From Pant(aloon)s to Pussy Hats: Feminist Dress as Media Spectacle
Fashion as Feminism: Pants as Literal and Symbolic Liberation as Described by Newspaper Fashion Editors
Kimberly Voss, PhD, Associate Professor, Univ of Central Florida
AJHA, 2017
Abstract
In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, one fashion debate was whether women should wear pants in business and social situations. Dress reform had been an issue for decades, beginning with Amelia Bloomer and female suffrage. To some people, the wearing of pants symbolized a threat to gender distinctions at a changing time. For others, it was a form of liberation that was covered in the fashion pages. In 1957, The New York Times noted that physician Mary Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor for being one of the first women to wear pants and “other masculine clothing in public.” Pants were about more than clothing. As Gail Collins wrote in her book, When Everything Changed, pants became a theme for the complexity of gender roles in America in the 1960s and 1970s.
