Pockets (from Here For The History)

9:01Alice Loxton:Disastrous stuff.

9:01Ben Henderson:Exactly. Yeah. You wouldn't want your granny to see.

9:03Alice Loxton:OK. So in the 1770s, then women have these kind of duck sized pouches. So what are men wearing then? Do they have the same thing?

9:11Ben Henderson:OK, well, let's rewind a little bit here. So in the medieval period, both men and women had these long pouches. they would be tied around the waist, outside your clothing, maybe kind of swinging about by your knees. And as we move into the 1500s, the Tudor period, so it's the time of Henry VIII, things begin to change. For men and women, the pocket goes from outside the clothing to within the clothing. But the way that that happens is very different for men and for women. And we talked to a pocket historian, Hannah Carlson, who wrote this wonderfully expansive book, Pockets, an intimate history of how we keep things close.

9:54Ben Henderson:Rather wonderful title. And she looks at Henry VIII as a kind of snapshot where we see in the wardrobe accounts in the 1540s, we first see the term pocket, evidence of the sewn in pocket. So that's quite a key marker in time. So Henry VIII could be a kind of pioneer, I suppose, of the pocket.

10:18Alice Loxton:Really? Oh, I mean, who knew? I'm trying to think. So you've got, I'm picturing Henry, you know, his big ginger beard. He's put on a lot of weight probably by this time. He's got those massive breeches, you know, like the big ballooning shorts. Is that where his pocket's being kept?

10:32Ben Henderson:That's it. That's exactly it, Ben. so the Tudor breeches that you mentioned are incredibly baggy they're just these like enormous baggy shorts and what this means is that there's a huge amount of space within them for a pocket and for a sewn in pocket as well and they reckon that some of these were up to 20 inches in size so like you know an enormous space inside basically very practical so I've always thought

10:58Alice Loxton:those breeches look ridiculous but um but yeah there we go functional purpose functional um

11:03Ben Henderson:Um, unfortunately, we don't know which tailor actually first implemented that. But what a hero. Yeah, what a legacy. There we go. Yeah, what a hero from history. An unknown legend, I suppose.

11:16Alice Loxton:Yeah, I always find it interesting because they must have been, you know, the first person to do it. And that kind of that person has changed the history of men's clothes. And we're still, you know, I'm still in debt to him today.

11:25Ben Henderson:Well, I do think it's funny thinking about Henry VIII. You know, we often think about him as the man who oversaw the Reformation and the Six Wives and founding of the Royal Navy. But maybe Henry's real legacy was introducing the pocket.

11:37Alice Loxton:Yeah, fashionista. There we go.

11:39Ben Henderson:Henry the pocketful, he could be. Henry the organised.

11:41Alice Loxton:Too right.

11:42Ben Henderson:I mean, maybe that's why he got married so many times. Yeah. To carry all the stuff of his wife.

11:47Alice Loxton:Yeah, his wife just loved it. They're like, oh God, he's the only man who can carry our stuff.

11:51Ben Henderson:Carry my keys.

11:52Alice Loxton:Yeah.

11:54Ben Henderson:That's how you charm a Tudor lady. Well, actually, yeah. So the first mention of pocket that we have a record of is in the 1540s in Henry VIII's wardrobe accounts. And that's the first evidence of a sewn-in pocket.

12:07Alice Loxton:So we've got this sewn-in pockets emerging for men's clothing at the time, but are women getting the same treatment? Presumably not.

12:13Ben Henderson:Yes, well, this is a good question. So while men are wearing breeches, women are wearing dresses, and they've got these corseted dresses. Okay, so that means it's really, really tight at the bust and the waist and down to the hips. But at the hips, it kind of flows out into this enormous skirt. So if you can think about Judi Dench playing Elizabeth I in the film Shakespeare in Love, it's really big and heavy materials. They didn't have a sewn in pocket, which I think they could have done. Elizabeth I could have implemented that. That would have been a good legacy. Our story would be quite different if she had done that.

