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Books for Senior Citizens

Remember Your First Gym Suit? Book Explores History of Women's Sportswear

The long, slow struggle to get women into pants

April 11, 2007 - “Every woman over 40 remembers her first gym suit,” says Patricia Campbell Warner, professor of theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose book published in late 2006, “When the Girls Came Out to Play,” traces the history of modern sportswear as a universal style that broke down traditional gender roles.

Those shapeless garments that left a lasting impression are one of many fashions that evolved in what Warner calls “the long, slow struggle to get women into pants.”

At a time when female athletes such as Maria Sharapova, Annika Sorenstam and Venus and Serena Williams are as widely recognized as some supermodels, it’s easy to forget how far women’s sports—and sportswear—have come in a relatively brief time.

Warner says the roots of that cultural shift date to the 19th century when women were limited to socially acceptable physical activities such as tennis and croquet.

But the founding of women’s colleges, says Warner, played a key role in women’s athletics and attire. “The links between sports, clothing, and women’s higher education are profound, entwined to the point of fusion,” she writes.

	Tennis 1888

As college women were introduced to physical education and competitive sports, they literally had nothing to wear, says Warner. Ladylike attire suitable for croquet simply didn’t allow for more strenuous activity. In the 1860s, Mount Holyoke College instructed students to provide “a dress suitable for gymnastic practice.”

Another women’s school, Wellesley College, offered a rowing program to its students and the outfits worn by the crew were adaptations of gymnastics dresses. Fashionable and nautical in style, says Warner, the crew outfits may have been the first team uniforms for collegiate women in the U.S.

But the most enduring symbol of women’s athletic wear—the gym suit—was born in 1892 at Smith College when students took up the new game of basketball. Very quickly, it became apparent that skirts were too bulky and restrictive for the sport.

“From then on, comfort and common sense played an increasing role, finally overwhelming the conservatism and societal limitations that had kept women covered, compressed and in skirts,” says Warner.

By the 1950s, the gym suit was a staple of high schools across the country. The memory of the shapeless, one-piece button-down garment with a belted waist lives on for many women, including a few who claim to have liked their gym suits, says Warner. “Most of us, though, remember its style, its smell, and the mortification we suffered if the boys saw us in it because it made even the best of us look so awful.”

With a few modifications, the gym suit lived on until the 1960s and ’70s, just as women’s collegiate sports were fading from the scene and men’s athletics grew in prominence. After the passage of Title IX in 1975, says Warner, women’s intercollegiate athletics made a comeback and each sport had its own uniform.

The mainstreaming of sportswear also had its roots in Massachusetts as women at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole abandoned the “skirt convention” in 1911 and opted for more practical bathing suits and gym suits to collect samples from the water. By adapting their attire to make their work easier, she says, the biologists were ahead of their time. With a couple of decades, trousers for women finally came into their own as country leisure wear. And by the 1930s, neither bare legs nor trousers for women were cause for comment in informal settings.

Warner credits the rising popularity of outdoors sports, especially among the media in the late 19th century and early 20th century, with changing the fashion taste of the public. At the same time, innovations in textile and clothing manufacturing brought mass-produced knitwear to the marketplace.

When Hollywood got into the act, new styles of bathing suits and casual clothing became more popular as the public began to copy their favorite stars as portrayed in movie magazines. Even pants for women got star treatment, first from Marlene Dietrich, who wore them to shock, and later from Katherine Hepburn, whose upper-class, sports-oriented upbringing helped make trousers more acceptable.

Before World War II even began, says Warner, the barriers between comfortable attire for “private wear” and more formal, public clothing fell and “American Style” was born. “Once it appeared, it never went away,” she says. “Now the whole world wears American sportswear and we owe it all to those women who came out to play so long ago.”

“Patricia Campbell Warner has delivered an important work, the product of twenty years of research,” writes Gerald R. Gems of North Central College, Naperville, Illinois. ”It is the first scholarly treatment to systematically analyze the evolution of women's sportswear in the United States, a subject little studied and relatively unknown in the realm of cultural changes affected by women.” His review of the book can be found by clicking here.

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