The recent announcement that Minnie Mouse has joined Pantsuit Nation, or at least Pantsuit Magic Kingdom, temporarily swapping her red dress for a polka-dot pantsuit designed by Stella McCartney, triggered a mini-meltdown on Fox News. Conservatives tend to be, by definition, change-adverse. Minnie’s new clothes — coming on the heels of culture-war skirmishes over the green M & M’s “progressive” sneakers and Hasbro’s dropping of the “Mr.” from Mr. Potato Head — may have been the straw that broke Candace Owens’s brain. The right-wing pundit went on “Jesse Watters Primetime” to slam Disney for making Minnie “more masculine” in an attempt to “destroy fabrics of our society” — an interesting Freudian slip, conflating “fabrics” (that is, textiles) with the social “fabric,” or structure.
Of course, as many pointed out on social media, Minnie has worn pants (and shorts) in the past. And at least she’s fully clothed, unlike some pantsless male Disney characters. (Looking at you, Winnie the Pooh and Donald Duck). But the move still riled the right because the politicization of women’s pants is an American tradition. Critiques of women’s fashion have often served as thinly veiled attacks on women themselves, and wearing pants — in the West, reserved for men from the late Middle Ages until just recently — is a convenient metaphor for appropriating historically masculine privileges, from voting to running for president.
In the 19th century, early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton experimented with wearing voluminous pants — also known as “the freedom dress” — but suffered so much mockery that they ultimately rejected them as unhelpful distractions from their cause. The 19th Amendment actually preceded women’s right to wear trousers in public, which was granted by the U.S. attorney general on May 29, 1923.
Yet for several decades wearing pants remained a crime of fashion, punishable under state laws banning cross-dressing by both sexes, which aimed to keep women (and men) in their places. In 1933, Joanne Cummings was arrested for wearing pants in public in New York. In 1938, Los Angeles kindergarten teacher Helen Hulick was barred from testifying in a burglary case when she arrived at the courthouse wearing trousers. Evelyn Bross was charged for wearing trousers on a Chicago street in 1943, even though she was dressed for her wartime job as a machinist in clothes “more comfortable than women’s and handy for work,” as she explained. Bross was acquitted. As the judge explained to The Journal Times, “I think the fact that girls wear slacks should not be held against them when they are not deliberately impersonating men. Styles are changing.”