12:51Ben Henderson:But instead they have these pouches on the inside of the skirt, which is known as the tie-on pocket. And it is that style that stays in place until the late 1700s.

13:04Alice Loxton:Fascinating. And that's presumably the Kuiper pocket that Jane Griffith was wearing at the beginning of the story in the late 1700s, right?

13:11Ben Henderson:Exactly. But things do change and they change quickly. Chapter 2. Regency Revolution. So in the 1790s and then in the 1800s and the 1810s, we have the Regency period, which is the era of Bridgerton, of Pride and Prejudice, that sort of thing.

13:35Alice Loxton:Which one's your favourite?

13:36Ben Henderson:Oh, well, I mean, I am a Keira Knightley fan, but I do think the BBC 1995 is the absolute classic. And Elizabeth Bennet walking in the mud is, I think, how I see myself in history. But that's a very distinctive image.

13:54Alice Loxton:Alice, could you just describe these dresses to me really simply?

13:58Ben Henderson:So we mentioned that until this point, people would have these enormous, heavy, quite structured dresses. so kind of tight corseted a bit here and then you know by the bust and the waist but then

14:12Alice Loxton:enormous skirt it's like what suddenly poofs out yeah waistline i'm trying to describe it

14:18Ben Henderson:doesn't understand um and then something really radical happens in the late 18th century which is we have this thing called the empire silhouette we'll get to why it's called that later where it

14:29Alice Loxton:completely changes it's tight beneath the bust and then below that point it's it's not tight at all

14:36Ben Henderson:okay so the material just freely flows okay straight to the ground interesting and that's what elizabeth bennett wears in pride and prejudice if you can visualize that and they often have like little puffy sleeves and they're often made of white kind of cotton material it's true though

14:49Alice Loxton:because there is a massive change in all the dramas i'm thinking of now or poetry between between women of, you know, only decades earlier and that kind of end of the 1700s, early 1800s period.

15:00Ben Henderson:Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is late 18th century. And then she changes when she's in Pride and Prejudice.

15:05Alice Loxton:Yes, I was going to say, because when you said corset, I was thinking of, you know, they're always like tightening a corset in Pirates of the Caribbean. So that's what, that was my image of it. And then, yeah, it changes totally for Pride and Prejudice, much more free flowing.

15:17Ben Henderson:She has an outfit change. It's amazing what they can do in films these days. Yes, and there are some important reasons for this. And I think there are kind of three things that we should think about here. Why does the fashion suddenly change? That happens really, really quickly across about four years. One of the first points is a renewed interest in the ancient world. Okay, so ancient Greece, ancient Rome. Part of this is because there are lots of wealthy young men going on a kind of gap year. They call it the grand tour. They travel around Europe. They become really interested in the ancient ruins.

15:45Ben Henderson:Lots of them are being discovered at this point, places like Pompeii and Herculaneum. So we see people dressing in these kind of long flowing white dresses, which are kind of similar to Greek goddesses with the robes that they used to wear. Now, the second reason for this big change was a big event that changed a lot of things in the late 18th century. Ben, can you hazard a guess of what that might possibly have been?

16:07Alice Loxton:Well, you know, you can't really do one of these episodes without the French Revolution.

16:10Ben Henderson:Exactly. The French Revolution kicks off in 1789. Massive political, cultural shifts in France, but also influencing other countries too. and it's all powered by these ideas of liberal democracy and this really had an impact on clothing because there was a bit of a rejection of aristocratic excess and there was a bit of a push to dress more simply.

16:32Alice Loxton:Fascinating, yeah. So it's another interesting example of the historical events of the age being channelled through fashion. There we go, there we go.

