Had there never been a Suffragette movement, the women’s clothing section of All Season’s Uniforms might still be blouses and skirts.
By the way, it’s not March, Women’s History Month. We’re gonna talk about women in the workplace because why not?
It’s impossible to talk about women’s workwear without touching on the struggle for equal rights fought by women since… well, forever. Hopefully, this doesn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable.
Thankfully for those of us in the workwear business, uniforms have come a long way. Gone are the days where women’s dress code mandated skirts and blouses, but it may surprise you how recently.
The craziest thing about women’s workwear today, which nobody could have predicted is that women often have more options than men in many workplaces.
19th-century
The 1800s brought many wonderful advances, including the industrial revolution which came into full swing. The 1800s even gave us our first automobiles.
It was a progressive time, despite how stuffy it looks to our modern eyes. We had territories and states giving women the right to vote, like Wyoming. That was way back in 1869.
Unfortunately, we didn’t come far in the workwear category during the 1800s. If we’re talking about the 1840s on, we call this chunk of history the Victorian era. It’s a reference to Queen Victoria’s preference for stuffy fashion amongst other things. During this time, men’s fashion grew more serious, but women’s went, well, stuffier.
At work and outside of work, women had limited clothing options in general. Jobs for women too suffered limitations. As late as the end of the 19th-century, there was secretarial work and some light-duty factory work.
Women who worked on farms in fields still labored in dresses. Those dresses, while flowing and free at the beginning of the century became more restrictive by the middle of the 1800s.
On top of it, or underneath it all rather, women would usually wear corsets and a farthingale of some sort. Farthingales were those cages that made the bottom of the dress as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. In the 19th century, they called them bustles.
Thankfully, bustles went away by the turn of the century, but women’s wear was still restrictive. Even women who went hunting, which was rare, wore ankle-length skirts with boots or gaiters. There was high visibility clothing or camo at that time, but not for women.
For better or worse, necklines rose to the base of the skull. Clothing covered women’s arms too. Not comfortable in warmer temperatures.
Turn of the Century
The Victorian era ended in 1901 because Queen Victoria died in January that year. Everyone sighed a collective sigh of relief, especially the women.
In the 20th-century, women started to engage in more sport. Fashion, by that measure, evolved. We still crammed them into dresses.
Some of the dress designs around the turn of the century restricted a woman’s gate to the tiniest steps with uber tight fitting bottoms. In fact, they called them hobble dresses in the 19-teens.
Forget about running, women could barely walk in those things. Workwear did not reflect this fashion, thankfully, not on the whole.
For the first two decades of the 20th-century, women’s workwear remained drab. The closest thing to a concession was that by the 1910s, some women wore skirts and blouses to work instead of dresses.
They still didn’t wear cravats or ties, and they still did not hold anything above entry-level positions, but their fashion was creeping towards men’s workwear.
At that time, 1910, only 23.4 percent of women were in the workforce, but by 1920 that number dropped to 21 percent. It wasn’t until The Roaring Twenties that women’s fashion started to relax again.
The 20th-Century
As the new century progressed, women entered more workplaces, but the work was still a matter of sorting or performing secretarial work.
Outside the workplace, in the late twenties, many young women cut their hair short. It was the flapper look, which was popular amongst young women. Flappers liked to go out dancing and would drink and smoke with the boys.
Whether it was the dancing that changed the dresses or the dresses that changed the dancing, the new moves on the dance floor mandated less restrictive dresses. Flappers often wore short dresses or skirts, with lots of glitter and fringe. This fashion also didn’t exactly hit workwear, not in traditional jobs for women.
By 1930, 22 percent of women were in the workforce, and pant fashions for women started popping up. We saw the first pantsuit in 1932 but in France.
Some women took work during the Great Depression to make ends meet, but it wasn’t until World War II that we put women in traditionally male jobs.
For the first time ever, women went to work in pants. Rosie the Riveter, the adopted face of the women’s movement, didn’t wear dresses or makeup.
In 1940 25.4 percent of women worked, but by the time the war ended, in 1950 we had 33.9 percent of the women in the workforce. Fashion in the workplace, however, took a more conservative turn for the 1950s and 60s, even though the percentage of women in the workplace continued to climb. Gone, again, were the pants.
Going Full Pant
We hit full pants in the 1970s, even though many workplaces retained antiquated workwear policies.
There was a trend to remove gender from fashion, practiced by both genders, but not across the board. We called it unisex clothing, a category of workwear we still carry.
Still, by 1970, only 43.4 percent of women were in the workforce. That said, they were taking more and more jobs previously held by men. They were climbing the corporate ladder, even though they were still not in corporate positions.
By 1980, over half of all women were in the workforce; 51.5 percent. We coined the term power woman, an expression to define women’s fashion which borrowed from men’s fashion.
Some women even wore ties, but some workplaces still retained gender-biases workwear standards. There was even a short backlash of women’s fashion in the 1990s, where more women wore skirts than they did the previous decade. It didn’t last, of course.
By 2000, 59.5 percent of women had entered the workforce. Many of them not only wore pants, they wore denim. In 2012, the New York City Commission on Human Rights passed a law prohibiting sexist dress codes, setting the tone for the nation.
In the last decade, we’ve been witness to a complete overhaul of workwear in many places. The idea of the workplace has changed so dramatically with the internet, that many workplaces have adopted more casual standards of dress which aren’t much different than what people wear outside the workplace.
Today’s workwear restrictions for women land on the side of safety and company branding. Gone are the days of women wearing skirts and men wearing ties.
In fact, what may come next is that men and their gender-fluid counterparts start wearing skirts as they please.
As long as everybody is branded, clean, and safe, that works for All Season’s Uniforms. We’re gonna stay on top of fashion at every turn, whatever way it goes, whoever wants to wear it.
Sources: mashable.com, onlinemba.unc.edu
About the Author
Nick Warrick
Nick Warrick is the Sales Manager at All Seasons Uniforms. With over 15 years of experience in the work uniform business, he has worked with hundreds of clients across 20 different industries. Holding bachelor’s degrees in both Business Administration and Information Technology, Nick revamped the company’s online presence, offering its customers a new uniform shopping experience.