I’ve seen a lot of people asking why Hillary Clinton’s suits are referred to as ‘pantsuits’ all the time. Like, why not just ‘suits’? The answer is more infuriating than you may realize.
Until very very recently – more recently than most people my age can probably believe (it was a shock to me) – ‘a women’s suit’ meant a suit jacket and a skirt, full stop. As in, guess when female Senators were last required - REQUIRED - to wear skirts on the Senate floor?
NINETEEN NINETY-THREE. I was six years old and female Senators were still required to wear skirts! And it only stopped when two female Senators showed up in pants to protest it.
1993. Women wearing suits with pants was still controversial 23 years ago. And Hillary Clinton has been a woman in public life for almost 40 years.
And she was a woman who wore pants, who at first didn’t wear makeup and didn’t change her last name, and kept her career after her husband entered politics, and got involved in politics herself, and had strong opinions which she freely expressed.
This made her fucking Satan as far as conservatives were concerned, and she’s been Satan to them ever since.
The use of the word ‘pantsuit’ to refer to Clinton’s suits, which she began wearing long before it was broadly socially acceptable, is a leftover dogwhistle from a less tolerant time. The very phrase ‘pantsuit’ basically means, a suit worn by an uppity woman. A suit worn by the type of woman who doesn’t care that skirts are PROPER professional garments for ladies. A suit for goddamn rabble-rousing hippie bitches.
Can’t wait to see what color pantsuit HRC wears when she’s the goddamn president.