16:39Ben Henderson:And here is another historical event. This is our third point. Because of connections around the world and the Industrial Revolution and huge leaps forward in technology. Another change that that all brings to fashion is a new material called muslin. And this is a lightweight cotton, incredibly beautiful, really delicate, really floaty. And this is often creating those dresses that you see in films like Pride and Prejudice. So the waistlines of women's dresses move from the natural waist up to under the bust. They call it the empire line. And this is because one of the proponents of this style was Empress Josephine, who was married to Napoleon, and he was leader of the first French empire.

17:23Ben Henderson:And so that gives us the name empire. And they often call it the empire silhouette. They call it the goddess dress, the column dress. And because of that, it really became very popular. But what is the relevance of this to our story? Well, this new style does come with a bit of a problem because it's such a kind of flowing fabric that it's actually quite revealing. quite revealing of any lumps and bumps. And I'm not just talking about, as they say, tums and bums. You know, the tie-on pocket is what I'm trying to get to here. You would be able to see that under that silhouette.

18:00Alice Loxton:And also because they don't have the massive skirts anymore. You can't hide it anywhere. So yeah, that's fascinating. Is this the end of women having those tie-on pouches that they had before? I mean, it strikes me as odd they couldn't just sew in a little subtle pocket. You know, if I buy my skinny jeans sometimes I can get a nice pocket in there and their figure hugging.

18:17Ben Henderson:Yeah, I know. It's a good question. You'd have thought they'd been able to do that. I mean, of course, this whole story and history in general is never that definitive. I mean, it's worth saying that there's a difference between the high fashion and the high styles of people like Josephine Bonaparte and ordinary people who had practical jobs that, you know, probably would have continued to use the tie on pocket. The other thing is that a lot of the dressmakers were women. So you'd have thought that they might have tried to put them in but the truth is that sewn in pockets just weren't the norm and they hadn't been for for many centuries okay fascinating but there are some quite funny examples of people trying to put a pocket in an empire line dress for example there's one that's kind of under your armpit which i don't know is very elegant imagine trying to pay for something you're like at the bar you've

19:05Alice Loxton:had a long day and you're like i'll just get my armpit up and uh get some change out here yeah i think it really compromises the look yeah but it's also worth saying that the tie-on pocket

19:15Ben Henderson:hasn't completely disappeared. So we spoke to the historian Ariane Fenito, who's one of the co-authors of the book, The Pocket. And she said that the tar and pocket had this stubborn resilience throughout history, despite what was fashionable. So lots of women did continue to use it. So we can sort of assume that upper class women would sometimes pick and choose when to wear the pockets based on the occasion, whether it was appropriate or not, how they were expected to dress but because these pockets are in the shadows they're often ridiculed for being old fashioned or the accessory of a doddery old woman as it was put.

19:52Alice Loxton:Interesting yeah because there's there's massive shifts in this period to do with men's clothing as well and this kind of regency period is exactly the time of Bo Brummel you know the original dandy and he's actually doing a similar thing in that men's clothing is becoming much more fitting to the natural male physique Again, it's inspired by Greek and Roman ideas of beauty, things like that. But men are getting these kind of slimmer fitting suits whilst retaining pockets. I mean, the suits are full of pockets. So how come women don't seem to have them put in? I mean, do the women want pockets?

20:23Alice Loxton:Do we know?

20:23Ben Henderson:Yeah, it's really interesting, that development. So women do develop the use of this little bag. They call it the reticule. And this is quite shocking at the time, actually, because the tie-on pocket was actually considered a kind of similar to underwear, if you like. And so lots of people viewed the reticule as almost displaying your underwear in your hands. So completely inappropriate. And they were often mocked for this. Lots of them were very small and very impractical. And so in England, they came to be known as ridicules.

20:57Alice Loxton:God, this is pretty harsh stuff. I mean, you can't win. I know. Pockets are taken away. and if you try and carry a little bag to put your stuff in, then you're taking the mickey out of.

