October 16, 2013 • 31 mins
The history of women wearing pants is about far more than fashion. Caroline and Cristen explore the gender and class politics interwoven with pants slowly entering the female wardrobe and why men began wearing them in the first place.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff. Mom never told you from how stuff works,
not com Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we are going to dive
into some sartorial history of pants. Pants. Hey, because it's
(00:23):
pants season, that's right, it's getting cold outside. And also
because a few weeks ago, as I was getting them
a fall pants out, I started thinking about why pants
are considered, you know, kind of like the masculine uniform,
whereas you know when skirts are for the ladies. And
(00:43):
I wanted to know when women started wearing pants, and
it drove me into this just rabbit hole of sartorial
have already said sartorial, I'm probably gonna say, start a
lot a lot of fashion history and gender politics, and
it is fascinating why women wear pants and why men
(01:07):
wear pants, and even where the word pants comes from.
Can you can you enlighten us on some pant etymology
to kick things off, I had no idea it came
from a Roman Sat. So we have the fourth century
Roman sat Pantalion, who's the patron saint of Venice. So
Venetians were commonly called Pantaliones. So then in sixteenth century
(01:29):
Italy we have a type of comedy theater with stock characters,
including the miserly Pantalone. He was distinguished by the cut
of his trousers, which French, which French people began to
call pantaloons, and then by the late seventeen hundreds pantaloons
is used to describe any style of trousers. And then
(01:50):
the word migrates over to Britain and the lower classes
thankfully shorten it just of pants, although the upper classes,
we should note, initially considered it a vulgar term. Don't
they now call pants in England? Isn't that like underwear? Yes,
pant pants? Pants? Are you like your panties and trousers
(02:11):
are like your pants? I would never keep that straight.
I would just say I would go around being like,
oh yeah, I'm just gonna go buy a new pair
of pants, and people would be like, oh my would
be like, my pants are really dirty, and then heavens
and then forty Edgar Allan Poe prints the word, and
by this point pants was a generally accepted term. So
(02:32):
when we're talking about pants, we're talking about Saint Pantalone.
Although I do kind of prefer sometimes to say pantaloon
just for fun. I know, I just I really and
truly love the word pants, pants, pants, put on some pants.
I love it. Well. The etymology of skirt is a
lot more straightforward. It comes from the Old Norse word
(02:55):
skirt to s k y r t a, which is
basically like one of those long peasant shirts. Think back
to uh monty python on the Holy grail Um and
that transitioned into the Old English word wait for it, skirt,
which is s c y r t e, And so
there you have it. The development of the word for
a what we think of as a skirt is related
(03:17):
to peasants long shirts that kind of came down to
their knees. Well, and speaking of skirts, we should stay
before we get into pants pants that skirts predate the
pant obviously, because it is the second oldest type of clothing,
predated only by loincloths. Valerie Steel, who's the director of
(03:41):
the f I T Museum, says that there are ancient
Egyptian drawings with featuring skirts and that a long skirt
signaled luxury, mainly because fabric is expensive and women's long
skirts would eventually signal modesty and prestige. There's a lot
(04:01):
of status found in skirts. Yeah, status and beauty. Uh.
You know, women's narrow waists were prized, and so you know,
if you could only cinch it so far where the courset,
you eventually were like, oh, optical illusion. I'll just make
my skirt fifty pounds or put a bustle in it,
(04:22):
put a bird on it, put a bustle in it,
um in nineteenth century. By the nineteenth century, skirts became
so distinctly feminine that the words skirt became slang for women. Yeah.
You still hear that every now and then. Yeah, but
this episode is devoted to pants, and we can't get
too sidelined by skirts. Although listeners side note, if you
would like an episode devoted to skirts, we can do that.
(04:45):
But for now, let's talk about paths. And obviously men
started wearing pants before women did. And the reason why
blew my mind. I had no idea because it has
a lot to do with horses. Yeah, pants developed out
of necessity. It's kind of hard and awkward to ride
(05:06):
a horse in a robe or a kimono if you're
in Japan. Uh. Samurais in Japan war baggy trousers so
that they could do things like ride horses and wheeled
heavy swords and things. Yeah, and we know this thanks
to evolutionary biologist Peter Turchen who traced the history of pants,
and he talks about how in different cultures, whether you're
(05:28):
talking about Japan, China, Rome, it's always related to horses
and militarism. And speaking of militarism, in Rome, soldiers adopted
pants in the first century CE after being beaten by
Hannibals trouser clad cavalrymen. Yeah, And church And also talks
(05:48):
about how in pre unified China pants were considered barbarian
clothes and that's the whole barbaric thing with pants is
not just exclusive to China. But speaking about China, they
were worn by nomadic horsemen from Central Asia. But after
they invaded and did pretty well, the Chinese started to
(06:10):
adopt them. And church And writes that those states in
China that did not adopt cavalry or pants or adopted
them too slowly lost to the states that did so early. Right,
And similarly in Europe we have in the eighth century,
after the fall of the Roman Empire, the continent falls
under the control of pants wearing horse riding nights so
(06:34):
you were, you know, smart enough to wear pants instead
of a robe. That meant you could conquer a lot
of people on a giant animal. Yeah, I mean, it's
really the evolution of pants is really all about the
evolution of the horseback cavalry. Uh in England, Henry the Eighth.
(06:54):
This has nothing to do with conquering cultures, but Henry
the Eighth wanted to show off his muscular calves and
his I'll say it, sweet, sweet god piece. And so
pants became established firmly as a symbol of power and
prestige and also modernity, which is ironic because to start
out with they were often considered the clothes of barbarians.
(07:18):
But by the late seventeenth century, for instance, we have
Peter the Great in Russia decreeing that everyone in every
level of society except for clergy and peasant farmers, had
to wear pants, so that he was like, hey, Russians,
we gotta get with the times. Get throw off your
your skirts and put on some pants. Um, they really
(07:40):
became something completely different. They became a symbol. In France
during the Revolution, militants were long pants as opposed to
the royalist knee length. I'm gonna call them capri pants.
