I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.
That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.
Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.
The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.
Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.
Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.
This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.
So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.
My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt.
They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.
A prime example of how gender is socially enforced.
I remember a prolonged battle at primary school, with petitions and numerous near riotous PTA meetings before girls were allowed to wear trousers. In the late 1990s/early 2000s. In Scotland. A country which now (rightly, for the most part) prides itself on its progressiveness. Please don’t ever take these things for granted, and don’t assume that it’s only far flung places that you have nothing in common with that took so long to catch up. We’re all still fighting, little by little, for every apparently trivial victory that mounts up until we can reach the non-trivial ones. And we can’t afford to stop.
At my private Catholic high school, girls were only given the green light to wear pants the year before I began attending.
In 1992.
Yeah, 1991, forced to wear dresses in school. Got detention once because after school was over while waiting for my ride outside I took off the dress that was over my button down shirt and normal-kids-shorts-length shorts because it was Louisiana degrees outside and I was 7.
Teachers were forced to wear skirts for years. And heels. My mother’s feet are still high heel shaped when she takes off her shoes. She had to wear a skirt till I was well into junior high.
In my primary (elementary) school the girls had to wear dresses. There was a winter and summer dress,, with the winter dress being of thicker material but still, at the end of the day, a dress.
And there were rules about what girls were allowed to wear under them as well. The boys had access to school trousers, like, sweatpants? Trackpants. But we weren’t allowed to wear those under our dress, we could wear stockings or green leggings. That was it.
Honestly the boys were allowed to dress like warm goblins, they didn’t have any rules. But ours was very concerned about looking good. I remember this because it was something I was mad about and I didn’t understand, I was like.. .7 and they wouldn’t let me wear thick pants under my dress because. . . Fashion.
