1940s Pants For Women

1940s pants for women may not seem controversial today, but in the 1940s, women wearing anything other than skirts or dresses caused quite a stir, especially among men. The Victorian ideal of rigid gender roles was starting to wane as the twentieth century moved by. Pants were traditionally reserved for men while women wore dresses, skirts and gowns. As more men went off to fight in the war, occupations traditionally reserved for men became available to women. Women not only wore pants to work in factories, but many house wives had dug through their husband’s closet and started wearing pants to conserve on clothing or to create new clothing to save on fabric materials. Designers like Coco Chanel and movie stars like Katherine Hepburn made 1940s pants for pants for women a popular style. Women often preferred slacks to traditional pants or trousers. While trousers and slacks were for day and work attire, it was still unacceptable for ladies to sport pants for evening and fancy events. Slacks for women were often flared and came with a matching jacket. Pants for women came to question assumptions of what men and women could wear. The establishment even went so far as to ban women from wearing pants in certain bars and restaurants. Despite these restrictions, pants for women showed no signs of waning and set the stage for working and professional women in the coming decades. This type of fashion would later spawn the pant suit for working women in a modern and post-modern age.

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