As I recall, women started being allowed to enter bars/saloons about a year before prohibition went into effect.
Of course, women could go to any bar once prohibition took effect - since the government no longer controled the bars and saloons, and had no authority over the speakeasys and blind pigs. Prohibition is what made it “ok” for women to drink and to go into bars in all states - since it was just as legal for a woman to drink as it was for a man. Al Capone, the Purple Gang, etc, were great supporters of womens rights, and encouraged serving alcohol to all female customers.
Many public places and businesses did not allow men and women to eat or drink together - until very recently.
Edison, SS Kresge, AAA auto club, and others actually had a separate dining room/cafeteria for men, and another just for women, until about 1970. Male and female employees could not eat together in the same room at their headquarters. There was a male cafeteria, and a female cafeteria.
They also had separate lounges for the male and female employees to go to after eating - the men went to the mens lounge for a smoke, and the women went to the womens lounge to talk.
I interviewed with EDS in the 1980’s, and they told me that male and female EDS employees were still not allowed to eat together. In the 1980’s at EDS, the females still had to wear a skirt every day, and the male employees had to wear a coat and tie- and a male must put on his jacket if he left his cubicle.
My understanding is that there have been more cases of women cross dressing than men until fairly recently. They had more reason to. Think about it, if you were a woman and needed to support yourself and were not a good nanny or governess, passing as a man was a viable yet dangerous proposition. There are many activities that were very difficult in women’s dress through the ages yet women wished to do them as much as they do now. And they did.
In fact it was considered such a problem the Old Testament holds forth on the subject in Deuteronomy 22:5
They had to be reacting against something going on. There are many cases of women being arrested for cross dressing, this is one of my favourites.
Busting places queer hang out is hardly unusual, with no laws against women being sociable together you had to arrest them for something! Cross dressing laws came in very handy.
The trend started in the 1930’s with Marlene Dietrich, as I said. Women also started to wear pants during the war at the factories.
As I said, women could wear pants if they had a reason, like skiing, hunting, and horseback riding, but it was uncommon even into the 1950’s for women to wear pants. No office in the 1950’s or 1960’s allowed women to wear pants.
“Young” women and girls started wearing slacks and pedal pushers in the 1940’s, and 1950’s at times, but most of the time- in school, church, or going out to shop or to work, we had to wear dresses, no matter how cold, or how much snow. I personally saw girls suspended from school, and women fired on the spot for coming into work wearing pants/slacks.
Stockings were also required when wearing a skirt. We were told it was a “Board of Health rule” that everyone had to wear stockings or socks, and women who did not wear stockings on very hot days, were sent home or fired. I never saw any men who did not wear socks.
Look at the old Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs, to see how very very few slacks for women were even for sale, even up into the early 1960’s. …Like one or 2 pages of slacks even in the 1960’s, and about 50 pages of slips, can-cans, skirts, and dresses, house dresses, evening dresses, work dresses, casual dresses, etc.
The crossdressing laws were NOT passed to keep men from dressing as women, very few men ever wanted to dress like women back then. In fact, I never even saw any men nor boys who dressed liked women back then. No where. Not one, not on the street, not in bars, not at work, not at school, never, noplace. It was extremely rare for men to crossdress. In fact, I never even heard of any boy back then who wanted to wear a dress to school, or to a prom, until recently.
The crossdressing laws were passed to keep women from dressing as men, which was the more common problem that most states, businesses, churches, etc. had to deal with. Society, back then, had the problem of women wanting to wear pants, not with men who wanted to wear skirts.
It was we women who wanted to wear pants and who were the ones that pressured the legislatures to repeal the crossdressing laws, not men who wanted to wear skirts!! It was we women who demonstrated and who pressured businesses, churches, schools, etc to put pressure on the legislatures to repeal crossdressing laws so we could wear pants.
When the “crossdressing laws” were finally repealed, none of us at the time imagined so many men would want to dress like women or wear skirts - it came as a pretty big surprise and an unintended consequence of our women’s liberation movement.
Another side point: it was also grounds for firing a woman if she got pregnant, even if she was married! Women, even married women, were fired for getting pregnant well into the 1970’s.
Yes, I am very interested. I would like links back as far as you can get to show any womens pants and styles from the 1930’s, 1920’s, etc, if any.
There were few slacks available for women back then with the trend that Marlene Dietrich started in the 1930’s. Another famous woman who wore pants at that time and helped the cause was Amelia Earhart. A few other movie stars from the 1940’s, like Carol Lumbard, went in public in pants.
Lucy Arnez was apeoneer who started wearing pants in her 1950s tv show: “I Love Lucy”, and that helped out a lot too to make it more acceptable for women to wear pants, much like the current tv shows of homosexuals are getting society used to the idea of those people being around too.
I have many of the old catalogs(Sears, JC Pennys, Wards, etc) from the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, up thru current day, in my personal library.
I am quite familiar with the fashion industry, and miss the old styles that changed each year and when women wore what was in style, and everyone wore the same skirt length, from the Paris fashion shows the year before. My old school chum, became a fashion designer in New York in the 1960’s. I know all about short shorts(even the hit record called:Short Shorts), can-cans, the sack dress, the mini skirt, house dresses, etc. from first hand experience, but I always enjoy seeing the old styles.
I just looked thru my 1962 Fall/Winter Sears catalog, and found 24 different pairs of slacks for sale in the womens section from page 1 thru page 349, and this is the winter catalog!!!
(P.S. the mens clothes have not really changed much at all since then - pages 609 - 704 hardly noticable from todays mens styles)
Duh, Yes, those old crossdressing laws in all states were meant to suppress WOMEN!!, not men.
