely to have
pockets than women is not just the patriarchy (though the fact that men wore the breeches was
(06:23):
already recognized as a symbol of their authority within the family unit). Instead, it appears to
have been a fashion decision (06:28):
pockets helped achieve the ideal inflated look for pants,
just as today cargo pants have a broader silhouette than many other cuts of trousers.
Also, almost as soon as pockets were routinely included in male costumes, however, people began
to worry about what might be concealed within them. By the early sixteenth century, there was
(06:49):
concern that people might be sporting small-scale handguns (known as pocket dags), which had only
recently been made possible by the innovation to the wheel-lock mechanism within the firearms.
As fashions evolved, men’s clothing continued to have more pockets than women’s clothing.
The middle of the seventeenth century saw the introduction of the three-piece suit,
which has remained the standard in menswear to the present day. From the beginning these
(07:13):
suits sported a myriad of inset pockets of varying sizes and purposes. Whereas at one
time men had to pay to have pockets added or repaired, by 1700 there was an expectation
that men’s clothing would have pockets and that expectation remains true to this day. I will note,
at this junction though, that there was an exception to this rule about men having pockets.
(07:37):
The least fortunate men in society, that is to say the enslaved and formerly enslaved,
did not have pockets and many came to view the integration of pockets into clothing as
a symbol of freedom. There are even a few accounts of enslaved men adding pockets to
their clothing in order to deflect suspicion from them when they escaped from their owners.
Pockets became so omnipresent among men’s clothing that there was a drive
(08:02):
to miniaturize instruments so that men might want things like pocket watches,
pocket compasses, pocket knives, and even pocket books – which were not bags at this juncture,
but rather books small enough to fit comfortably in the pocket. The addition of the word pocket
is still short hand for anything that has been miniaturized to fit into small spaces
even if they no longer literally fit in a pocket, so pocket games are small games.
(08:25):
As men’s clothing underwent this radical transformation to the suit, women’s styles
remained more consistent and continued to feature bodices and full skirts. Most commonly
women continued to carry purses but there were some tie-on pockets that women could wear and
it was even possible to tie them on under one’s skirts. These tie-on pockets could be large and
(08:46):
they could even be highly decorated. But they did not have the easy access to them in public because
you would have to pull up your skirt to get into your pocket (though to be fair, men were also
discouraged from accessing their pockets in public well into the 18th century because it was seen as
unseemly – this pocket space was private space that should be accessed in private). Moreover,
(09:07):
ladies’ pockets were not sewn in so that there was much higher risk of the knot holding them
in place slipping or coming undone entirely, so the pockets could fall out and be lost,
and we actually have advertisements of women looking for their lost pockets. I’m including
a link in the show notes to show you what the tie-on pocket looked like, and you can
also google just “tie on pockets” to see what I mean and how they would have been attached.
(09:32):
Moralists poked fun at women’s tie-on-pockets, but when women did try to don clothing with
sewn in pockets they expressed alarm. Women’s riding habits, for example,
frequently included over coats with pockets sewn into them, and the women who wore them were
dismissed as unfeminine or as Amazons. In short, until the 18th century women did have pockets but
(09:53):
their pockets were less useful than the ones men had. As art historian Hannah Carlson has noted,
it’s not that women weren’t pocketed but rather that they were differently pocketed.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, as men’s clothing began to be mass produced more
frequently, the narrative surrounding pockets shifted. The satirist William Livingstone Alden
described pockets as a biological given for men just as facial hair was natural to men. But,
(10:18):
since pockets allowed independence, they were not appropriate for women
or for children and one mark of adulthood was when a man got clothing with a pocket.
Unsurprisingly, the availability of pockets for women depended a lot on which fashions
happen to be in at any given moment. When formfitting dresses became popular at the
(10:39):
beginning of the nineteenth century, tie-in pockets – which are naturally
bulky – fell out of fashion and were replaced with reticules, which were effectively purses
worn on the wrist. Women who retained their tie-in pockets were seen as old-fashioned,
and those who opted for the reticule were often denigrated as silly or frivolous.
In other words, whatever choice they made women were subject to mockery.
(11:00):
The narrow silhouette did not last and by the 1820s women began wearing wider skirts
with tie-on pockets again. There were even a few women who experimented with adding inseam pockets
but when fashions shifted again to favor flat fronted dresses with large bustles at the back,
women’s pockets moved into the bustle of the dress, which was obviously not
(11:20):
an easy place to access. So while women could still carry their stuff with them,
unlike men they could not pull out a watch from their pocket and check the time,
which I guess would have been fine since they were not supposed to be carrying practical things like
compasses and watches, they were supposed to be carrying domestic things (like their sewing).
By the turn of the twentieth century, pockets had become a political issue. Male writers largely
(11:42):
blamed women for women’s lack of pockets and used the fact that they had not demanded pockets as
one more reason to dismiss women as silly and frivolous. It wasn’t always that easy to get a
pocket though. While men’s clothing was being mass produced long before, women were still reliant on
dressmakers to make their clothing into the 20th century. As such, you would think it would be
(12:05):
possible for women to get what they wanted, but that wasn’t always the case as Elizabeth Cady
Stanton discovered to her chagrin in 1895 when she asked her dressmaker to add pockets to her dress.
The dressmaker objected saying that pockets would “bulge you out just awful” still Stanton persisted
and left thinking that she had won the argument and that she would get a dress with pockets. When
(12:29):
she came back to collect her dress, however, she discovered that not one single pocket had
been added. In short, even when women were having their clothing individually tailored they didn’t
always have control. Arguably we have even less control now that most of us are buying ready-made
clothing. If the store doesn’t carry clothes with sufficient pockets, our only recourse is to learn
(12:50):
to sew or to shop in the men’s department and neither of these options appeal to most women.
Unlike men’s clothing, where pockets are an assumed staple, pocket fashion fades in and out
for womenswear. Sometimes women are discouraged from having pockets lest it mess with fine lines
and body-hugging silhouettes, other times women are given pockets that are purely decorative,
(13:12):
or oddly placed. None of these things is the norm with men’s clothing. This issue is not
just one of fashion, it is a feminist issue and it has been for a long time.
That’s where I’ll leave you today. I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning just little
bit about pockets and that you’ll come back to join us again soon for another episode of
Footnoting History. In the meantime remember, the best stories are always in the footnotes.
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