Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.
(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)
The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”
Hm yes story checks out
peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts
skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything
skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life
no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here
Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)
Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”
Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)
Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)
Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”
Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.
Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.
*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT
(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)
Ancient Rome
Modern Morocco
Medieval Europe
Traditional Saudi Arabia
16th century Russia
Traditional Papua New Guinea
16th century Turkey
Modern India
i deliver propane. this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold. i was the first woman my company ever hired.
and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC. they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was. i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then. they stayed in the house all the time.” and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.
anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.
Another thing to keep in mind is that often a garment can be cumbersome if you’re not used to it, but no problem at all if you’ve worn it everyday for years and years.
Of course people who rarely/never wear skirts are going to have a harder time working in them than people who wear them every day! I wear shirts with big puffy sleeves everyday, and I never have any trouble with them, but someone who’s used to t shirts probably would.
I have to strongly disagree with the assertion that bifurcated garments are only useful for riding horses though. Plenty of cultures wore some form of pants, wether they had horses or not. Often you’ll see bifurcated garments with skirts layered on top of them.
Try and tell me that traditional Inuit women’s clothing includes trousers because they were riding horses they didn’t have and not because it’s sometimes -40 there. Skirts without anything underneath are very practical in some parts of the world, but in others you would quite literally freeze your junk off.
Bifurcated garments are useful for keeping cold drafts out! Or for keeping bugs from biting you, or just showing off your legs! And probably good for keeping sand out too, but I’ve never encountered a sand storm. None of this goes against all the other stuff about skirts being practical of course, but you can make a pro-skirt post without minimizing the usefulness or ubiquity of bifurcated things.
I wear below-knee skirts and dresses exclusively* and have for a number of years. The one thing I have to say about What People Say About Skirts is:
When someone tells you that you “can’t do X in a skirt”, they are wrong.
Specifically, they are leaving out some critical modifiers. It’s not true that you physically cannot do various things - ride horse, climb tree, run hard - in a loose skirt such as normal people have historically worn. What they may not be aware that they mean is: you cannot do those things in a socially acceptable fashion, which generally means without a chance of anyone seeing your underwear/lack of underwear. If you are in serious danger, or are alone, or simply choose not to care about this, I promise you can do those things just fine.
(Personally, in my life I find that I can also shovel snow in a skirt, because my scandinavian heritage makes me get warm VERY fast when I’m exercising. Obviously snow is not Super Cold Weather, but: you can do it. It will kind of suck if it goes over the tops of your shoes, though. Get good shoes.)
*It’s not a religion thing or anything, I just hate shopping for pants and wearing pants that don’t fit right or have bad texture so much that I quit forever. If it sucks, hit the bricks!
This is about skirts, but I want to add another thing to the truly EXCELLENT “if you can pretend women were too hobbled by their clothes” thing above.
I run a corseting panel at anime conventions. I always start it with my feet up on the table, chatting with the audience until start time. Then I say “so, who believes I’m corseted right now?” WITHOUT FAIL the people who raise their hands are all veteran cosplayers, often wearing a corset of their own. Then I say “you’re right, I am. How many of you believe I’m tightlaced?”
The hands go down. My shirt comes off. I turn around to show them my laces and tell them tightlacing is defined as a waist reduction of over 4”, and I’m at slightly over 6”.
Then I turn back around and say “also, I’ve pushed a stalled car across eight lanes of intersection like this” and you should see the faces. They’re gobsmacked. They’re HOOKED. They never quite know what to say after that revelation. I never bother telling them I wasn’t even breathing hard because I know they wouldn’t believe me.
Women were not nearly as hobbled by their clothing as you think.
not to mention that corsets are actually incredibly helpful if you’re a farmer, or you’re someone who has to be on their hands and knees a lot. they provide excellent back support. the history writer Ruth Goodman has written a lot about it. also, if you genuinely believe no one can do work in a skirt, watch literally any history re-enactors with women. you’ll see the kind of freedom of movement a skirt offers.
As with many things, people want to criticize a cultural mandate dictating that women do exclusively one thing and not certain other things – in this case, wearing skirts rather than trousers, in western history – and end up just. Criticizing the thing that women did, as inherently evil and oppressive. Rather than the restriction to ONLY do that thing, which is the actual oppression
(obligatory “I am a feminist; OP has repeatedly clarified that they are also a feminist in the notes; feminist fantasy is a specific genre and this post is not bashing feminism in general“ disclaimer)
