Let's explore how taboos come and go by looking at how women wearing pants became the norm
We talk a lot about taboos on this podcast but we never actually talk about what taboos are, where they come from, and how to change them.
A taboo exists outside of cultural or societal norm. But just like society itself, those norms are fluid.
There’s 3 kinds of norms:
Folkways: things we do for sake of everyday convenience or tradition, like holding open a door for the person behind you.
Mores: A norm based on morality, many of the taboos we talk about violate this one. Like unmarried couples living together
Laws: written down and enforced
We learn norms through:
Others (human see, human do)
Stories (how we give our world meaning)
Authority (what we’re formally taught and the rules enforced)
How to Change a Norm
Norms and beliefs are rarely isolated. They exist in a network, making it hard to disconnect them. This means it’s hard to change beliefs through argument, you have to find the week links in the belief chain and go after them.
To argue a belief successfully you have to base your argument on an equally well established set of beliefs. Second, the belief cannot be held just because other people hold it. No matter how much sense it makes to wear pants, I’m not wearing them if no other woman is.
Specific instances that can change those empirical beliefs:
Change in culture (invention, discovery, diffusion)
New ideas and modification of ideas
Demographic changes
Tension and conflict
Organized or deliberate
Find the behavior gap, how should we be acting
Get the right messengers or influencers
Show the behavior, a lot
Spread the message in a way the resonates with community
Tailor to your audience
Amplify stories of people engaging in the new behavior
The Parable of Pants: A Brief Example of How Norms Change What better way to illustrate these boring sociology terms than with a Tale of the Taboo? Laura presents, “Who Wears the Pants?: A Short History of Women and Pants”
No one thinks about women wearing pants today, but once upon a time it was something of a controversy. Eastern cultures have been wearing them for centuries but in Western culture, it’s been a journey.
When you think of women of history in America, you think of a woman in a big flowy skirt. Your Revolutionary war ladies, the civil war ladies, they are pretty much all wearing the same thing. It changed a little- a bustle or hoop skirts here, a corset there- but not much changed from the start of America until the 1850s.
And there were even laws on the books about it! In the mid-1850s cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and Orlando had legislation that criminalizing appearing in public in "a dress not belonging to his or her sex". I assume that also applied to men in dresses, but who knows.
The big hub-bub started in 1850 by Elizabeth “Libby” Smith Miller. She seemed like a pretty cool lady- her house in New York was a stop on the Underground Railroad, she was a women’s rights activist, and she is credited as the first women in the US to design pants for the ladies. She got tired of working in her garden in her skirt and whipped something up called Bloomers. Basically, big Hammer pants underneath a calf length skirt.
This really caught on with the Suffragettes fighting for women’s right to vote. They reported it was better for women’s health and gave them the ability to move more and get more fresh air. “Libby’s” cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said it best: “The question is no longer, how do you look, but woman, how do you feel?”
In the 1890s, something similar to bloomers was mass-made for athletic use. The bicycle was all the rage. Have you ever rode a bike in a skirt? Dangerous. But in general, these clothes weren’t popular with your “every day woman” outside of sporting activities and it was kind of a flash fashion.
During WWI (1914), women went to the factories and it became more socially acceptable. But once those boys came back, women went back to their skirts for the most part, but there were some notable exceptions.
Katherine Hepburn was the first actress to wear pants in a major motion picture in 1930. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to appear in trousers at a formal function in 1933 and Vogue featured its first spread of women wearing slacks in 1939.
In WWII, history repeated itself. Women wore pants so they could work safely in factories. And it wasn’t about fashion- no couture houses were making millions. Rationing and patriotic duty to the cause meant no one was wearing bring colors or frilly things- it would have been shameful. They made their own or wore their husband’s clothes to work.
But clothes wear out! By the summer of 1944 it was reported that sales of women's trousers were five times more than in the previous year. Which means manufacturers are cranking them out.
But then the boys came back and we took a few steps back. Housewives put on their frilly dresses with tight waists and pearls. Pants were ok for working and for at home, but in public or social engagements, they were decidedly uncool. Like wearing a sweatshirt now to a fancy dinner. You wouldn’t get arrested but you might get a few funny looks.
After that, pants just started creeping in. Them crazy youths just wearing whatever they wanted! And it just kind of caught on. In the late 60s, Mary Tyler Moore got some attention for wearing capri pants on The Dick Van Dyke Show and Barbra Streisand broke some ground for wearing pants to the Oscars.
Then in the 80s it’s full on power suits for women. But some of it remained in our standards for women. My grade school made us wear skirts, and even in the 90s it was the defacto “conservative dress” for women.
Taboos of Today Are Tomorrow's Norm
What's considered normal is always changing. What taboos do we have today that you think won't be so uncommon tomorrow?
What do you think? Let us know!