Women Who Wear Pants: Still Somehow Controversial [View all]

[HuckleB]

Just ask a flight attendant. Or Hillary Clinton.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/02/women_wearing_pants_are_still_controversial.html

"Female flight attendants at British Airways just spent two years fighting for the right to wear pants on the job—and they finally won. The airline crew’s union, Unite, celebrated the triumph earlier this month, saying, “Female cabin crew no longer have to shiver in the cold, wet and snow of wintery climates, but also can be afforded the protection of trousers at destinations where there is a risk of malaria or the Zika virus.” Good news all around! Unite also declared, “Not only is the choice to wear trousers a victory for equality it is also a victory for common sense.”

But wait. Isn’t the equal right to make the common-sense decision of wearing pants a victory that women had already won? (At British Airways, trousers have been accepted wear for established crew since 2003, but the airline has applied different rules to attendants hired since a set of strikes in 2010.) Why are we still talking about women’s right to pants? Like many of women’s battles, pants-related activism stretches back centuries and continues with no sign of abating in the present day.

In America, the first women to seek pants also sought power. In addition to suffrage, 19th-century feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocated what they called “rational dress,” a costume with a short skirt over loose trousers that was pioneered by the activist Elizabeth Smith Miller. In 1851, Amelia Bloomer famously defended the pants against social ridicule in her newspaper, the Lily, the first “ladies’ journal” in U.S. history; thereafter, both the clothes and their wearers became known as “bloomers.” But the fashion’s run was short-lived. As Kathleen Cooper has noted in her excellent short history of women and pants at the Toast, “Prominent feminists were more concerned with gaining women’s rights than dress reform, and most of them dressed like ‘ladies’ to avoid detracting from their main cause of securing the vote.”

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When will we be finished advocating for women’s right to wear pants? Doesn’t men’s right to wear skirts deserve some love after all these centuries? At the Toast, Cooper suggests, “Men’s skirts are in the ‘ridicule’ stage now, just as trousers were on women 150 years ago.” Celebrities like Jaden Smith and Jared Leto have signaled an interest in this fashion-forward cause. Meanwhile, I fully intend to wear pants on my next flight, and I hope the crewmembers will have the option to do the same."


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