Women Wearing Pants
My paper, “Who’s Wearing the Pants? How The New York Times Reported the Changing Dress of Women,” has just been published in the current issue of Media Report to Women.
The wearing of pants was a controversial topic, symbolizing the concern over the changing role of gender roles in society. For some people, pants were another step toward equality for women. For others pants meant losing femininity – almost to the point of androgyny. After all, “the meaning of clothing is culturally defined.” To learn more about the national conversation, the New York Times coverage over a 25-year period was examined through the newspaper’s database. Each article that came up with a search for “pants” or “trousers” that ran from 1950 through 1975, was examined.
In a women’s page example, Fort Lauderdale News women’s page editor Edee Greene and her staff wore pants to work as their form of protest on August 26, 1970 – Women’s Strike for Equality Day. I learned this in a letter that she wrote to Penney-Missouri Awards Director Paul Myhre