So long pants in France became equated with freedom. Oh yeah,
because the sands cool lots. It didn't mean that they
weren't wearing any pants, as you might hope or imagine.
(08:01):
It just meant that they weren't wearing the short pants. Yeah,
instead they were the sand schoolats, and the sands actually
meant more in that case because they were more pants,
more pants, longer pants. But politicizing pants wasn't just exclusive
to France either. In Scotland, King George, the Seconds Dress
Act prohibited kilts, although that was dissolved in seventeen eighty two.
(08:26):
But we see this, you know, all of these fascinating
things of countries being unified, empires being brought to their knees,
cultures being changed by pants, pants, And so it's not
that surprising considering that that history of the pants that
it is then going to influence and intersect with gender politics. Yeah,
(08:53):
so when do women start wearing pants? When does this happen?
Basically a lot of people are like, hey, your skirts
and your course that they're pretty much disgusting, and they're
trailing dirt all over the place and they're making it
hard to breathe. And so those people who said that
very eloquent statement that I just tripped over were the
dress reformers. Yeah, the women's dress reform movement took place
(09:17):
from eighteen fifty to nineteen fourteen, and even though it
was not very mainstream, the dress reformers were considered fringe crazies,
but they had some pretty practical ideas about fashion. Because
women's clothes, a single outfit could weigh up to twenty
five pounds, and those long skirts that women wore not
(09:40):
only dragged on the ground and collected up street trash
and vermin, but they were also health hazards because they
caught on fire easily. Some women even died from tripping
and falling down flights of stairs because of these ridiculous skirts.
They were literally weighing us down. And the dress reformers, uh,
(10:03):
some of them even said, hey, can we just at
least put a cap on undergarments weighing no more than
seven pounds? Is that too much to ask? Like that?
That was radical for back then, I mean, because those
were the days of petticoats, right, hide that shameful body
under as much weight as you possibly can well, and
then we have we get back to skirts and the
(10:25):
symbolism and how the female shape at that time was
being artificially constructed. Yeah, exactly. Can you imagine Caroline living
a time when the idealized shape was a figure eight? No. No,
the women in my family are barrel chested. So I
(10:49):
don't think I I would not be a good candidate
to fit into a corset because I've just got I've
got a a tummy and I'm fine with it. Who
would be? I don't even know what good of course
that Candida is is? Um So what were the dress
reformers solutions? It was, I mean it was kind of
like adopting the more masculine clothes. They said that women
should be more allowed to wear trousers. They had reform underwear,
(11:13):
which were the lighter types of underwear, and also something
called artistic dress. And so they did this really really crazy, radical,
earth shattering thing. They paired a short dress, like a
knee length skirt over pants. I mean, can you believe it? Well,
this was already the fashion abroad in some places, um,
(11:37):
but in the United States was still very radical. And
it caught the attention of a woman named Elizabeth Smith
Miller who adopted it for daily wear and then introduced
it to her cousin, someone who might sound familiar, Elizabeth
Katie Stanton, early feminist and women's rights advocate. And then
Stanton said, Hey, what galapal Amelia Bloomer, check out this outfit.
(12:03):
And Amelia Bloomer, who we mentioned in other podcasts about bicycles, um,
she was the editor of The Lily, which was a
feminist publication devoted to the temperance movement and women's reforms.
And Amelia Bloomer started wearing that trouser skirt combo and
people started calling those trousers bloomers. Yeah, And so she
(12:27):
wrote about this whole get up in her publication The Lily,
and after other papers picked up on the trend, they
did start calling them bloomers. And her response to that,
her response to the publicity was, some of our editorial
brethren commend us, while others protest this usurpatient of the
rights of man. Yeah. And she made her Bloomer debut
publicly in eighteen fifty one, and it's scandalized a lot
(12:51):
of people, even though it was considered in modest of
the time. But she was so covered by modern standards
and It was also though seen as unpatriotic because it
was borrowing on a Middle Eastern style, and some people
found it to be just straight up bad fashion or
also immoral. Yeah, but the big idea was that it
(13:13):
just was not consistent with how people at the time
thought women should be, should look, should exist, should act.
And so a lot of these get ups were ridiculed
in political cartoons and publications, and that led many, even
the staunch feminists who were very pro pants to begin with,
(13:33):
it led them to ditch the whole outfit and just
say it's not worth it. I'd rather be taken seriously
for what I'm trying to accomplish. Yeah, Amelia Bloomer only
sported Bloomers for a few years because once the I
think it was the caged crinoline style came into fashion.
It alleviated some of the weight from petticoats because the
cage style held the dress out, so you didn't need
(13:57):
all of those layers. But then you give me and
you'd get a breeze. Yeah, what from the petticoats or
now from like from not having any petticoats. That's all
lose lose. But if it's cold outside, that's true. Sometimes
you want to breeze up there and sometimes you don't. Well,
if you're wearing twenty pounds of clothes, you'll probably a
little a little warmer in the winter, you would assume. Um.
(14:19):
But outdoor activities like bicycling did help start moving the
dial away from women exclusively having to wear skirts and
dresses to it being a little bit more acceptable to
wearing pant like garments. Yeah. And this reform dress movement
(14:40):
really gave women a chance to participate in more physical activities,
because if you're not wearing pounds of clothes and underwear
that like makes it impossible to breathe, you can participate
in more things like tennis, like cycling. And so this
pants boom intersects with the first American bicycle boom, which
(15:00):
made it possible for women to ride away from the house. Yeah,
I mean it was speaking of physical activity, we see
a similar evolution with swimwear, where at first when women
wanted to get into the water, they had to do
it wearing woolen dresses and it was a drowning hazard.
