pocket envy

I‘ve done it twice now, written and lost it.

I’ll try again later…

So now t’s October 9, and it has been another DAY. (I have a favourite line I wrote in one of my plays: A harassed mother complains, “Life is so daily.Why can’t I get used to it?” I guess one never does.

Here’s anther stab at the blog:

I came across a book called The Pocket (2019), by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux—a history of pockets, particularly women’s pockets, with the focus on tie-on pockets, tied around women’s waists over or under their clothes,with openings to enable access to the inner ones. Men fared better.

From the 17th century on, their garments were fitted with sewn-in pockets, up to 20 to 24 of them. Unfair. And the discrimination continued, up to my time, and past. Christian Dior ruled that women’s pockets can only be for decoration. As late as 2018, a survey revealed that the pockets in women’s jeans are almost 50% shallower than men’s.

Somewhere along there I paraphrased Freud’s catch phrase with mine, much more meaningful to me: women suffer Pocket Envy.

This is deeply political. The artist Gwen Raverat (1885-1957) a few years before her death mourned the loss of her childhood tie-ons: “Why mayn’t we have Pockets? We have got Women’sSuffrage, but why must we still always be inferior to Men?”

It won’t be forever.