Twentieth Century
During World War I, women wore their husbands' (suitably altered) trousers while they took on male jobs, and increasingly wore trousers as leisurewear in the 1920s and 30s. And for a period in the 1970s, trousers became quite fashionable for women. In the United States, this may be due to the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which ruled that dresses could not be required of girls. Dress codes changed in public schools across the United States. Today, though trousers are not as fashionable as previously, jeans are sometimes worn as casual wear by many women, while skirts and dresses remain more typical feminine wear.
Women working the ranches of the 19th century USA also wore trousers, for riding, and in the early 20th century aviatrices and other working women often wore trousers. Actresses Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn were often photographed in trousers from the 1930s. During World War II, women working in factories and doing other forms of "men's work" on war service wore trousers, and in the post-war era trousers were still common casual wear for gardening, socialising, and other leisure pursuits.
In Britain during the Second World War, because of the rationing of clothing, many women took to wearing their husbands' civilian clothes to work while their husbands were away in the armed forces. This was partly because they were seen as work garments, and partly to allow women to keep their clothing allowance for other uses. As the men's clothes wore out, replacements were needed, so that by the summer of 1944 it was reported that sales of women's trousers were five times more than in the previous year.
In the 1960s, André Courrèges introduced jeans for women, leading to the era of designer jeans.
Read more about this topic: Women Wearing Pants
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious ‘retreat’ of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)