And so slowly but surely it became more acceptable and
(15:22):
safer for women to wear a little bit less and
a little bit less to the beach. Um, and the
same thing happens with pants. But it's not like all
of a sudden at the turn of the century women
were just wearing bloomers and pants all the time. Um
and Tove Hermannson over the Warren Through blog wrote in
two thousand ten she did a fantastic piece on the
(15:44):
evolution of women wearing pants, and she writes that in
every major instance of feminist upheaval, women's clothing has been
examined as both a symbolic and literal reflection of women's
inequality in society. An overarching irony is that fat is
a human construct. The things we recognize as feminine and
masculine are not inherently so, but have simply been designated
(16:07):
as such by early human society and reinforced and subsequently
evolving fashions. So in a lot of ways, skirts and
dresses of that day we're outward symbols of women's second
class citizenship, because at this point we don't have the
right to vote, we can't own property, we can't even
wear pants if we want to. It was a terrible,
(16:28):
terrible cycle, because if you're putting women in these clothes
you're expecting to them to wear. You know, all of
these clothes, clothes that weighed as much as a small
child all the time, all day long. You can't really
expect them to do much. I mean, would you want
to go outside and run around and close like that. No,
you'd probably kind of have to sit at home and
not lift a finger and lie on your fainting couch
(16:50):
and eat bond bonds or whatever. Or by the same token, though,
women who would be given more leeway to where if
not a little bit shorter girds where it's just brushing
the ankle rather than the floor, or actually wearing pants,
would be working class women who it would be a
occupational hazard for them to wear anything else. So it's
(17:13):
kind of a double edged sword where it also takes
on this classiest aspect of oh, if you're wearing pants,
then you must be poor. And I mean that really
holds true when you look at who were the early
adopters of pants, and a big category is the working woman,
pioneer women of the West in the US, African American
(17:34):
women of the South, European immigrants in the fields of
the Midwest. These women were not going to wear humongous
cage skirts to work in, and then that leads us
up to World War One and two. Women who took
on mail work had to dress functionally, and in World
War One they became known as slack girls who wore
full knickers. And then of course in World War Two
(17:57):
we have a record number of women and factories and
they are wearing men's denim overalls. A lot of them
were just wearing their husband's trousers to work um but
over it worn through. Hermanson notes that even for these
women working in wartime, they might be wearing pants to work,
but when they would go out, it would be in
(18:17):
a skirt or address right getting back inside that feminine
sphere once you're outside of the workplace. Although the sales
of pants, we should note in World War Two definitely
went up from nineteen to forty four in England it
was reported that five times more women's trousers were sold,
probably for them to work in. And around this time too,
(18:41):
you have actresses like Katherine Hepburn and Marlena Dietrich who
are publicly wearing pants. They have photos of them taken
wearing pants, and even a viatrix Amelia Earhart, loved wearing pants.
They were her go to garment. But those were special cases.
They were celebrities. They had more leeway socially to where
(19:05):
pants that they wanted to. Yeah, and then Victorian college
women often uh cross dressed at school, you know, whether
it was for plays, whether it was for just social events.
And I've actually posted a shout out to social media.
I've actually posted a lot of pictures on our Pinterest
page of Victorian college women dressed as one addresses the
(19:27):
bride and one was dresses the groom. And they would
have all these ceremonies, and they talked about on blogs
about it. How you know, like women would write letters
to each other that sounded almost like love letters, and
they would dress as men. But this was not like
as they stressed, They're like, it's not like all this
rampant lesbian activity was going on in colleges in the
Victorian area. It was more to do with social divisions
(19:48):
at the time. You know, if you were going to
be affectionate with someone, it had to be a female
friend because there was that division between men and women. Yeah,
and Kavin Hepburn went to a woman's college, and their
potos of her from her college days wearing pants, which
would have been totally radical, and it's also totally radical,
but she just kept wearing them even as she ascended
(20:09):
into stardom in Hollywood. Um. But on a side note,
we do have to get a give a shout out
to pants where eleanor known as Elio sears. We could
do an entire podcast on this woman. Um. She earned
the nickname the universal female athlete because she excelled at
pretty much everything, and she was born to privilege. She
(20:31):
was the great great great granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, and
she was condemned for wearing trousers in public, but she
did it a because she liked to wear them and
be did not really appreciate or like the gender roles
of the time. And pants were also practical for her
because they helped her compete in sports. Yeah, this woman's
(20:55):
athletic resume is re ridiculous. She became the first woman
to play for a men's polo team. She was a
five time national doubles tennis champion, in the first female
national squash champion. And that is just a teeny, teeny
tiny sampling of all the stuff that she did. She
actually also had gone down in a submarine, poking around
(21:15):
under the water in a submarine, which is awesome. She
was the first woman to ever fight a ticket, and
she was also arrested for smoking in a hotel lobby,
not because she loved to smoke so much, but because
men were allowed to smoke in lobbies and women were not,
and she was just not going to have that. She
was not a big fan of gender roles of her era,
(21:37):
but she was known at the time for being one
of the few women who would ever be publicly seen
in pants, and it was considered very revolutionary at the time. Um.
But let's take a moment, though, and talk more about
the fashion industry in high fashion, because we've talked about
how pants are clearly tied up in work women's lives,
(22:01):
but what about for the fashion elite. In the nineteen thirties,
fashion magazines were starting to give coverage to women's pants.
Because in nineteen eleven or nineteen thirteen, I can't remember
which one it is exactly Paul Perray, who was the
fashion designer who might sound familiar because he's credited with
(22:21):
uh loosening women from having to wear the corset, and
he invented the harem pants or he didn't invent it,
but he refashioned it for the catwalk. Yeah, he adopted it,
not as a political statement or anything like that, but
more just as fashion. Yeah. And because he was such
a big name at the time, harem pants took off,
(22:42):
and so fashion magazines gradually came around to featuring more
women wearing divided garments, as they were sometimes called. Yeah.
Vogue had been sort of at the forefront of this
for a while. They had started running in nineteen and
seven ads for equestrian clothes, so you know, riding pants, um,
and then all the way up into the nineteen thirties
(23:04):
when they have women in beach pajamas and ski trousers.
But in the late nineteen thirties, slacks became considered more
appropriate for uh, not just skiing and beaching and riding horses,
but they were also a wardrobe staple for country living.
