By Fritz


In honor of Women's History Month, I bought a new pair of pants.

I figured my womanly posterior deserved a round of applause in some new khakis. It took a lot of shopping and time in fitting rooms because my posterior is one of the larger specimens out there. But it was worth it. I'm now the proud owner of two new pairs of pants. When I sit in my pants, I spread my legs out and enjoy the sensation of fabric encasing each leg. Pants are nice — I like the noise they make as my thighs rub while I walk. I like dancing in pants; I like the friction of pants.

Women didn't always wear pants. In fact, if you research women and pants on the Internet, you will find numerous sites touting the Biblical standard for skirts and dresses. Apparently, pants and women were a question in California until 1995, when the legislature allowed pants, pantsuits, and women to go to work together. My mother tells me she was not allowed to wear pants to elementary school. In high school, she was finally permitted to wear pants but never jeans.

Women and pants didn't come together until the 1850's, officially. The medical community in Europe discouraged women in pants; female genitalia would decay, it was believed, with lack of air provided by a skirt or dress. While plenty of men donned skirts and kilts, the religious community criminalized 'cross-dressing' women wearing pants. But the women in English coalmines (the pit brow girls) made an important discovery for themselves—pants were a superior garment when it came to physical labor. In 1869, women in Wyoming got the vote, and soon thereafter got rid of the sidesaddle. American women were swinging legs over horses and donned the britches of their male comrades. When women starting roping cattle and flying airplanes, pants were seeing more and more of the female physiognomy. WWII rationed clothing, so housewives put on their husbands' jeans and took up their husbands' jobs. When the men came home from the war and took back their jobs, they asked their wives to put back on their discarded skirts. But pants came back—dungarees, trousers, slacks, khakis, corduroys, jeans, capri’s, gauchos, shorts, hot pants, leggings—and women can't stop wearing them.

Women in pants have only been around for 175 years. Up until then, we did everything in dresses. We menstruated in dresses without tampons or pads. We rode horses in skirts and climbed ladders without underpants. We ruled countries in pinafores and had sex in tunics. We curtsied in bustles and courted in corsets. We defecated through holes in our bloomers. We fought for the vote in modest skirts and showed our ankles to very few deserving eyes. But pants are still new to our sex, and we can do anything we want with pants. We can feminize pants to show off our rumps, or we can sag them on our hips to shroud our crotches. We can break dance in our pants, we can chill in our sweats, and we can run companies in our power suits.