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Learn when women started wearing pants in the United States
Learn about the development of women ‘s preen in the U.S .
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Transcript
speaker 1 : It ‘s foreign to think about today, but there was a time in the United States when women just did n’t wear pants. In many cultures, women wearing some kind of trouser is an ancient phenomenon, but in the United States there was a prison term when women were expected to limit their options to skirts and dresses, specially out in public. so when and how did this change ? When did women start wearing pants ?
Well, first, let ‘s be clear that some women have sometimes wear pants in America for centuries. Women sometimes wore pants for work or leisure, even in the nineteenth hundred, though club did n’t always look kindly on these virtual dress decisions.
The long skirts women wore were frequently bulky and heavy. These clothes were both socially and physically restrictive. They got in the room when women wanted to enjoy a full range of gesture.
The dress reform movement arise in the mid nineteenth century with the goal of giving women the exemption to wear trousers for both practical and political purposes. Trousers were seen as a symbol of women ‘s rights, a group proposition at the time.
It was around 1851 that a womanhood named Elizabeth Smith Miller designed an outfit that would become iconic among believers in the concept of what was called rational dress for women. It consisted of a annulus and loose trousers with a curtly jacket on top. The invention was championed by Amelia Jenks Bloomer, and they quickly became known as bloomers. Bloomers finally fell out of fashion, but the name lives on as a description for respective baggy, divided garments for the lower body.
hush, as the popularity of bloomers faded, pants became, once again, something women generally wore only in secret or for sporting activities. It would take boastfully changes to finally bring women ‘s pants into the mainstream, and those changes came with two world wars.
During the First World War, the mobilization of men in the army meant that women began doing jobs that had previously been reserved for men and sometimes wearing the pants that went with them. But it was during World War II that women in both civilian and military life began wearing pants in large numbers, not just for study, but socially, excessively. It ‘s intemperate to imagine the Rosie the Riveter wearing a dame below that celebrated raised bicep.
After the war, many women continued to wear pants, but women ‘s fashion still tended to focus on skirts and dresses. But more than a century after women ‘s rights activists had first begun their energy to reform how women dress, the women ‘s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s last helped to break down the stigma against women wearing pants.
today in the US, the question of whether women can wear pants in public is n’t a interview at all, which means we ‘re rid to move on to the adjacent frontier of gendered fashion, making it socially acceptable for men to wear dresses. Fair ‘s carnival, right ?