Ladies, have you ever begrudged having to find  a bag that perfectly matched your outfit?

And, gentlemen, have you ever been asked to  carry someone’s keys or ID?

I bet you have and that’s because women  frequently don’t have pockets, and when we do, they’re often not fully  functional.

Today on Footnotning History I’m going to think about where pockets  come from and why ladies don’t have them.

Hi.

I’m Sam and I’d like to welcome you to  Footnoting History.

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I usually don’t this, but for this episode I’m  like to start with a word or two about myself or, rather, about my kids.

You see, when my son  turned 4 he started collecting pocket treasures.

And every day I would find an abandoned stick  that had transformed into a sword through the magic of imagination, or a few rocks, and  at least 4 snack wrappers lovingly carried home and then forgotten in the laundry.

But  my daughter never had pocket treasures.

And it’s not because she was less curious,  or less inclined to collect.

The reason my daughter never got to bring things home was  that girls’ clothing rarely has pockets.

And so, because I had blindly decided to shop in the  girls’ department, my inquisitive younger child didn’t have any place she could stash the various  sundries that she encountered throughout her day.

I noticed this lack of pockets and was annoyed by  it, but it didn’t occur to me until I was doing research for this podcast that through all  of this my daughter was being conditioned to expect less from her clothing.

By the time she  was two years old she was starting learn that she would need a bag to carry her things.

And  in the process, she would have to sacrifice a hand or brave the chafing of a cross-body bag  and if she dared to put her precious bag down, she would risk losing the things she loved.

Either  she will grow into a pocket having rebel like her mom, or she will continually have to expend her  precious executive functioning skills keeping track of her stuff while her brother can expect  to carry everything safely close.

I am, of course, by no means the first person to have the  realization that the possession of pockets and the design of clothing is a feminist issue.

My goal  right now is to take a few moments of your day to explore the history of pockets to figure out  how ladies ended up with such poor pocket game.

Inset pockets seem to have developed first in  Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages.

If you want to learn more about medieval fashion,  I strongly recommend Kristin’s episode on the topic.

But for now, I suppose it suffices to know  that in Middle Ages both men and women wore belts that held both tools and purses.

Indeed, the  purse was a mark of status and it was often constructed from comparatively expensive and  finely decorated materials.

For medieval poets, the positioning of the purse was  also sometimes highly eroticized.

The earliest pockets were simply small bags – in  fact the word pocket comes from the Anglo-Norman poke (meaning bag) to which the suffex  -ette (meaning small).

These small bags, could fall into the wrong hands, and so by the  middle of the twelfth century there some who decided to hold them the inside of the long,  loose robes or tunics that were worn by both sexes at that time.

As tailored dresses became  more popular tailors sometimes included a slit in the seam between the front and the side panels  at hip level to allow a bag to be positioned under the garment.

Wearers could rest their hands in  the openings and keep their pockets inside of them.

We can see an example of these slits in  sculpture of Joan the daughter of King Edward III at Westminster Abbey, which you can find  linked in the show notes.

These pockets, however, were sewn into the main garments.

Most likely,  pockets were not permanently attached because they would have been comparatively fragile and  would not have stood up well to the rough washing methods that were used at that time, which would  have meant that a sewn in pocket would need to be regularly repaired or replaced, so instead  of sewing them in, they just kind of hold them.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, clothing became  more and more gendered and men started wearing padded garments, called hose – and again, if you  would like more detail about this shift I will refer you to Kristin’s episode.

There were many  styles of breeches across Europe but eventually they begam fuller and puffier.

To achieve this  rounded effect tailors stuffed breeches with hair, or with quilted lining or with a cotton padding  known as bombast.

It’s actually from this stuffing that we get the word bombastic because men  with particularly large breeches compensated by adopting a distinctive walk that became associated  with a militaristic and pugnacious attitude.

By the 1560s these pants were so ridiculous that the  English crown began to issue edicts intending to limit their “monstrous and outrageous greatness”  by limiting the amount of filling that tailors could use.

It appears that sewn in pockets first  appeared in these overstuffed pants and in fact there is even record of a man who was chastised  for breaking the sumptuary laws limiting the size of pants.

He was, however, exonerated from  any payment when he revealed the contents of his pockets and demonstrated, thereby, that his pants  were not over stuffed – they were full of useful things including (apparently) four spare shirts,  a pair of sheets, two table cloths, ten napkins, a brush, a mirror, and (of course) a comb, along  with various other sundries that were not listed.

Descriptions like this one demonstrate that  sixteenth-century pockets must have been both sturdier and larger than the ones we typically  see today.

Some were attached to the exterior of clothing and were closed with drawstrings,  but others were stitched into side seams much as pockets are today.

So pretty much as soon  as pockets were first sewn into clothing, they were most commonly an addition to male  ensembles.

Women could have pockets attached to their skirts – in fact Queen Elizabeth I’s  wardrobe accounts indicate that a few of her casual gowns had pockets – but it remained much  more common for women to wear purses suspended from belts.

To be fair, sometimes men had both so  they would have the pocket and a purse on a belt.

It is, perhaps, worth noting that at first  the reason that men were more likely to have pockets than women is not just the patriarchy  (though the fact that men wore the breeches was already recognized as a symbol of their authority  within the family unit).

Instead, it appears to

have been a fashion decision: pockets helped  achieve the ideal inflated look for pants, just as today cargo pants have a broader  silhouette than many other cuts of trousers.

Also, almost as soon as pockets were routinely  included in male costumes, however, people began to worry about what might be concealed within  them.

By the early sixteenth century, there was concern that people might be sporting small-scale  handguns (known as pocket dags), which had only recently been made possible by the innovation  to the wheel-lock mechanism within the firearms.

