Maybe you guys don’t remember what it took for us to be able to wear pants.
As late as 1938, a woman was arrested in Los Angeles for wearing pants in a courtroom, and was jailed for five days. The movie star Katharine Hepburn was frowned upon by Hollywood for wearing blue jeans to the set.
In 1969, I was sent home from public school for wearing pants to class. The walk to school was long, the winter was cold, and skirts were short. As I had on this day, I often chose to speed my trip to school by riding a bike, and I was sick of having the difference between the time it took to either walk or ride eaten up by having to get to the girls room to get changed ahead of class, an inconvenience that had no comparison among my male classmates. My fashion “don’t” caused quite a stir. Had I worn a floor-length skirt, I would have been deemed weird, but not in violation of the dress code. But the sight of pants on the female form, it seemed, was transgressively distracting. It earned me my junior-high nickname, “Stan the man.”
In 1993, only months after Hillary Rodham Clinton became first lady, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the first African-American woman (and the first woman of color) to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, joined Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in wearing pants on the Senate floor, prompting the sergeant-at-arms to change the archaic rule prohibiting women senators so clad from standing at their desks in the upper chamber.
I remember those days. Young women sent home for wearing slacks, not jeans mind you, but slacks . . . and culottes, are they still called that? I still think, how was that ever a thing???
It was not all that long ago that a widow could not retain title to her late husband’s property without getting remarried.
Hell, I’m old enough to remember when women couldn’t buy a house or a car without their husbands consent. And forget about even having credit of ANY kind. James Brown had it right (sort of :), “It’s a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothin’ without a woman or a girl.”