(23:26):
But in uh, in the nine Vogue that has this
huge article about these revolutionary things called slacks for women
that did say that you had to be a hundred
and fifty pounds or less to wear them, and they
had to be very well cut and well creased to
appear properly feminine because your figure is not the same
as a man. Thank you, Vogue, thanks for clearing that up.
(23:50):
We should say, though, that in ninety four Levi's had
invented its first women's genes, but not many wore them.
It was mostly for women working on dude ranches. They
were sold a lot in the West, but not everywhere.
It would take a while for women in jeans for
a gene for to pick up. I hate singular usage. See,
(24:13):
I really enjoy it because I like what not to wear.
I think Stacy London is divine and she uses the
singular pants I know, and I giggle every time. Yeah,
like pants, stop it, stop it saying so stop saying
that I'm wearing a pant right now. See that makes
me think you're only one of your legs has a
pant on it, That's what I think of the other
(24:34):
one is just wrapped up in tinfoil. You've got half
a bloomer on. I do like that. In the ninet
thirties and forties, the sales of women's genes increased alongside
the popularity of dude ranches. Yeah, I find that very interesting.
And and you have cowgirls, you have like Calamity Jane.
You have women, you know, way back when in our
(24:54):
Cowgirls episode we talked about women out on ranches riding horses,
and there's great pictures of women flying off their horses
with their pants all askew. But in terms of everyday
use of being able to open up your closet, pull
out a pair of pants and wear them whether you're
going to the workplace or to hang out or to
(25:16):
a party, women don't start wearing pants really until second
wave feminism comes along and the sexual revolution of the
sixties and seventies. That kind of loosens up those old
gender roles and shakes things up a bit, and you know,
once again our clothes become politicized, and for women, pants
(25:38):
are part of that. And so it takes so so long,
even though we do have people like you know, their
images of Mary Tyler Moore wearing pants, Audrey Hepburn obviously
in pants. Jackie oh is considered a fashion trailblazer of
wearing pants a lot um. But for everyday women, it
(26:00):
takes a long time for it to be kosher for
us to wear pants. And in France apparently it took
until this year for it to be kosher to wear pants. Yeah. Finally,
in two thousand and thirteen, France officially struck down a
law enacted in seventeen ninety nine in which a police
chief decreed that women seeking to wear pants had to
(26:20):
get special permission because pants symbolize both masculinity and the
working class revolutionaries. Those all sands, cool lots, right. I
know I'm saying that incorrectly, but I mean they were
so attached to this law that they even amended it
in eighteen ninety two and nineteen o nine to keep
it current with the times. And it was not until
(26:41):
in France when Green Party lawmakers introduced a bill to
strike down elements of what they called France's judicial archaeology,
and the government was like, don't worry about it. It's outdated.
You're all wearing pants, no point of taking it off
the books. Yeah. But then France's Minister Women's Rights said, actually,
let's go ahead and get official about it because it's
(27:03):
a symbol that's incompatible with the principles of equality. So
finally we can we can all wear it. We can
all wear our our pants. Um. But the history of it, though,
is really fascinating when you think about how for men
wearing pants, I mean, obviously that takes some time as well,
(27:23):
but it's all linked to militarism, and they become adopted
because it's the symbol of power and status, whereas women's
symbol of status had to be taken off in the
form of the skirt. Yeah, pants evolved out of necessity
for conquering purposes, and since women were doing the conquering,
(27:47):
they got stuck in heavy skirts instead for a while.
That's right, although I will say that today, and you know,
I'm not anti skirt at all, but the pants is fascinating.
I do love a good pair of pants. True, yes,
So let us know your thoughts on pants. Are you
pro pan? Are you anti pant? I know there's some
(28:07):
women who hate wearing pants. I wonder if there are
guys out there who hate wearing pants. I'm sure there are,
I'm sure there aren't. Moms Stuff at discovery dot com
is where you can send all of your pant ponderings.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff, podcasts and
messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you when we come right back from
a quick break and now back to our letters. Well,
(28:32):
I've got an email here from Doug in response to
our episode on women and wine, and Doug is a
Texan wine maker. He writes, I left for a year
to finish school and worked in wine sales at a
large store in town. And I can't tell you how
frustrated I would become with women who, after having spent
ten minutes extolling the virtues of a specific region, the
(28:54):
viticultural techniques, and the science behind a particular wine, they
would see a pretty bottle and choosed to buy it instead,
all the while admitting that it's most likely not as good.
What's going on, ladies, I am confused by the dichotomy
of this phenomenon relative to women choosing a mate. It's
the complete opposite, I digress. I'm equally confounded by the
(29:18):
men who think it unmanly to drink a white wine
or rose. The luscious viscosity and complexity of a grand
Crew Montrachet Chardonay, while not as tannic, are more robust
and flavorful, and the biggest calves in California. And don't
even get me started on the dry reasoning offerings from
alsays Magnifique. Oh man. Thank you so much, Doug, you
(29:42):
Texan wine maker. You. I have a letter here from Mallory.
She is responding to our wine episode. Talking about her grandmother.
She says, my family is initially from northern Italy, and
back in the early nineteen fifties, my nona actually worked
stomping grapes. Sometimes she would even her kids, I e.
My dad, aged three, to come and work with her.
(30:04):
Perhaps the funniest of her stories is the time she
caught my dad peeing while stomping grapes with her in
one of the big open fermentation tanks. Hilarious thought, considering
my dad actually grew up to become a very quiet
and serious man. The most ridiculous part, however, was that
after she caught him, she never told anyone. When I
have asked her why, she always shrugs, says she couldn't
(30:25):
afford to own up to it, and that a little
pep never hurt to anyone. That is her emphasized accent
on those words, not mine, just letting you know, uh so,
Mallary says. Anyways, I hope my familiar anecdotes haven't put
you off wine altogether. Just make sure to avoid Italian wine.