21:07Ben Henderson:I know, it's tough. It's tough out there. And lots of people lament not having tie on pockets anymore. One writer even complained that these could never be a real replacement for the substantial and capacious pockets women had once worn. So the point is here, there's a real symbolic importance of pockets and a link to personal independence. So if you can carry your money, your keys, your tools on your own body and safely and securely, then you have this small but meaningful freedom. And that is a freedom that is lost to women in that period.

21:44Alice Loxton:Oh, looking forward to hearing more. Please let us know what you think about the Great Pocket Debate by commenting on our social media videos. And don't forget to share the pod with your friends and follow the show. Pop quiz. What's in your kids' lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

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23:54Ben Henderson:Chapter 3, Political Pockets. So far we've heard about the loss of the pocket, but Chapter 3 is about the moment that women begin to fight back and it's all wrapped up in politics and about women getting the vote. Fascinating. So we're in the 1800s now, Victorian era, the time of the Industrial Revolution, and fashions are changing throughout the century as they do. The skirts are getting wider, then they're getting narrower, and the systems of storage of pockets change with that. One of my favourite examples is in the late 1800s. You have the flattening of the skirt at the front. It's tight on the hips, but then at the back, they've got this enormous thing called the bustle.

24:39Ben Henderson:Do you know what a bustle is, Ben?

24:41Alice Loxton:No, don't. I think I can picture what you're getting at, but no, not really. If you could elaborate.

24:47Ben Henderson:Don't worry, I wouldn't have expected you necessarily to have known. It's this massive gathering of fabric at the back of the dress, which was so ridiculously enormous that, you know, you could have enormous pockets in the fold of the bustle. You could even fit a champagne bottle. That's how big it was.

25:06Alice Loxton:What do people actually do that?

25:07Ben Henderson:Yeah, yeah.

25:07Alice Loxton:That'd be quite good for sneaking them into, like, you know.

25:10Ben Henderson:Yeah, it's like sneaking drinks into a festival. Bring your bustle.

25:13Alice Loxton:More sophisticated way of doing it, yeah.

25:15Ben Henderson:There's all sorts of stories about people losing things in their bustle. They're being pickpocketed from the pockets in your bustle. So it gives you a sense of actually what a ridiculous kind of fashion moment that was. But the overriding thing throughout this period is that women could also carry little bags. They often would tie these bags around their waists. They might have a key on a chain that would go around their waist as well. And the problem for lots of women was that lots of their belongings were kept on the outside of their clothing. These were on display. they were vulnerable to being stolen.

25:48Alice Loxton:It seems totally impractical.

25:50Ben Henderson:There we go. And I mean, it's very hard to kind of trace this history because it's a real mix. People are doing all sorts of things. But there is an article from the Fashion Weekly magazine, Harper's Bazaar, from 1894. And there's this woman who wrote in to complain about the disparity with the men and boys in her household, which she found infuriating, which I think you can tell. She says that she was without pockets. She had no pockets. But at the same time, her husband had 14 pockets.

26:20Alice Loxton:14. And her son had seven, which does seem quite excessive. I'm trying to think how many I have on now.

26:26Ben Henderson:I feel like you'd lose where you put things.

26:29Alice Loxton:I think I've only got four, I think. But then if I put my jacket on, that grows to about 10. There we go. There we go.

26:34Ben Henderson:But the key point here that I find really interesting about this article is she described her son's pockets as his certificate of empire. and she writes, all through life he will carry the scepter of dominion by right of his pockets.

26:52Alice Loxton:Gosh, that's quite a powerful phrase. So just the idea there that his certificate of empire means that he has the world kind of at his fingertips. Is that what she's trying to say? Because he has these pockets which allow him to do things and give him a bit of freedom, I imagine.

27:06Ben Henderson:That's it. So he can do what he wants because, as she puts it, it's by right of his pockets. And so it's really a metaphor for the potential power that the boy holds, which this woman, because she doesn't have pockets, doesn't have access to, which I think is fair. It makes sense. I mean, if you can't carry your money or your keys safely, then you are quite limited in your behavior.

