When American Suffragists Tried to ‘Wear the Pants’

Editor’s Note: Read more stories in our series about women and political power.

In 19th-century America, the struggle for women’s rights—including the right to vote, enshrined nearly 100 years ago in the Nineteenth Amendment—often went hand in hand with other social and political goals: from abolishing slavery and securing Native American land rights to promoting temperance and championing the dress-reform movement. Dress reformers proposed comfortable and healthful alternatives to confining garments such as corsets and crinolines, the cagelike steel underskirts that characterized female fashion at the time.

Chafing against clothing norms was, of course, not quite the same thing as rebelling against the patriarchy, but the two issues frequently overlapped, starting in the mid-1800s. Women demanded physical freedom along with other, less tangible liberties, and many early feminists embraced what was euphemistically known as “freedom dress”—or, in other words, pants. But rather than spurring the suffrage movement forward,