Why Don’t Women’s Clothes Have Pockets?

In the late 1600s, women didn’t have pockets in their clothing at all — they had belts with attached pockets that they usually wore under their skirts and accessed via small slits that were meant to be essentially invisible. These were spacious enough to carry everything from fruit to gloves, and often as stylish as the purses of today. Purses themselves became more fashionable (and functional) as dresses got smaller and less conducive to covert storage. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that pockets were regularly sewn directly into women’s clothing; for a time, most of them were even larger than men’s pockets.

Then the same thing happened to pants and other garments that had happened to dresses: Smaller, more form-fitting variants became in vogue, making it more difficult to accommodate large pockets. The line of thought was that they ruined the female silhouette, which brings us to perhaps the main crux of this issue: gender inequality.

Women have long entreated the fashion industry to elevate function to the same level as form. The Rationalist Dress Society was founded in 1891 to push back against corsets and other constricting garments in favor of clothing that was more comfortable and useful, but it wasn’t until World War II that this really happened en masse — and even that was only because women were performing jobs that had previously been the sole province of men. If you’ve seen A League of Their Own, you already know what happened once the war ended: Things went back to the way they were. Small steps have been made since then, of course, but by and large women are still forced to deal with tiny pockets.

Word of the Day

"lackadaisical".

The definition is: lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy.

You might say, "His lackadaisical approach to the project resulted in numerous errors," or "She had a lackadaisical attitude towards her chores."