27:29Alice Loxton:Yeah, it is interesting. And clearly, you know, in this period, we can identify, it seems, that there is actual frustration boiling up. I mean, she sounds pretty upset. So you mentioned earlier, there's a fight back. So I'm intrigued to hear how that manifests.

27:43Ben Henderson:Yes. Well, around the time of this article, there are more and more women who are openly challenging the idea that fashion should come before function. And in 1881, there was a rather wonderful development with the Rational Dress Society established and it pushed back against any women's styles which limited movement. So things like corsets or really heavy skirts. And it basically argued that any clothing should be healthy and practical and not actively damaging to the body, which I think is fair enough. For example.

28:20Alice Loxton:It's funny how that's radical.

28:21Ben Henderson:Yeah, I know. I know. Radical ideas in the Victorian age. For example, corsets would really, really restrict breathing and so much show that women might pass out by wearing them.

28:31Alice Loxton:What, doesn't Elizabeth from Pirates of the Caribbean? She falls off the...

28:35Ben Henderson:Oh.

28:36Alice Loxton:Into the harbour.

28:37Ben Henderson:There we go. Yeah, knowledge. Yeah, that's... You didn't know what I was going with. That's Ben's corset knowledge. Yeah, there we go. Keira Knightley. Well, that's the point. It was a big problem, corsets. And throughout history, it's amazing. I mean, it's actually amazing that any woman ever put up with wearing them. But there we go. The Victorians wouldn't stand for it, especially not the Rational Dress Society. they also brought in these long skirts which had trousers underneath these were known as the divided skirt essentially what we would know as clots today a kind of very long skort if you like

29:12Alice Loxton:ben do you know what a skort is yeah it's like it's like leggings you wear for sport with a bit

29:18Ben Henderson:of a skirt attached yeah but like really not just like little shorts yeah it's shorts with a skirt and that's why it's called a skort. Have you seen what they've done there?

29:26Alice Loxton:Very impressive. I get it. It all makes sense now.

29:29Ben Henderson:Learning a lot. Now, of course, these divided skirts were mocked. One periodical said the skirt was a delusion. So, you know, not welcomed by all. But the point about rational dress was it wasn't just about comfort. It was about women being taken seriously and having the right to participate fully in society. And so this all connects us to the suffrage movement.

29:52Alice Loxton:OK, so you've got the suffragettes who are relevant to this story, aren't they? And they're campaigning for women's political rights, occasionally using militant tactics. But the suffragette campaign is really getting going in the early 1900s. They're fighting not only for the vote, but also, you know, which ties us to this story. They're fighting for a claim to public life or a wider involvement in public life for women.

30:16Ben Henderson:Absolutely. And a big part in this campaign was clothing itself. So they developed this outfit called the suffragette suit. And a key part of this, which is quite fun, is that it has loads of pockets. This was a big, big moment in fashion history. And actually a New York Times article from 1910, it was literally titled, Plenty of Pockets in a Suffragette Suit. So it was newsworthy that this had a lot of pockets. and what it was made up of was this short coat that had pockets on the side. They had the divided skirts which had two pockets in the front and two behind and all together there would have been about seven or eight pockets and the point was that all of them were in sight, they were easy to find so not like the under the armpit pockets that are really awkward.

31:10Alice Loxton:Hidden in the bustle.

31:10Ben Henderson:Yeah, none of the bustle pockets. These are really practical for daily use. And when you look at images of suffragettes being arrested by policemen, you see them in these suffragette suits. So it's quite a powerful part of their campaign.

31:30Alice Loxton:And those images presumably are very good at projecting this image of normalising, I guess, the idea of women having pockets.

31:37Ben Henderson:I mean, it's interesting thinking about people buying the newspapers and seeing these photos and they might have looked at them and say, gosh, look at those women wearing clothes with pockets and not hiding it. That's pretty radical.