Just as the first concealed gun laws were meant to arrest blacks(sonce white men could carry guns unconcealed!!!)
There were many cases of women masqurading as men in history, in the civil war, and even as a famous pirate!! I cant imagine how a woman could masquerade as a male pirate on a small boat and hide her daily functions from the male crew!
I cant imagine what reason or why any man would have wanted to dress like a woman back then - and very few did then - I dunno, I never saw one back then.
Women had so few rights and priveliges, and we were so restricted in what we could do prior to the 1960’s, that it made no sense for any man to want to put himself into a lower class.
I dont consider a man dressing like a woman to avoid being killed by an invading army to be the same thing - I can see the logic in that special situation - hiding behind womens skirts. I have read of some male crossdressers in history, but never actually met a man in a skirt until the 1980’s. The Mandan, Soiuix, and Cheyenne indians, did have a few cases where women who wore leggings and became warriors, and even went on hunting parties and into battle, and a few cases of men who chose life as squaws, but this was very rare.
On the other hand, I never learned or read of any cases of indian homosexuals(male or female) in the old days. I Wonder why?
I don’t usually give pants a lot of thought but I do remember back in 1970 in fifth grade having to wear them under my dress to school. By the next year we could wear pant suits. In '72 when I was in junior high we could wear pants, even jeans to school. It was a big deal. Needless to say, I seldom, if ever wore a dress after that. I still don’t all these years later.
I have always loved the story of Pope Joan myself.
As for queer Native Americans, curiosity got me googling. Fascinating stuff. Thankyou for piquing my curiosity in that direction I had not before thought of exploring, learning more about that could keep me out of trouble for a long time.
I am aware of female cross dressers – George Sand and Colette are the ones that come to mind first.
But when I do a Dogpile search on “cross dressing,” I seem to come up with products only for men who wish to dress as women.
Because it has become increasingly common for women to wear pants over the last seventy years or so, women in pants are no longer seen as cross dressers. But men in skirts and dresses are still are rare.
Just as women in pants are no longer seen as crossdressers, men in skirts are also no longer seen as crossdressers either.
Actually, a “true” male “crossdresser”, by definition, will now be wearing what women of today normally wear most of the time: gym shoes, pants, a shirt or sweatshirt, and maybe a ring, an earing or a necklace.
It is the men in slacks and shirts wearing a necklace who are todays true male crossdressers: i.e., who wear what the oppossite sex wears.
A man that wears a skirt or dress is not a “crossdresser”, since so few women wear skirts or dresses anymore.
Are you sure? The men who wear skirts where I live are so convincing, that the best way to tell that they are male, is that they ARE wearing a skirt. So few real women wear skirts, esp on a Saturday, that you should look carefully at any person in a skirt.
If you ever go to Las Vegas, go see Frank Marino, he is beautiful, and funny as Joan Rivers, and he wears the most beautiful clothes. It is a rare nite to find a real female in the audience who is prettier and more femininely dressed than he is.
Lucky you! You did not have to wear dresses to junior high or high school as I did on the coldest snowiest winter days.
I give it more thought than you do. You were too young to really question what you were told you had to do by men before junior high. You will never know the resentment it can later cause as we older women can think back and remember what we had to suffer thru because of what men told us we had to do, or what we were told by men that we could not do.
It was MEN who made women wear dresses and skirts regardless of the weather. It was the MEN who made all the rules back then, it was the men who made all the laws, it was the men who controlled all the school boards, and the companies. I thought more than once about making men walk a mile wearing dresses on a zero degree winter day with a foot of snow. Or letting the women be able to smoke and drink alcohol, and not letting the men do so.
Yeah, sure, we finally got some equality, but no revenge, or compensation for all the past discrimination. There is talk about giving money to blacks for past discrimination, but no one talks about giving women money for past discrimination.
I thought when they stopped making girls wear skirts, they stopped calling it “junior high”, and instead started calling it “middle school”. Around here anyways.
Susanann, according to Webster’s, pantaloons are slacks.
I didn’t look up slacks for women in the 1920’s. No need to. They didn’t become a fashion trend until the 1930’s.
Collette was a famous French writer who did wear pants sometimes early in the century before it became fashionable.
George Sand was the pseudonym for another famous writer from the 19th Century.
I had already seen the link to the Sears catalogs. They do not feature all of the clothing from those catalogs nor did I say that women didn’t wear dresses more often than slacks.
Hmmm…Have fun sorting out your inconsistencies. Be sure to let us know what you come up with. I will be hanging onto your every word.:rolleyes:
No, sorry. I dont know of any books specifically on this subject, other than the many general womens rights books of which most do go into the types of clothing permitted and prohibited for women thru the ages. I would think any womens bookstore should have something on this subject though.
But I do thank you for your complement and your interest.
Many young men and young women of today have absolutely no idea for what it was like before women like myself took action to legalize pants for women. They have no concept of how it feels to be refused entry into a church, or restaurant, and with the restaurant threatening us with calling the police on us, or with the church taking away our membership for what clothes we chose to wear. How sad it was to see my girlfriends walked out the door of my company minutes after showing up for work in pants, and they could not sue the company at all.
I did not learn about this subject from reading books, I learned about it from seeing my girlfriends suspended from school, other friends being fired for wearing pants, from myself walking to school in a foot of snow in a dress, and from being a member of the womens liberation movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, to repeal those laws which legally prohibited women from wearing pants.
Most women(and men) today have no appreciation for what we went thru to let women legally wear whatever we want to in public.
Can you please provide some cite to the relevant statutes?
Can you explain exactly what statute you took action to repeal? And what actions did you take especifically? Where? When? And when was it finally repealed? I’d like to see some support for all that as I have a very hard time believing it.
