From Agatha Christie to Bridget Jones women wearing trousers has been a developing story in the world of fiction. Who were the pioneers of the pant?
One of the tantalising details to emerge from newspaper extracts of the latest Bridget Jones novel is that fifty-something-year-old, widowed Bridget opts for jeans for an evening out with her old boyfriend Daniel. And not just any old jeans but "a brand chillingly called Not Your Daughter's Jeans".
Clothes have always played an important part in Bridget's life - and this particular fashion choice puts her in a tradition of trousered women in fiction which goes back to the eary 20th century.
In Norman Collins' London Belongs to Me (1945, but set in 1939) the sad fate befalling a minor character gets what you can only think is this rather judgmental sartorial newspaper headline: "Trousered Blonde Dead By Stolen Car" She is also described as having "coloured toenails and extensive head injuries" – clearly asking for it.
On the other hand, in Agatha Christie's Body in the Library (1942, but with a pre-war setting), Miss Marple blames the low-rent victim for wearing a posh frock: "A girl of – of our class" (hesitation because she knows she is being snobbish) would "change into trousers and pullover, or into tweeds" for an outdoors outing. Or to be murdered in of course.
These two references come in the middle of an arc you can track, in which the wearing of trousers by women in fiction is a way of defining character, class and even morals.
We can start with EF Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, with their thrilling overview of social wars in a small English town: in 1922, in Miss Mapp, we are first introduced to Quaint Irene, who wears knickerbockers, and spits and smokes in the street. She is an artist and eccentric and plainly gay – it's nice that she is meant to be young and attractive rather than the traditional literary trouser-wearing lesbian of the next 50 years, who tends to be an older lady with weatherbeaten features (see for example The Hon Con in Joyce Porter's 1970s mysteries, in her tracksuit and slacks). Quaint Irene wears all kinds of trousers – breeches, jockey outfit, "shorts and scarlet pullover" – and is no more a figure of fun than anyone else in the series.
Moving on to Evelyn Waugh's 1930 Vile Bodies: "They stopped for dinner at another hotel, where everyone giggled at Miss Runcible's trousers." This is actually a third-time-lucky improvement for the aristocratic Agatha – at lunchtime they'd been asked to leave a hotel because of her trousers (and, to be fair, because a male friend was wearing makeup) and "at the next hotel they made Miss Runcible stay outside, and brought her cold lamb and pickles in the car".
Rose Mortmain, from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, is given a fancy trousseau when getting married in the 1930s. When circumstances change (she nearly married the wrong man, silly girl, but is now headed for a ranch in America) it turns to "fairy gold. She only needs slacks and shorts now, she says, which it didn't happen to contain."
The practicalities of war provide the great turning point: by 1940, Cynthia, the respectable young wife in London Belongs to Me, wears cherry-coloured slacks around the house, to the horror of her mother-in-law. Stella Gibbons' minor classic of the Home Front, Westwood(1946), shows us a female railway ticket-collector "in her unfortunate trousers". A random John Dickson Carr crime story of 1944, He Wouldn't Kill Patience, has a young woman visiting the zoo in a shirt and corduroy slacks, her outfit "vaguely suggested work without indicating what kind of work". (And as it happens, the hero "considered that it showed too much of her figure".)
By 1945, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love has this snobbish but lovely description of The Bolter, ageing but still game: "She had a short canary-coloured shingle (windswept) and wore trousers with the air of one still flouting the conventions, ignorant that every suburban shopgirl was doing the same."
The world is becoming more casual, and the US is leading the way. Noel Streatfeild's 1949 The Painted Garden has a teenage girl visiting California, and she in her nice-girl British skirt is (totally understandably) envious of her contemporaries' beachwear – "They usually arrived in shirts and sort of three-quarter length slacks … If only, oh, if only she had a pair of those three-quarter length slacks how gorgeously right she would feel."
Miss Hinchcliffe in Christie's A Murder is Announced in 1950 wears "corduroy slacks and battledress tunic" to feed the hens – but then she's got the Lesbian "weatherbeaten countenance" mentioned above, while her more feminine partner, Murgatroyd, wears a tweed skirt.
Barbara Pym has a very exact eye for any social signifiers. In Excellent Women (1952), the narrator meets her new neighbour, and the differences couldn't be more clear: "She was fair-haired and pretty, gaily dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright jersey, while I, mousy and rather plain anyway, drew attention to these qualities with my shapeless overall and old fawn skirt." We can definitely draw conclusions about the adventurous neighbour from this.
In the same year, Josephine Tey puts a young viscountess into "very elegant trousers and a disreputable old lumber jacket", but that's to go fishing (in The Singing Sands).
As the 1950s wear on, bohemian theatre people are taking to trousers: "neat crimson slacks" for the ASM in a rehearsing company in the routine detective story Exit Charlie by Alex Atkinson, and a "grey-haired woman in blue slacks" working in rep in St Kelvern's Launches Out by Carol Ann Pearce, a standard girls' school story about career choices.
By 1960, trousers are acceptable in many more places, and in Margery Sharp's marvellous Something Light, a dinner party involves "Freddy in black tie, Louisa, to keep her spirits up, in toreador pants", though it's clear this is a not-uncontroversial choice. But there's going to be much less pointed comment from now on – crime writer Emma Lathen shows two older, female archaeologists wearing appropriate clothes at a party, then changing into more dishevelled, "piratical" clothes for going on a dig – "her faded blue jeans were tucked into old lace-up hunting boots" – but Lathen is just pointing out that they wear the right clothes for the right event, and can (as she didn't put it) rock different looks. That's from When in Greece, 1969.
Nowadays a female character wearing trousers doesn't have any special significance, though one can bet that Bridget Jones's mumsy embrace of skinny jeans will provide Helen Fielding with a rich comic seam. In the recent (2010) thriller Rupture, Simon Lelic makes the intriguing point that modern working clothes for women resemble old-style men's uniforms: "[Detective Inspector Lucia May] considered her own outfit: dark trousers, white blouse. The only difference between Price's [police uniform] clothes and hers was that she had had to pay for hers herself."
It would be great to find more early references to women wearing jeans – anyone? Sarah Waters has a woman wearing "blue jeans jacket and dungarees" in her second world war book, The Night Watch – surely correct but not contemporary. John Updike, writing in the 1984 Witches of Eastwick about the 60s and 70s says "More and more Alexandra found men's clothes comfortable … corduroy and chino trousers that weren't so nipped at the waist as women's slacks were." An interesting idea, but not one that resonates with most women – it's not at all hard to find comfortable trousers for women, then or now.
Going back to the beginning, there must be early references to bloomers, bicycling, and feminists in trousers. The best I can do is Mary Norton's The Borrowers, published in 1952, set in the 19th century, and about wholly imaginary little people anyway. But it still has an irresistible trousers moment: Homily makes Arietty a small pair of Turkish bloomers from two glove fingers for "knocking about in the mornings".
So who can fill in the gaps? We're hoping for some trouser-tracking and denim-referencing …
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