In some cultures, pants have been common garments worn by women for centuries or millennia. This was not the case in much of Western society. In the United States, women typically wore long skirts, with the exception of some women who wore pantslike garments to perform work or engage in sports. While there were some women who championed pants in the 19th century, pants as an acceptable everyday clothing option for women didn’t truly catch on until the mid-20th century.
The adoption of pants as a popular item of dress for women in Western society traces its roots to the mid-19th-century dress-reform movement. Although there were women of this time who were already wearing pantslike clothing if they were engaged in physical exercise or household work, the garments were typically worn out of the public eye. Most women usually wore long skirts that felt heavy, looked bulky, and limited their range of motion. Some women, embracing the concept of “rational dress,” wanted the option to wear pants in public. Some wanted it for purely practical reasons, such as for comfort and ease of movement. For others, the freedom to wear pants was tied to the women’s rights movement, a radical and controversial crusade at the time.
In the United States, Elizabeth Smith Miller designed an early version of pantslike clothing for women around 1851. It consisted of a skirt extending below the knees and loose “Turkish” trousers that gathered at the ankles, and it was worn with a short jacket on top. Known as “bloomers,” this garment took its name from an early advocate of Miller’s design, Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Other early supporters of pants for women were physician and reformer Mary Edwards Walker and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Despite enjoying popularity in some circles, bloomers generated much controversy. Their everyday use faded away after a few years, and pants for women were again relegated to a limited range of activities, such as exercise or chores, or were worn in private.
There were short-lived revivals of pants-wearing in public by women, such as during World War I (1914–18), when civilian women who took over jobs traditionally held by men sometimes wore pants. During World War II (1939–45), pants were more widely worn by civilian and military women, both at work and socially. Although women continued to enjoy wearing pants after the war, particularly for sports or leisure, style trends for women remained fixated largely on skirts or dresses until the 1960s and ’70s. Then, buoyed by the women’s rights movement, pants became firmly established as popular and appropriate clothing options for women at home, in public, and in many workplaces.