From back then. So thank you for the warning, Mallory,
(30:46):
and thanks to everyone who's written in mom Stuff Discovery
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(31:08):
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(31:31):
other topics. Does it House stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff. Mom never told you from how stuff works,
not com Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we are going to dive
into some sartorial history of pants. Pants. Hey, because it's
(00:23):
pants season, that's right, it's getting cold outside. And also
because a few weeks ago, as I was getting them
a fall pants out, I started thinking about why pants
are considered, you know, kind of like the masculine uniform,
whereas you know when skirts are for the ladies. And
(00:43):
I wanted to know when women started wearing pants, and
it drove me into this just rabbit hole of sartorial
have already said sartorial, I'm probably gonna say, start a
lot a lot of fashion history and gender politics, and
it is fascinating why women wear pants and why men
(01:07):
wear pants, and even where the word pants comes from.
Can you can you enlighten us on some pant etymology
to kick things off, I had no idea it came
from a Roman Sat. So we have the fourth century
Roman sat Pantalion, who's the patron saint of Venice. So
Venetians were commonly called Pantaliones. So then in sixteenth century
(01:29):
Italy we have a type of comedy theater with stock characters,
including the miserly Pantalone. He was distinguished by the cut
of his trousers, which French, which French people began to
call pantaloons, and then by the late seventeen hundreds pantaloons
is used to describe any style of trousers. And then
(01:50):
the word migrates over to Britain and the lower classes
thankfully shorten it just of pants, although the upper classes,
we should note, initially considered it a vulgar term. Don't
they now call pants in England? Isn't that like underwear? Yes,
pant pants? Pants? Are you like your panties and trousers
(02:11):
are like your pants? I would never keep that straight.
I would just say I would go around being like,
oh yeah, I'm just gonna go buy a new pair
of pants, and people would be like, oh my would
be like, my pants are really dirty, and then heavens
and then forty Edgar Allan Poe prints the word, and
by this point pants was a generally accepted term. So
(02:32):
when we're talking about pants, we're talking about Saint Pantalone.
Although I do kind of prefer sometimes to say pantaloon
just for fun. I know, I just I really and
truly love the word pants, pants, pants, put on some pants.
I love it. Well. The etymology of skirt is a
lot more straightforward. It comes from the Old Norse word
(02:55):
skirt to s k y r t a, which is
basically like one of those long peasant shirts. Think back
to uh monty python on the Holy grail Um and
that transitioned into the Old English word wait for it, skirt,
which is s c y r t e, And so
there you have it. The development of the word for
a what we think of as a skirt is related
(03:17):
to peasants long shirts that kind of came down to
their knees. Well, and speaking of skirts, we should stay
before we get into pants pants that skirts predate the
pant obviously, because it is the second oldest type of clothing,
predated only by loincloths. Valerie Steel, who's the director of
(03:41):
the f I T Museum, says that there are ancient
Egyptian drawings with featuring skirts and that a long skirt
signaled luxury, mainly because fabric is expensive and women's long
skirts would eventually signal modesty and prestige. There's a lot
(04:01):
of status found in skirts. Yeah, status and beauty. Uh.
You know, women's narrow waists were prized, and so you know,
if you could only cinch it so far where the courset,
you eventually were like, oh, optical illusion. I'll just make
my skirt fifty pounds or put a bustle in it,
(04:22):
put a bird on it, put a bustle in it,
um in nineteenth century. By the nineteenth century, skirts became
so distinctly feminine that the words skirt became slang for women. Yeah.
You still hear that every now and then. Yeah, but
this episode is devoted to pants, and we can't get
too sidelined by skirts. Although listeners side note, if you
would like an episode devoted to skirts, we can do that.
(04:45):
But for now, let's talk about paths. And obviously men
started wearing pants before women did. And the reason why
blew my mind. I had no idea because it has
a lot to do with horses. Yeah, pants developed out
of necessity. It's kind of hard and awkward to ride
(05:06):
a horse in a robe or a kimono if you're
in Japan. Uh. Samurais in Japan war baggy trousers so
that they could do things like ride horses and wheeled
heavy swords and things. Yeah, and we know this thanks
to evolutionary biologist Peter Turchen who traced the history of pants,
and he talks about how in different cultures, whether you're
(05:28):
talking about Japan, China, Rome, it's always related to horses
and militarism. And speaking of militarism, in Rome, soldiers adopted
pants in the first century CE after being beaten by
Hannibals trouser clad cavalrymen. Yeah, And church And also talks
(05:48):
about how in pre unified China pants were considered barbarian
clothes and that's the whole barbaric thing with pants is
not just exclusive to China. But speaking about China, they
were worn by nomadic horsemen from Central Asia. But after
they invaded and did pretty well, the Chinese started to
(06:10):
adopt them. And church And writes that those states in
China that did not adopt cavalry or pants or adopted
them too slowly lost to the states that did so early. Right,
And similarly in Europe we have in the eighth century,
after the fall of the Roman Empire, the continent falls
under the control of pants wearing horse riding nights so
(06:34):
you were, you know, smart enough to wear pants instead
of a robe. That meant you could conquer a lot
of people on a giant animal. Yeah, I mean, it's
really the evolution of pants is really all about the
evolution of the horseback cavalry. Uh in England, Henry the Eighth.
(06:54):
This has nothing to do with conquering cultures, but Henry
the Eighth wanted to show off his muscular calves and
his I'll say it, sweet, sweet god piece. And so
pants became established firmly as a symbol of power and
prestige and also modernity, which is ironic because to start
out with they were often considered the clothes of barbarians.
(07:18):
But by the late seventeenth century, for instance, we have
Peter the Great in Russia decreeing that everyone in every
level of society except for clergy and peasant farmers, had
to wear pants, so that he was like, hey, Russians,
we gotta get with the times. Get throw off your
your skirts and put on some pants. Um, they really
(07:40):
became something completely different. They became a symbol. In France
during the Revolution, militants were long pants as opposed to
the royalist knee length. I'm gonna call them capri pants.
