It’s hard work finding women in skirts nowadays
IWAS idly watching the passing shoppers as I waited for a friend in a local shopping mall when I started counting the women wearing skirts. In about 15 minutes, with hundreds of women having walked past, I had seen only four wearing skirts. They were all middle-aged black women. Everybody else, male and female, black and white, was in trousers.
I thought back fondly to the women I had known in my life and remembered almost all of them wore skirts or dresses as a matter of course. Teenagers wore jeans most of the time but dressed in skirts for parties and church.
Now there I was, watching teenage girls with earplugs permanently attached, mothers pushing toddlers in strollers, busy housewives wheeling loaded shopping trolleys and grey-haired grannies with walkers – all wearing trousers. Only those four women – all middle-aged and with scarves on their heads – passed me wearing skirts.
According to a Sunday news article, this year commemorates the 150th anniversary of the time women started wearing trousers. Trousers have not had an easy walk to freedom. In a male-dominated world it is only very recently that trousers for women have been universally accepted.
I don’t know what the situation is today, but not so long ago, when my late wife was a teacher, teachers were not permitted to wear trousers of any kind in class. Skirts – or frocks – were the dress of the profession. In America it was only in 1993 that women were permitted to wear trousers in the Senate.
I was interested to learn from the Sunday Times story that a law was passed in Paris, often considered to be the cutting edge of the fashion world – as long ago as 1800 – forbidding women to “dress like men”, or in other words, to wear trousers. Amazingly, this law was repealed only four years ago!
Well, maybe not so amazingly. The world is slow to change. I once worked for a large wholesale company in the Free State which employed about 20 women in the accounts department, all seated at formal desks facing the front where the chief accountant sat overlooking the operation.
Company rules forbade the wearing of trousers by female employees, so the embarrassed accountant sat facing 20 pairs of bare knees. Before long he requested management to have plywood boards fitted to the front of all the desks. He was an elder in his church and found the distraction of all those pretty knees just too much for his pure mind.
I watched all those women in trousers and cannot claim to have been any more pure in mind than that accountant. Trousers can be very attractive.
Last Laugh
An elderly man arrived at the ophthalmologist for his first eye test. The ophthalmologist instructed him to close one eye, but he struggled to keep it closed without shutting both eyes.
After trying several times to get the man to shut only one eye the ophthalmologist produced a brown paper bag, cut a single hole in it and popped it over the old man’s head. “How does that feel Mr Brown?” he asked. “Well. It’s quite comfortable,” the patient said, “but I was hoping for something a little more stylish.”