No Stopping Us Now by Gail Collins

Author:Gail Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

“TEARING APART HUMAN ORDER”

As the ’60s went on, and those twenty-something baby boomers became the center of everything from fashion to civil disobedience, older women began dressing more and more like their juniors. “This historian observed a Boston matron on the far side of fifty, who might have worn a graceful palla [mantle] in ancient Rome, dressed in a miniskirt and leather boots,” complained Brandeis professor David Hackett Fischer. To be fair, Fischer also noted that he’d seen a man in his sixties “who might have draped himself in the dignity of a toga” wearing hip-hugger jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt.

Twiggy, the famous 91-pound British model, epitomized an era when the Duchess of Windsor’s slogan about never being too thin became a national mantra. Twiggy, whose real name was Lesley Hornby, measured 31-22-32. “It’s not really what you’d call a figure, is it?” she asked. But it was the look of the moment, and mature women like Helen Gurley Brown tortured themselves to keep their bodies as reedy as possible. “Skinny is sacred,” Brown decreed.

In a win for everyone of every shape, underwear was getting more comfortable—tights and pantyhose replaced girdles and nylons. And slacks, which would transform the way older women dressed in the near future, were beginning to make an appearance. In 1961, The Dick Van Dyke Show made history of sorts when it introduced a happy homemaker, in the form of Mary Tyler Moore, who wore pants while she did the housework. Many women were already doing that in the comfort of their homes, but it would be a while before the idea of wearing slacks in public would become popular for women of all ages. “Back then… women got dressed up to go to the store,” a beauty care executive recalled.

We live in an era when it’s perfectly okay for a woman to wear pants to church or to work, or to be nominated for president. It’s sometimes hard to remember how daring that seemed back in the wild 1960s. “To sum up, wherever women wear men’s dress, it is to be considered a factor in the long run tearing apart human order,” a prominent Vatican cardinal declaimed in 1960. Slacks wearers who weren’t afraid of tearing human order apart still had to worry about where they could get pants when they wanted them—they often had to buy men’s versions and adapt them. Levi’s discovered that about 15 percent of its jeans were being purchased by women.

The tide was turning, with the help of women like Mary Tyler Moore and Rep. Charlotte Reid, a 56-year-old Illinois Republican. In 1969, she became the first woman ever to wear pants on the floor of the House of Representatives. “I was told there was a lady here in trousers, so I had to come over and see for myself,” one of Reid’s male colleagues told the Washington Post.

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