Pants in the F amily

Glamorous photos of Katherine Hepburn might lead you to believe that everyone wore pants in the 1930s and 1940s. Not so! In this subset of fashion, Hepburn was an early adopter. How do I know? I have been reading Ph.D. dissertations by home economists who study what people actually wear, not what fashion magazines or movies tell them to wear. This fascinating subfield is called “clothing behavior,” a term that surely deserves its own investigation. (Can you make your clothes behave?)

According to one study that examined the clothing choices of three different age groups, women over sixty-five wore dresses almost all the time in the mid 1960s. While younger women donned pants to keep house, shop, and serve the family meal, their mothers and grandmothers wore dresses for everything, including house cleaning. Those more formal days are long gone, and now I rarely see a woman over sixty-five in a dress. When did the change take place? Maybe we can correlate the rise of pants to the disappearance of gloves? Now there’s an interesting hypothesis for a dissertation.

Hearth and Home

In one of those happy accidents on the internet, I stumbled upon a wonderful website hosted by Cornell University called Hearth, which documents the history of Home Economics in the US. Perhaps you do not think that this is an interesting topic, remembering you own seventh grade experiences or humorous depictions of Home Ec classes in movies. I hope this site will convince you otherwise!

Historically, Home Economics departments were havens for academic women who were not welcomed elsewhere at the university. They taught design, marketing, nutrition, hygiene, and a host of other topics that now are integrated under other programs and schools. The website is a treasure, with full text journals, the texts of rare books, and amazing photographs. In my quest for information on how older women have dressed (and been advised to dress) in the twentieth century, this is an amazing resource. There are sources on design as well…and the best thing is that you can search it all in your own hearth and home.