ofbeautsandbeasts:skittermouse:auntiewanda:epoxyconfetti:codex-fawkes:unified-multiversal-theory:sta

ofbeautsandbeasts:skittermouse:auntiewanda:epoxyconfetti:codex-fawkes:unified-multiversal-theory:stained-glass-rose:hyggehaven:profeminist:SourceI want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants. The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt. They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.A prime example of how gender is socially enforced.  #i’m confused when I visit New Zealand and see all the schoolgirls wearing skirts in winter                                                                                                        #like…are they allowed to wear pants but just choose not to?                              #aren’t y'all cold??                @ofbeautsandbeastsI dunno what it’s like in NZ nowadays, but when I was in school there (some 20-ish years ago), we had to wear skirts as part of our uniform. And I hated them because you couldn’t play on the monkey bars and suchlike, without boys laughing that that could see your underwear, so it sort of made you either lessen physical activity or deal with being mocked a bit. And yes, it was also a bit chilly in winter and despite that we sometimes had to sit cross-legged on the concrete outside, in P.E. classes. Pretty impractical to do in a not-very-warm skirt. I guess kids just got used to it.I myself was eventually allowed, by special plea of my mum to the school, to wear skin-toned nylon stockings under my skirt in winter. They allowed it on the grounds that I was ‘from Eastern Europe and wasn’t used to the climate’.wow…that doesn’t sound pleasant at all.I tried googling it and found that one school, Dunedin North Intermediate,  abolished gendered uniforms (after the girls complained) and now any student can wear shorts, kilt, trousers, culottes, and skirts. And this was LAST YEAR. And apparently it was a big deal across the nation?? (I’m assuming that means most of the nation still has gendered uniforms, but hopefully they follow suit!) -- source link

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