So long pants in France became equated with freedom. Oh yeah,
because the sands cool lots. It didn't mean that they
weren't wearing any pants, as you might hope or imagine.
(08:01):
It just meant that they weren't wearing the short pants. Yeah,
instead they were the sand schoolats, and the sands actually
meant more in that case because they were more pants,
more pants, longer pants. But politicizing pants wasn't just exclusive
to France either. In Scotland, King George, the Seconds Dress
Act prohibited kilts, although that was dissolved in seventeen eighty two.
(08:26):
But we see this, you know, all of these fascinating
things of countries being unified, empires being brought to their knees,
cultures being changed by pants, pants, And so it's not
that surprising considering that that history of the pants that
it is then going to influence and intersect with gender politics. Yeah,
(08:53):
so when do women start wearing pants? When does this happen?
Basically a lot of people are like, hey, your skirts
and your course that they're pretty much disgusting, and they're
trailing dirt all over the place and they're making it
hard to breathe. And so those people who said that
very eloquent statement that I just tripped over were the
dress reformers. Yeah, the women's dress reform movement took place
(09:17):
from eighteen fifty to nineteen fourteen, and even though it
was not very mainstream, the dress reformers were considered fringe crazies,
but they had some pretty practical ideas about fashion. Because
women's clothes, a single outfit could weigh up to twenty
five pounds, and those long skirts that women wore not
(09:40):
only dragged on the ground and collected up street trash
and vermin, but they were also health hazards because they
caught on fire easily. Some women even died from tripping
and falling down flights of stairs because of these ridiculous skirts.
They were literally weighing us down. And the dress reformers, uh,
(10:03):
some of them even said, hey, can we just at
least put a cap on undergarments weighing no more than
seven pounds? Is that too much to ask? Like that?
That was radical for back then, I mean, because those
were the days of petticoats, right, hide that shameful body
under as much weight as you possibly can well, and
then we have we get back to skirts and the
(10:25):
symbolism and how the female shape at that time was
being artificially constructed. Yeah, exactly. Can you imagine Caroline living
a time when the idealized shape was a figure eight? No. No,
the women in my family are barrel chested. So I
(10:49):
don't think I I would not be a good candidate
to fit into a corset because I've just got I've
got a a tummy and I'm fine with it. Who
would be? I don't even know what good of course
that Candida is is? Um So what were the dress
reformers solutions? It was, I mean it was kind of
like adopting the more masculine clothes. They said that women
should be more allowed to wear trousers. They had reform underwear,
(11:13):
which were the lighter types of underwear, and also something
called artistic dress. And so they did this really really crazy, radical,
earth shattering thing. They paired a short dress, like a
knee length skirt over pants. I mean, can you believe it? Well,
this was already the fashion abroad in some places, um,
(11:37):
but in the United States was still very radical. And
it caught the attention of a woman named Elizabeth Smith
Miller who adopted it for daily wear and then introduced
it to her cousin, someone who might sound familiar, Elizabeth
Katie Stanton, early feminist and women's rights advocate. And then
Stanton said, Hey, what galapal Amelia Bloomer, check out this outfit.
(12:03):
And Amelia Bloomer, who we mentioned in other podcasts about bicycles, um,
she was the editor of The Lily, which was a
feminist publication devoted to the temperance movement and women's reforms.
And Amelia Bloomer started wearing that trouser skirt combo and
people started calling those trousers bloomers. Yeah, And so she
(12:27):
wrote about this whole get up in her publication The Lily,
and after other papers picked up on the trend, they
did start calling them bloomers. And her response to that,
her response to the publicity was, some of our editorial
brethren commend us, while others protest this usurpatient of the
rights of man. Yeah. And she made her Bloomer debut
publicly in eighteen fifty one, and it's scandalized a lot
(12:51):
of people, even though it was considered in modest of
the time. But she was so covered by modern standards
and It was also though seen as unpatriotic because it
was borrowing on a Middle Eastern style, and some people
found it to be just straight up bad fashion or
also immoral. Yeah, but the big idea was that it
(13:13):
just was not consistent with how people at the time
thought women should be, should look, should exist, should act.
And so a lot of these get ups were ridiculed
in political cartoons and publications, and that led many, even
the staunch feminists who were very pro pants to begin with,
(13:33):
it led them to ditch the whole outfit and just
say it's not worth it. I'd rather be taken seriously
for what I'm trying to accomplish. Yeah, Amelia Bloomer only
sported Bloomers for a few years because once the I
think it was the caged crinoline style came into fashion.
It alleviated some of the weight from petticoats because the
cage style held the dress out, so you didn't need
(13:57):
all of those layers. But then you give me and
you'd get a breeze. Yeah, what from the petticoats or
now from like from not having any petticoats. That's all
lose lose. But if it's cold outside, that's true. Sometimes
you want to breeze up there and sometimes you don't. Well,
if you're wearing twenty pounds of clothes, you'll probably a
little a little warmer in the winter, you would assume. Um.
(14:19):
But outdoor activities like bicycling did help start moving the
dial away from women exclusively having to wear skirts and
dresses to it being a little bit more acceptable to
wearing pant like garments. Yeah. And this reform dress movement
(14:40):
really gave women a chance to participate in more physical activities,
because if you're not wearing pounds of clothes and underwear
that like makes it impossible to breathe, you can participate
in more things like tennis, like cycling. And so this
pants boom intersects with the first American bicycle boom, which
(15:00):
made it possible for women to ride away from the house. Yeah,
I mean it was speaking of physical activity, we see
a similar evolution with swimwear, where at first when women
wanted to get into the water, they had to do
it wearing woolen dresses and it was a drowning hazard.
