Women wore various versions of skirts or robes for most of history. A few brave women in pants traumatized their neighbors in the 19th century, but it wasn’t really acceptable in the western world until the 20th century, when women in sports, women in film, and women in fashion design took the bifurcated risk and gave us all the right to wear pants (almost) everywhere we want to go.
Women mentioned include Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I of Russia, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Hawes, Rosie the Riveter, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Moseley-Braun, Barbara Mikulski, and Hilary Clinton.
This episode belongs in Series 1: What’s in the Closet and How Did It Get There?
Selected Sources:
One of many sources for this episode was Gayle V. Fischer’s Pantaloons and Power: A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States.
You can read or listen to Mary Tyler Moore’s interview on NPR. Mental Floss has an article on the Pantsuit Rebellion.
Have other great sources on women wearing pants? Feel free to list them in the comments below.
The feature image is by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
Her Half of History 
Do you have the text that we could follow along while you are reading/talking?
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Thanks for the interest! I have really gone around and around on the question of transcripts, and for now I am not providing them, but if I continue to have interest on that, I could change my mind.
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Clever and informative
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Thank you!
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[…] her right leg was always shorter and thinner than her left, and she experimented with long skirts and even pants (gasp) to hide it. It didn’t blunt her ambition though. She was going to be a doctor and she was […]
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[…] first series was What’s in the Closet and How It Got There, and the very first episode was on why women didn’t wear pants for so long. I asked ChatGPT the flip question: Explain why men don’t wear skirts and dresses. Be […]
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[…] with the male sex, and to hear more on why, you’ll have to go all the way, way, way back to episode 1.1, Who Wears the Pants Around Here. Little girls stuck with the dresses for the rest of their […]
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