Chapter 2: Trousers and the Fight for Women's Rights

If Chapter 1 established that trousers were never inherently gendered, this chapter addresses how they became gendered in the West — and how women fought, over nearly two centuries, to reclaim them. That fight was never really about fabric cut into two legs. It was about mobility, autonomy, labor, and the right to occupy public space on equal terms.

The Rational Dress Movement

By the mid-19th century, Western women's fashion had become, in a very literal sense, restrictive. Corsets compressed the ribs and organs. Layers of heavy petticoats and crinolines could weigh over ten kilograms. Long skirts dragged through mud and dust and posed a genuine hazard around machinery, stairs, and open flame.

In 1851, the American social reformer Elizabeth Smith Miller began wearing a costume consisting of a shortened skirt over loose trousers gathered at the ankle — a style inspired partly by Middle Eastern dress. Amelia Bloomer, editor of the women's temperance newspaper The Lily, popularized the style so widely in her publication that the garment became known as "bloomers," and Bloomer's name became permanently attached to it.

The backlash was swift and severe. Bloomer-wearing women were mocked in the press, subjected to public harassment, and accused of "unsexing" themselves. Most reformers, including Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abandoned the style within a few years — not because it failed practically, but because the social cost of wearing it was too high, and it was actively distracting from other suffrage priorities. The Rational Dress Society, founded in London in 1881, picked up the cause again decades later, explicitly campaigning against corsetry and heavy skirts on health grounds and advocating for "divided skirts" and trouser-like garments for cycling and athletics.

Bicycles, Bloomers, and the "New Woman"

The 1890s bicycle craze did more for women's dress reform than any single manifesto. A cyclist in a full skirt risked catching her clothing in the chain and spokes; a practical, safer alternative was essential. Bloomer-style cycling costumes saw a genuine resurgence, and cycling itself became closely associated with the emerging figure of the "New Woman" — independent, physically active, and less willing to accept confinement, literal or social.

Cultural Flashpoint: In an 1896 interview with journalist Nellie Bly, published in the New York World, Susan B. Anthony credited the bicycle with doing more to emancipate women than anything else, describing the sense of freedom and self-reliance it gave a woman the moment she took her seat. (The exact wording is quoted with minor variations across different reprintings of the interview, so this book paraphrases rather than presenting a single version as verbatim.) The trouser-adjacent cycling costume was inseparable from that new mobility.

Wartime Necessity

The two World Wars did more to normalize women's trousers than any single fashion campaign. With men conscripted into military service, women moved in large numbers into factories, munitions plants, farms, and transportation roles that made skirts genuinely dangerous or impractical around heavy machinery. Coveralls and trousers became standard-issue work clothing for women in shipyards, aircraft factories, and land armies across Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

The American cultural icon "Rosie the Riveter," depicted in coveralls with sleeves rolled and hair tied back, is perhaps the single most enduring image linking women's trousers to labor, capability, and national contribution. Critically, this normalization happened through economic and wartime necessity rather than fashion trend — which gave it a durability that earlier reform movements, resisted purely on cultural grounds, had lacked.

Legal and Institutional Battles

Social acceptance of trousers did not automatically translate into legal or institutional acceptance. Well into the 20th century, women were barred from wearing trousers in many workplaces, schools, restaurants, and even legislatures. Notably:

• A Paris police ordinance dating to 1800 technically required women within the city to seek official permission to "dress as a man," including wearing trousers (exceptions were added later in the 19th century for activities such as cycling and horse riding). The ordinance applied only to Paris, not to France as a whole, and by the late 20th century it had gone unenforced for decades. In 2013, France's Minister for Women's Rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, declared the ordinance incompatible with the constitution and formally void; some historians note it was never technically a national law to begin with, so accounts differ on whether "repeal" is the precise word for what happened in 2013 versus an official confirmation that it no longer had force. Either way, the announcement was widely reported as finally, formally clearing women in Paris of an old legal requirement to ask permission to wear trousers.
• Actress Marlene Dietrich is frequently said to have been arrested in Paris in the 1930s for wearing trousers in public under this same ordinance. This is one of the most widely repeated anecdotes in trouser history, but it appears to be exactly that — an anecdote rather than a documented event: no official arrest record or contemporary French press report of an arrest has been identified, despite heavy press coverage of her visits at the time. What is well documented is that Dietrich wore tailored men's-style suits off-screen in an era when doing so drew public and press attention and could invite open criticism; this book presents that documented fact rather than the unconfirmed arrest story.
• Actress Katharine Hepburn was known for defying studio and public expectations by wearing tailored trousers off-screen in the 1930s, at a time when doing so in public could draw open criticism.
• In 1993, U.S. Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Barbara Mikulski both wore trousers onto the Senate floor within the same period, challenging an unwritten dress-code norm (enforced informally by Senate doorkeepers rather than set out in a formal two-century-old rule) that had until then kept women in dresses, skirts, or skirted suits. Accounts differ on which senator did so first — Moseley Braun's choice is generally described as unplanned, while Mikulski had independently decided to challenge the norm around the same time — but the combined effect led the Senate's sergeant at arms to formally update the written dress-code guidance to explicitly permit "coordinated pantsuits."

From Permission to Power Dressing

By the late 20th century, the trajectory shifted from women fighting for the right to wear trousers toward trousers becoming a symbol of professional authority. Yves Saint Laurent's 1966 "Le Smoking" tuxedo suit for women (covered in depth in Chapter 3) marked a turning point where the tailored trouser suit became not just acceptable but aspirational — coded as powerful rather than transgressive.

The through-line across this entire history is consistent: each expansion of women's access to trousers tracked closely with expansions in women's access to public life, physical activity, paid labor, and political power. The garment and the right were never separate struggles.