I hate pants. I have never liked pants.
As a kid, I would cry if my mom tried to dress me in pants instead of a skirt.
It may have seemed like one of those many ornery phases we all go through as children, but my aversion to pants only worsened as I grew older.
When I transferred to a private school, I was thrust into the world of dress codes. Denim was not allowed — no complaints from me there — but neither were leggings or sweatpants.
The only pants we were allowed to wear were dress pants or what our teachers explained in our dress code presentation as “Chinos.” Frankly, I’m still not quite sure what Chinos are.
As we went through the years of middle and high school, many of my peers began to wear black denim jeans instead of dress pants, unbeknownst to teachers — how salacious. While I broke the dress code in other ways, I saw no point in wearing something that wasn’t permitted if it wasn’t something I wanted to wear in the first place.
So, I continued wearing skirts.
In the dead of winter, I’d trek between the different buildings on our school property. My legs would be chapped and raw while my friends would be cozy and covered, but at least I wasn’t wearing a pair of slacks.
As a chronic overthinker, I’ve worried over the years that my fidelity to skirts is some sort of internalized misogyny — am I forcing myself to fulfill my perfect idea of femininity? Even worse, is it anti-feminist of me to avoid wearing pants when feminists before me fought for my freedom to wear them?
Nowadays, I will wear yoga pants on a lazy day or to go to the gym. I’ll even don a pair of jeans to go out with friends or keep myself from freezing on a winter day. Still, I see pants as a necessary evil. They are never my first choice. But that’s just the thing — they are a choice.
Women’s clothing reformers didn’t fight for women to be forced into wearing a different piece of clothing. They fought for women to be able to wear whatever clothing they wanted to wear.
Amelia Bloomer is known for being one of the first suffragists who fought to reform women’s clothing styles in the Western world. Bloomer wasn’t the first woman to adopt pants ensembles — shoutout to Fanny Kemble and Lydia Sayer for doing it first — but she quickly became one of the most popular pants advocates due to a piece she wrote in defense of pants in “The Lily”.
Although over time women began incorporating pants into their daily dress, this fact wasn’t well-represented in the media — that is, until Mary Tyler Moore came around.
In her role as sharp-witted Laurie Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore worked to accurately portray the modern housewife down to the way she dressed.
Showrunner Carl Reiner supported Moore’s costuming choices, but sponsors didn’t appreciate the way Moore’s pants defined her backside. Moore later admitted she was limited to one pair of pants per episode, but slowly began to push the limits, eventually wearing them frequently.
For Moore, having her character wear pants wasn’t an overtly feminist statement — it was merely a reflection of how real housewives were dressing to comfortably fulfill their daily work.
Even if it wasn’t her intention, it still was arguably very feminist for Moore to don pants — but it shouldn’t have been.
Both women and men have freely worn pants in different cultures around the world for centuries. The idea of pants being masculine or immodest is a deeply Western idea — one that stands in stark contrast to other cultures around the world.
If you’ve ever worn a skirt on Commonwealth Avenue, you might be familiar with the antagonistic relationship between wind and skirts. That’s why in many ancient cultures across South Asia and North Africa, pants called “salwar” or “shalwar” were seen as a more modest option for women.
The modern salwar kameez, an ensemble composed of a tunic styled over loose-fitting pants and often worn with a neck scarf called a dupatta, is a descendant of these historical pants. While the outfit is now worn by women across India and around the world, the salwar kameez specifically evolved in the Punjab region of India and drew inspiration from the rulers of the Mughal empire.
Salwar were also part of traditional ensembles in Turkey, first being worn by workers and enslaved people before eventually being made with rich fabrics for those in high society — a fact that caught the attention of wealthy European women.
In fact, Amelia Bloomer’s pants ensembles took inspiration from the styles worn by Turkish women for centuries, both due to the stylish silhouette of the pants and European women’s positive albeit orientalist view of Turkish women.
All of this goes to show that pants are not innately gendered — Western society just portrays them that way.
But like I said, clothing reformers weren’t really fighting for pants — they were fighting for freedom.
In another world or another society, our American foremothers might’ve been fighting for the right to wear turtlenecks or pocket squares or something even more ridiculous that we’d needlessly gender.
I finally feel comfortable with the knowledge that choosing to wear skirts is nothing more than personal preference. It’s not a forced commitment to gender stereotypes, nor is it an insult to feminism.
Every time you make the decision to wear pants or not as a woman, you are taking back your power. You’re still calling the shots in your own life, just like past feminists fought for.
Even if your choice is a skirt and not a literal pair of pants, you can still say you’re wearing the pants.