31:51Alice Loxton:Yeah, I wonder if they found, would that have been seen as inspirational or really subversive? I don't know.

31:56Ben Henderson:Well, lots of, lots of, it did become quite popular, this style. So other people did start to wear it. Maybe they realize the benefits of pockets. but but the point of it i suppose is that you know this clothing is practical it's tailored equipped with pockets and it's the exact opposite to the idea that women should be decorative first and functional second and that's the same with the fashion you know it shouldn't be just decorative

32:21Alice Loxton:it should be functional well i love this way you can see you know as we did earlier with the french revolution and the obsession with you know the greco-roman world we see how that is channeled and expressed in fashion with that shift to the empire line and so on. And then here we can see, you know, the fights for democracy, the fights for women's rights are being channeled through fashion again. And I love how, you know, fashion is a great way of visualizing these big shifts in society. But then I guess that raises the question, you know, women do now have the vote, but they still don't really have pockets.

32:51Alice Loxton:So what happened then?

32:52Ben Henderson:Yeah, what went wrong? Yes. Well, I mean, tracing this throughout the 20th century is quite tricky and women's pockets do come and go. So, for example, when women were contributing to the war effort and the Second World War pockets were allowed, they were essential even, as women took on roles in the armed forces, for example, or in industry or on land.

33:13Alice Loxton:There's a very famous woman, I don't know if she was a real woman, but in the poster she's known as Rosie the Riveter, I think, and she's doing like a bicep curl. She's got a handkerchief for something around her head, spotted red one, And she's got a big blue kind of boiler suit, doesn't she? And I imagine that is, you know, full of pockets. It looks perfectly functional, basically. That's the point, isn't it?

33:32Ben Henderson:That's the point. And I suppose to wrap up this chapter, even then, even after the suffragette suits with their divided skirts and their plentiful pockets, and even after the boiler suits of wartime that you just mentioned with Rosie the Riveter, all of this was still a false dawn on pocket paradise.

33:55Ben Henderson:Chapter four, La Poche. Now this chapter is called La Poche because I'm going to take you back to France briefly. Ben, can you guess, maybe you already know, can you guess what La Poche might possibly mean?

34:11Alice Loxton:Well, I'm suspecting it means pocket in French.

34:15Ben Henderson:There we go. But what's interesting about the pockets in the post Second World War period is that there are still really strong ideas about whether women should or shouldn't have pockets. The battle for pockets is not over. Let's take two designers from the luxury fashion world from the middle of the 20th century as a bit of an example. First up, the French fashion designer Coco Chanel.

34:37Alice Loxton:Of course.

34:38Ben Henderson:Have you heard of Chanel? I have.

34:40Alice Loxton:She's very important in the history of fake tan, but that's for a future episode.

34:44Ben Henderson:Whatever your reference is, that's cool. And she can be seen in a number of iconic photos standing with her hands in her pockets. She's very relaxed. it's a kind of powerful stance what would have been seen as quite manly for that day

34:57Alice Loxton:Okay, and what because of the use of hands in pockets it's seen as manly, oh interesting

35:02Ben Henderson:Yeah, she's got these real usable pockets, I mean that's something that traditionally is only for men's clothing and her big thing is that elegance should not come at the cost of comfort and her strapline was luxury must be comfortable otherwise it is not luxury.

35:18Alice Loxton:Oh, there we go rallying the troops.

