A couple of weeks ago I looked at the history of why men wear pants. Horses. Spoiler alert.
By popular demand and because I'm all about gender inequality, it's time for the history of the skirt.
As I mentioned in why do men wear pants, skirts are the second oldest article of clothing
in human history predated only by the loincloth. Before men started wearing pants, everybody
was wearing some kind of skirt, whether it be in the form of a tunic or toga or kilt,
ect. But why by the 18th century give or take, when pants had taken on the role as the below
the belt uniform of masculine manly men, did women just continue to wear skirts? Back in
the day skirts were not fun to wear. They were heavy, hot, confining. We have things
like bustles, petticoats, cage crinolines for corsets, all of which compressed the female
body into these exaggerated silhouettes. The more impractical the skirt, the harder it
was to move, the wealthier and more socially esteemed that woman would be. So in a way
you can see how these skirts and dresses at the time were really outward symbols women's
second class citizenship. This was before women were affording such basic rights such
as, I don't know voting and property ownership and even just the expectation that we could
make whatever we want of ourselves through education and career aspirations. And moving
from the symbolic to the more tangible, these heavy floor-length skirts were literally health
hazards to women who wore them because not only did they sweep up trash and vermin and
all sorts of gross things, they also posed risks of catching on fire, some women actually
fell from tripping on skirts while walking down stairs and not to mention yeah the breathing
issues with corsetry. There was even in the mid-19th century something called 'the rational
dress movement' that said ladies it is time for you to throw off your oppressive garments
and start wearing something more practical for your own health. And a woman Amelia Bloomer
who in 1851 debuted scandalous outfit ankle-length bloomers, which were essentially like hammer
pants, underneath an ankle-length skirt. Not okay at the time when for instance pianos
were covered to the floor so that their suggestive legs would not be shown. Fast-forward a few
decades to the late 1800s when the bicycle became really popular and women were like
we want to ride bicycles too but how can we because we've got these skirts on and they're
going to caught in the spokes and then we'll die, gradually women started wearing those
bloomers, those old-school hammer pants in order to ride their bicycles. But that doesn't
mean though that it's okay for women to do things like wear pants. Even with the first
World War when you had slat girls who were women who would work in factories and they
would actually wear men's slacks because it would be dangerous for them to wear skirts,
when they left the job and went home, they would put their dresses right back on. In
World War II, even though we see all those images of even more women working in factories,
often wearing their husbands overalls or trousers to work, off the clock it was all dresses
and skirts. After World War II when the guys came home and there was that resurgence in
traditional domesticity, you see Betty Draper Mad Men styles totally taking over. Pants
would have to wait until the late 1960s with the Sexual Revolution and second wave feminism.
It really took a revolution in how men and women got along in mainstream society for
it to be okay for women to wear pants whenever they wanted. And if you don't believe me here's
one final fact that blew my mind. It wasn't until April of 1993, we have the very first
female senator to wear pants on the Senate floor. And even today when you think about
skirt fashions, whether it's a miniskirt or a pencil skirt or a maxi or whatever you choose,
those seemingly simplistic garments are often loaded with all sorts of meanings, whether
it's armchair economists trying to insist that the hemlines somehow reflects something
about the stock market or someone saying that oh well your skirt's too short and you're
showing too much leg so you're asking for it or someone saying that hey that skirt's
too tight to wear to the office, even today, women in skirts and men in skirts, that's
for another video, often still attracts so much attention. I would argue that the history
and long-standing reasons of why women wear skirts has a lot less to do with fashion than
it does really with gender and status. But what do you think? Let me know in the comments
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