Wearing Pants: Fashion & Feminism
The New York Times published a story this week about women wearing pants as a protest to women’s roles in the Mormon Church. According to the article:
“Wear Pants to Church,” an event on Sunday, was meant to draw attention to the role of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, using attire as a symbolic first salvo in a larger struggle over gender inequalities.
Though the Mormon Church has no official policy against women wearing pants to church, many say they feel peer pressure to wear a dress, particularly in the Western United States, organizers said.”
This is not a new idea. Fort Lauderdale women’s page editor Edee Greene wore pants to work as a silent protest on Women’s Strike for Equality Day – August 26, 1970. I learned this in a letter from Greene to Paul Myhre, director of the Penney-Missouri Awards. It is located in the Papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards.
I published an article two years ago about how the New York Times covered the topic of women wearing pants. Here is the citation. It is part of my ongoing work on fashion and feminism.