And so slowly but surely it became more acceptable and
(15:22):
safer for women to wear a little bit less and
a little bit less to the beach. Um, and the
same thing happens with pants. But it's not like all
of a sudden at the turn of the century women
were just wearing bloomers and pants all the time. Um
and Tove Hermannson over the Warren Through blog wrote in
two thousand ten she did a fantastic piece on the
(15:44):
evolution of women wearing pants, and she writes that in
every major instance of feminist upheaval, women's clothing has been
examined as both a symbolic and literal reflection of women's
inequality in society. An overarching irony is that fat is
a human construct. The things we recognize as feminine and
masculine are not inherently so, but have simply been designated
(16:07):
as such by early human society and reinforced and subsequently
evolving fashions. So in a lot of ways, skirts and
dresses of that day we're outward symbols of women's second
class citizenship, because at this point we don't have the
right to vote, we can't own property, we can't even
wear pants if we want to. It was a terrible,
(16:28):
terrible cycle, because if you're putting women in these clothes
you're expecting to them to wear. You know, all of
these clothes, clothes that weighed as much as a small
child all the time, all day long. You can't really
expect them to do much. I mean, would you want
to go outside and run around and close like that. No,
you'd probably kind of have to sit at home and
not lift a finger and lie on your fainting couch
(16:50):
and eat bond bonds or whatever. Or by the same token, though,
women who would be given more leeway to where if
not a little bit shorter girds where it's just brushing
the ankle rather than the floor, or actually wearing pants,
would be working class women who it would be a
occupational hazard for them to wear anything else. So it's
(17:13):
kind of a double edged sword where it also takes
on this classiest aspect of oh, if you're wearing pants,
then you must be poor. And I mean that really
holds true when you look at who were the early
adopters of pants, and a big category is the working woman,
pioneer women of the West in the US, African American
(17:34):
women of the South, European immigrants in the fields of
the Midwest. These women were not going to wear humongous
cage skirts to work in, and then that leads us
up to World War One and two. Women who took
on mail work had to dress functionally, and in World
War One they became known as slack girls who wore
full knickers. And then of course in World War Two
(17:57):
we have a record number of women and factories and
they are wearing men's denim overalls. A lot of them
were just wearing their husband's trousers to work um but
over it worn through. Hermanson notes that even for these
women working in wartime, they might be wearing pants to work,
but when they would go out, it would be in
(18:17):
a skirt or address right getting back inside that feminine
sphere once you're outside of the workplace. Although the sales
of pants, we should note in World War Two definitely
went up from nineteen to forty four in England it
was reported that five times more women's trousers were sold,
probably for them to work in. And around this time too,
(18:41):
you have actresses like Katherine Hepburn and Marlena Dietrich who
are publicly wearing pants. They have photos of them taken
wearing pants, and even a viatrix Amelia Earhart, loved wearing pants.
They were her go to garment. But those were special cases.
They were celebrities. They had more leeway socially to where
(19:05):
pants that they wanted to. Yeah, and then Victorian college
women often uh cross dressed at school, you know, whether
it was for plays, whether it was for just social events.
And I've actually posted a shout out to social media.
I've actually posted a lot of pictures on our Pinterest
page of Victorian college women dressed as one addresses the
(19:27):
bride and one was dresses the groom. And they would
have all these ceremonies, and they talked about on blogs
about it. How you know, like women would write letters
to each other that sounded almost like love letters, and
they would dress as men. But this was not like
as they stressed, They're like, it's not like all this
rampant lesbian activity was going on in colleges in the
Victorian area. It was more to do with social divisions
(19:48):
at the time. You know, if you were going to
be affectionate with someone, it had to be a female
friend because there was that division between men and women. Yeah,
and Kavin Hepburn went to a woman's college, and their
potos of her from her college days wearing pants, which
would have been totally radical, and it's also totally radical,
but she just kept wearing them even as she ascended
(20:09):
into stardom in Hollywood. Um. But on a side note,
we do have to get a give a shout out
to pants where eleanor known as Elio sears. We could
do an entire podcast on this woman. Um. She earned
the nickname the universal female athlete because she excelled at
pretty much everything, and she was born to privilege. She
(20:31):
was the great great great granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, and
she was condemned for wearing trousers in public, but she
did it a because she liked to wear them and
be did not really appreciate or like the gender roles
of the time. And pants were also practical for her
because they helped her compete in sports. Yeah, this woman's
(20:55):
athletic resume is re ridiculous. She became the first woman
to play for a men's polo team. She was a
five time national doubles tennis champion, in the first female
national squash champion. And that is just a teeny, teeny
tiny sampling of all the stuff that she did. She
actually also had gone down in a submarine, poking around
(21:15):
under the water in a submarine, which is awesome. She
was the first woman to ever fight a ticket, and
she was also arrested for smoking in a hotel lobby,
not because she loved to smoke so much, but because
men were allowed to smoke in lobbies and women were not,
and she was just not going to have that. She
was not a big fan of gender roles of her era,
(21:37):
but she was known at the time for being one
of the few women who would ever be publicly seen
in pants, and it was considered very revolutionary at the time. Um.
But let's take a moment, though, and talk more about
the fashion industry in high fashion, because we've talked about
how pants are clearly tied up in work women's lives,
(22:01):
but what about for the fashion elite. In the nineteen thirties,
fashion magazines were starting to give coverage to women's pants.
Because in nineteen eleven or nineteen thirteen, I can't remember
which one it is exactly Paul Perray, who was the
fashion designer who might sound familiar because he's credited with
(22:21):
uh loosening women from having to wear the corset, and
he invented the harem pants or he didn't invent it,
but he refashioned it for the catwalk. Yeah, he adopted it,
not as a political statement or anything like that, but
more just as fashion. Yeah. And because he was such
a big name at the time, harem pants took off,
(22:42):
and so fashion magazines gradually came around to featuring more
women wearing divided garments, as they were sometimes called. Yeah.
Vogue had been sort of at the forefront of this
for a while. They had started running in nineteen and
seven ads for equestrian clothes, so you know, riding pants, um,
and then all the way up into the nineteen thirties
(23:04):
when they have women in beach pajamas and ski trousers.
But in the late nineteen thirties, slacks became considered more
appropriate for uh, not just skiing and beaching and riding horses,
but they were also a wardrobe staple for country living.
