From a female mountaineer wearing pants to a Muslim mayor of New York

The historical social progress always produces social backlash among those who are attached to the particular social norms that are being challenged. Some could not cope with the fact that the US president was black. Others are mourning the fact that the French national football team today might be dominated by people of colour. Also, Sadiq Khan has now been the mayor of London for quite a while. And now, Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race. As usual and as expected, the old men are crying because their old world is slowly dying. And nobody can do anything about it.

Of course, it is not only the men. The conservative women are equally crying. This is not about genders. Neither it concerns different races and ethnicities - there are plenty of white people that do not give a damn about the skin colour of the footballers. Moreover, it would be equally ridiculous to assume that only Muslim people could support Mamdani or Khan. Hence, this has nothing to do with religion either. All in all, this is yet another simple story about generational change. Novel social norms are breaking ground and pushing away what has so far been considered as normal and appropriate. And history is full of amusing examples regarding such generational change. Here we shall remember the past generations within the so-called Western world who would not allow women to wear pants.

“Imagine going outside wearing a pair of pants and being relentlessly mocked, inspiring derisive political cartoons, or even receiving death threats.” No matter how ridiculous this might sound to us today, this was once the reality for women “in countries such as the US, England, and France”. All those who scream about the Sharia law being implemented in London or New York as a result of the Muslim mayors most likely know very little about the not so distant Christian traditional social norms. Namely, to castigate women for wearing pants. In early 20th century France, for instance, “women were arrested for wearing divided skirts, while the tennis player Lili de Alvarez received death threats for wearing a Schiaparelli version on the court in the 1930s”. It is difficult, indeed, not to compare these historical precedents with France’s burka ban in our days.

But the list of such historical incidents does not end here. “When mountaineer Annie Smith Peck summited the Matterhorn in 1895, her climbing outfit included pants. Most women of Peck’s day scaled mountains in layers of heavy woolen skirts. Many didn’t approve of Peck’s pants, including rival mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman”. Moreover, “in Peck's case, on the other hand, the press didn’t focus on the achievement but on the clothes that the 45-year-old was wearing. [...] It actually got so bad that public debate centered around whether or not she should be arrested for the crime of pants-wearing”. As we can see, this is yet another example of historical social change. In simple terms, what was once almost incomprehensible has become absolutely normal for us today. In the same manner, what is still seen by some as distressing in our days, be it a Muslim mayor of New York or the French national football team composed of black individuals, will be considered as completely natural by the future generations. In fact, one such generation has already arrived.

To sum up, those who paint the future in apocalyptic colours as a result of the ever-greater interracial mixing of our society might feel better by recalling that a particular generation once believed that “the social order would be upended by bloomer-wearing women who proposed marriage to men or lounged while husbands did chores”. Yet, this society has successfully survived not only this particular shift in social norms, but also all of the other social changes that were equally denounced as civilizational risks. For instance, the legalization of divorce or women’s right to vote, just to name a few. In any case, “by the ’80s, pantsuits, complete with banker-style pinstripes and padded shoulders that imitated a masculine silhouette, were common for women in white-collar offices. By then, pants had long become unremarkable as everyday wear, too.”

In a couple of decades from today, a non-white and non-Christian mayor of any town in the so-called Western world will likewise have become an unremarkable political feature. And all those who are making a big fuss about it today will be judged in the same way as we may judge this particular restaurant’s owner, named Robert Cobb, who refused to seat the actress Marlene Dietrich in 1933. What could have been the reason for this decline? Well, she had “caused a minor uproar by turning up to famed Hollywood hangout the Brown Derby in pants”. Knowing history might help one avoid standing on the wrong side of it.

Sources:
https://mdash.mmlafleur.com/history-of-women-and-pants/
https://qz.com/quartzy/1597688/a-brief-history-of-women-in-pants
https://www.hrlc.org.au/case-summaries/france-bans-the-burqa-in-public/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-things-know-about-pants-wearing-mountaineer-annie-smith-peck-180965297/

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