Dressing Down the Decades1969 - PresentThe Pantsuit

And then, life changed forever and much, much, much for the better. I moved to Fairbanks to teach in the local Montessori school, and stopped having to wear skirts. Alaska, because of the weather, was ahead of the Lower 48 in allowing women to wear pants to work. It was wonderful. I had skirts, I sometimes wore them, but rarely. Mostly it was pantsuits. The one pictured here was one of my favorites, gray that could be worn with any dark, intense color. Notice the three sets of chains that I bought to go with my gray mini and vest. I'm posing in the living room of the log house we lived in, which we called Antler Manor because there was a set of moose antlers above the front door, and it seemed nicer than calling it Horney Hall. Richard, Julie, and I shared the house with various roommates at various times, often another woman with a child.

Another good thing that happened with clothes, and happened very rapidly, was wash and wear. When we moved to Alaska we brought most of our clothes in suitcases, but the ironing came up by mover. The mover lost my belongings for six months, and when I finally got them, the only clothes my children owned that needed ironing were the ones in the shipment -- in six months, mothers had been freed of the iron unless they wanted to deal with it.


Pantsuits come in all sorts of styles and fabrics, good for summer as well as winter, or as in this case, for California as well as Alaska. By the time I had returned to California, in 1975, pants were being worn for work by many women there as well. Things had really changed in the five years we lived in Fairbanks. I was walking uphill on the UoP campus, the same UoP that had threatened to expel my aunt for wearing a pair of dress slacks to the grocery store just six years earlier, and there on the grass was laying a young woman with a short skirt and her feet pointing down hill and you could see she had on no underwear. Students and teachers were walking by and no one turned a hair.

1981-1993
Business Suits
For a while in California I owned my own training and consulting firm, and for that I had to wear skirted suits. I did it. It was a uniform, like the middy and pleated skirts I'd worn at boarding school. Of course, I used my own style on it as much as I could and had one turquoise suit and learned all sorts of things to make them more individual. But, when I was standing up in front of business people and expecting them to accept my authority, I had to know how to dress for that. Dark suits, high heels, dark glasses frames, all the tricks that make a woman who is just 5'2" tall seem imposing.

Now that I'm back in Alaska and I'm working in social service agencies, I'm back in my slacks. I'm back to free movement and easy care in my clothes. I can still play with color and enjoy clothes, but I no longer need to be constrained by them. I haven't worn a skirt that wasn't ankle length since a job interview in 1993; I have some long skirts, but no short ones. I haven't worn high heels since that day, either. Or pantyhose.