(23:26):
But in uh, in the nine Vogue that has this
huge article about these revolutionary things called slacks for women
that did say that you had to be a hundred
and fifty pounds or less to wear them, and they
had to be very well cut and well creased to
appear properly feminine because your figure is not the same
as a man. Thank you, Vogue, thanks for clearing that up.
(23:50):
We should say, though, that in ninety four Levi's had
invented its first women's genes, but not many wore them.
It was mostly for women working on dude ranches. They
were sold a lot in the West, but not everywhere.
It would take a while for women in jeans for
a gene for to pick up. I hate singular usage. See,
(24:13):
I really enjoy it because I like what not to wear.
I think Stacy London is divine and she uses the
singular pants I know, and I giggle every time. Yeah,
like pants, stop it, stop it saying so stop saying
that I'm wearing a pant right now. See that makes
me think you're only one of your legs has a
pant on it, That's what I think of the other
(24:34):
one is just wrapped up in tinfoil. You've got half
a bloomer on. I do like that. In the ninet
thirties and forties, the sales of women's genes increased alongside
the popularity of dude ranches. Yeah, I find that very interesting.
And and you have cowgirls, you have like Calamity Jane.
You have women, you know, way back when in our
(24:54):
Cowgirls episode we talked about women out on ranches riding horses,
and there's great pictures of women flying off their horses
with their pants all askew. But in terms of everyday
use of being able to open up your closet, pull
out a pair of pants and wear them whether you're
going to the workplace or to hang out or to
(25:16):
a party, women don't start wearing pants really until second
wave feminism comes along and the sexual revolution of the
sixties and seventies. That kind of loosens up those old
gender roles and shakes things up a bit, and you know,
once again our clothes become politicized, and for women, pants
(25:38):
are part of that. And so it takes so so long,
even though we do have people like you know, their
images of Mary Tyler Moore wearing pants, Audrey Hepburn obviously
in pants. Jackie oh is considered a fashion trailblazer of
wearing pants a lot um. But for everyday women, it
(26:00):
takes a long time for it to be kosher for
us to wear pants. And in France apparently it took
until this year for it to be kosher to wear pants. Yeah. Finally,
in two thousand and thirteen, France officially struck down a
law enacted in seventeen ninety nine in which a police
chief decreed that women seeking to wear pants had to
(26:20):
get special permission because pants symbolize both masculinity and the
working class revolutionaries. Those all sands, cool lots, right. I
know I'm saying that incorrectly, but I mean they were
so attached to this law that they even amended it
in eighteen ninety two and nineteen o nine to keep
it current with the times. And it was not until
(26:41):
in France when Green Party lawmakers introduced a bill to
strike down elements of what they called France's judicial archaeology,
and the government was like, don't worry about it. It's outdated.
You're all wearing pants, no point of taking it off
the books. Yeah. But then France's Minister Women's Rights said, actually,
let's go ahead and get official about it because it's
(27:03):
a symbol that's incompatible with the principles of equality. So
finally we can we can all wear it. We can
all wear our our pants. Um. But the history of it, though,
is really fascinating when you think about how for men
wearing pants, I mean, obviously that takes some time as well,
(27:23):
but it's all linked to militarism, and they become adopted
because it's the symbol of power and status, whereas women's
symbol of status had to be taken off in the
form of the skirt. Yeah, pants evolved out of necessity
for conquering purposes, and since women were doing the conquering,
(27:47):
they got stuck in heavy skirts instead for a while.
That's right, although I will say that today, and you know,
I'm not anti skirt at all, but the pants is fascinating.
I do love a good pair of pants. True, yes,
So let us know your thoughts on pants. Are you
pro pan? Are you anti pant? I know there's some
(28:07):
women who hate wearing pants. I wonder if there are
guys out there who hate wearing pants. I'm sure there are,
I'm sure there aren't. Moms Stuff at discovery dot com
is where you can send all of your pant ponderings.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff, podcasts and
messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you when we come right back from
a quick break and now back to our letters. Well,
(28:32):
I've got an email here from Doug in response to
our episode on women and wine, and Doug is a
Texan wine maker. He writes, I left for a year
to finish school and worked in wine sales at a
large store in town. And I can't tell you how
frustrated I would become with women who, after having spent
ten minutes extolling the virtues of a specific region, the
(28:54):
viticultural techniques, and the science behind a particular wine, they
would see a pretty bottle and choosed to buy it instead,
all the while admitting that it's most likely not as good.
What's going on, ladies, I am confused by the dichotomy
of this phenomenon relative to women choosing a mate. It's
the complete opposite, I digress. I'm equally confounded by the
(29:18):
men who think it unmanly to drink a white wine
or rose. The luscious viscosity and complexity of a grand
Crew Montrachet Chardonay, while not as tannic, are more robust
and flavorful, and the biggest calves in California. And don't
even get me started on the dry reasoning offerings from
alsays Magnifique. Oh man. Thank you so much, Doug, you
(29:42):
Texan wine maker. You. I have a letter here from Mallory.
She is responding to our wine episode. Talking about her grandmother.
She says, my family is initially from northern Italy, and
back in the early nineteen fifties, my nona actually worked
stomping grapes. Sometimes she would even her kids, I e.
My dad, aged three, to come and work with her.
(30:04):
Perhaps the funniest of her stories is the time she
caught my dad peeing while stomping grapes with her in
one of the big open fermentation tanks. Hilarious thought, considering
my dad actually grew up to become a very quiet
and serious man. The most ridiculous part, however, was that
after she caught him, she never told anyone. When I
have asked her why, she always shrugs, says she couldn't
(30:25):
afford to own up to it, and that a little
pep never hurt to anyone. That is her emphasized accent
on those words, not mine, just letting you know, uh so,
Mallary says. Anyways, I hope my familiar anecdotes haven't put
you off wine altogether. Just make sure to avoid Italian wine.
From back then. So thank you for the warning, Mallory,
(30:46):
and thanks to everyone who's written in mom Stuff Discovery
dot com is where you can email us. You can
also follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast, find
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(31:08):
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(31:31):
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