As fashions evolved, men’s clothing continued  to have more pockets than women’s clothing.

The middle of the seventeenth century saw  the introduction of the three-piece suit, which has remained the standard in menswear  to the present day.

From the beginning these suits sported a myriad of inset pockets of  varying sizes and purposes.

Whereas at one time men had to pay to have pockets added or  repaired, by 1700 there was an expectation that men’s clothing would have pockets and that  expectation remains true to this day.

I will note, at this junction though, that there was an  exception to this rule about men having pockets.

The least fortunate men in society, that is  to say the enslaved and formerly enslaved, did not have pockets and many came to view  the integration of pockets into clothing as a symbol of freedom.

There are even a few  accounts of enslaved men adding pockets to their clothing in order to deflect suspicion  from them when they escaped from their owners.

Pockets became so omnipresent among  men’s clothing that there was a drive to miniaturize instruments so that men  might want things like pocket watches, pocket compasses, pocket knives, and even pocket  books – which were not bags at this juncture, but rather books small enough to fit comfortably  in the pocket.

The addition of the word pocket is still short hand for anything that has  been miniaturized to fit into small spaces even if they no longer literally fit in a  pocket, so pocket games are small games.

As men’s clothing underwent this radical  transformation to the suit, women’s styles remained more consistent and continued to  feature bodices and full skirts.

Most commonly women continued to carry purses but there were  some tie-on pockets that women could wear and it was even possible to tie them on under one’s  skirts.

These tie-on pockets could be large and they could even be highly decorated.

But they did  not have the easy access to them in public because you would have to pull up your skirt to get into  your pocket (though to be fair, men were also discouraged from accessing their pockets in public  well into the 18th century because it was seen as unseemly – this pocket space was private space  that should be accessed in private).

Moreover, ladies’ pockets were not sewn in so that there  was much higher risk of the knot holding them in place slipping or coming undone entirely,  so the pockets could fall out and be lost, and we actually have advertisements of women  looking for their lost pockets.

I’m including a link in the show notes to show you what  the tie-on pocket looked like, and you can also google just “tie on pockets” to see what I  mean and how they would have been attached.

Moralists poked fun at women’s tie-on-pockets,  but when women did try to don clothing with sewn in pockets they expressed alarm.

Women’s riding habits, for example, frequently included over coats with pockets  sewn into them, and the women who wore them were dismissed as unfeminine or as Amazons.

In short,  until the 18th century women did have pockets but their pockets were less useful than the ones men  had.

As art historian Hannah Carlson has noted, it’s not that women weren’t pocketed but  rather that they were differently pocketed.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, as  men’s clothing began to be mass produced more frequently, the narrative surrounding pockets  shifted.

The satirist William Livingstone Alden described pockets as a biological given for men  just as facial hair was natural to men.

But, since pockets allowed independence,  they were not appropriate for women or for children and one mark of adulthood  was when a man got clothing with a pocket.

Unsurprisingly, the availability of pockets  for women depended a lot on which fashions happen to be in at any given moment.

When  formfitting dresses became popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century,  tie-in pockets – which are naturally bulky – fell out of fashion and were replaced  with reticules, which were effectively purses worn on the wrist.

Women who retained their  tie-in pockets were seen as old-fashioned, and those who opted for the reticule were  often denigrated as silly or frivolous.

In other words, whatever choice they  made women were subject to mockery.

The narrow silhouette did not last and by  the 1820s women began wearing wider skirts with tie-on pockets again.

There were even a few  women who experimented with adding inseam pockets but when fashions shifted again to favor flat  fronted dresses with large bustles at the back, women’s pockets moved into the bustle  of the dress, which was obviously not an easy place to access.

So while women  could still carry their stuff with them, unlike men they could not pull out a watch  from their pocket and check the time, which I guess would have been fine since they were  not supposed to be carrying practical things like compasses and watches, they were supposed to be  carrying domestic things (like their sewing).

By the turn of the twentieth century, pockets had  become a political issue.

Male writers largely blamed women for women’s lack of pockets and used  the fact that they had not demanded pockets as one more reason to dismiss women as silly and  frivolous.

It wasn’t always that easy to get a pocket though.

While men’s clothing was being mass  produced long before, women were still reliant on dressmakers to make their clothing into the 20th  century.

As such, you would think it would be possible for women to get what they wanted, but  that wasn’t always the case as Elizabeth Cady Stanton discovered to her chagrin in 1895 when she  asked her dressmaker to add pockets to her dress.

The dressmaker objected saying that pockets would  “bulge you out just awful” still Stanton persisted and left thinking that she had won the argument  and that she would get a dress with pockets.

When she came back to collect her dress, however,  she discovered that not one single pocket had been added.

In short, even when women were having  their clothing individually tailored they didn’t always have control.

Arguably we have even less  control now that most of us are buying ready-made clothing.

If the store doesn’t carry clothes with  sufficient pockets, our only recourse is to learn to sew or to shop in the men’s department and  neither of these options appeal to most women.

Unlike men’s clothing, where pockets are an  assumed staple, pocket fashion fades in and out for womenswear.

Sometimes women are discouraged  from having pockets lest it mess with fine lines and body-hugging silhouettes, other times women  are given pockets that are purely decorative, or oddly placed.

None of these things is the  norm with men’s clothing.

This issue is not just one of fashion, it is a feminist  issue and it has been for a long time.

That’s where I’ll leave you today.

I hope  that you’ve enjoyed learning just little bit about pockets and that you’ll come back  to join us again soon for another episode of Footnoting History.

In the meantime remember,  the best stories are always in the footnotes.