35:20Ben Henderson:But then on the other side of the room we have another French designer called Christian Dior yeah and in 1954 he said quite plainly men have pockets to carry things and women's pockets are for decoration okay

35:38Alice Loxton:interesting so he's basically saying in well according to him they don't need them is that

35:43Ben Henderson:what he's trying to claim yeah maybe they don't want them and maybe they also don't need them it's just decoration. Whatever the reason, for the last 70 years or so, Christian Dior's approach has generally prevailed, that it's not essential for women to have pockets. And it seems like there are two main reasons for not putting pockets in women's clothing. The first is one that we can see throughout history. So lots of women's styles over the years are quite figure hugging, quite, you know, revealing of the body. And that just simply can't accommodate a bulky pocket. It ruins the silhouette so tight clothing is the big barrier pockets the other reason especially in more recent years is fast fashion and fashion companies so clothes producers know they can get away without having pockets in women's clothes and so it's cheaper to make garments without those pockets and sometimes they'll even put fake pockets in okay so there's the point here that

36:36Alice Loxton:you know obviously for men and women's clothes fast fashion will try and cut costs wherever ever possible but because they know they can get away with it with women's clothes they do you know

36:45Ben Henderson:you give them an inch and they'll take a yard kind of thing yeah i mean if a man's suit didn't have pockets in i think people would find that really really strange yeah although you do get if you're

36:55Alice Loxton:getting really cheap suit jackets sometimes they often have the side pocket sewn up but that's like

37:00Ben Henderson:the only example i can really think of so clothes producers know they can get away with not putting pockets in women's clothes. And so they don't because it's cheaper. It uses less material. It's generally more profitable for the fashion industry at all levels for women not to have pockets. And I think, I mean, this is kind of debated by lots of people, but I do think handbags are a big product of no pockets. You know, the reason that women have handbags, even sometimes the tiniest little handbag, and men don't, is because they don't have those spaces to put their belongings. And it's obviously in the interest of the handbag industry, which is quite a big industry for women not to have pockets.

37:42Ben Henderson:And actually, if you think about the Georgian reticules, these tiny little bags that are really ornate, really decorative, that seems very similar to what handbags are today.

37:52Alice Loxton:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's made me think differently about handbags and how it all ties together.

37:57Ben Henderson:You either get a boyfriend to carry your stuff or a handbag. Okay, so now we're at the end of our story. And often when you're going through these developments in history, you want to reach the modern day and say, oh, look, it's been resolved. And we're not with this some kind of resolution. But actually, it's a bit of an anti-climax, because things haven't really changed. I mean, most women's clothes still don't have pockets. and I suppose this is a good reminder that we often see history as this separate point to the modern world and we're this kind of full stop moment.

38:33Alice Loxton:Yeah, exactly. As if it's like separate to our lives, not relevant to us.

38:36Ben Henderson:Yeah, but we're just one stepping stone. We're just one step living through history, which is changing all the time. So who knows what will happen next with the pocket story. Absolutely. And actually, you know, just last year there was this eight-year-old school girl and she was shopping for her school uniform with her mother and she found that the boys' trousers had pockets and the girls' trousers did not have pockets. Really? For a school uniform? I know.

39:02Alice Loxton:That's totally bananas. Like why? Surely a schoolgirl will need pockets.

39:06Ben Henderson:Yeah, I know. It's quite amazing really. And she bought the boys' trousers but she was so furious about this that she kind of started this petition with her peers And the tagline was, girls need to carry things too. And I find that interesting because that sounds exactly the same as what the suffragettes would have been saying 100 years before. So, you know, she is the kind of suffragette equivalent of the modern world, which goes back to the point that, you know, we are still living through history.

39:34Alice Loxton:Yeah, and I guess it shows that, you know, perceptions of men and women having different roles in society are very hard to shift or, you know, they do stick over long periods of time.

39:45Ben Henderson:Absolutely. And women and men's experiences throughout history in so many different ways, even in the smallest details, are so different. And even those tiny details have a massive impact. And in the case of this story with pockets for women, it's very limiting for women.

40:03Alice Loxton:Thank you so much. In all seriousness, that was brilliant. It was really eye opening. I particularly enjoy just the way that, again, we said earlier, but the way these big historical shifts in philosophy, ideas, are all transmitted through fashion. It's a lovely window into popular culture at whatever time period. So yeah, thank you so much. And I hope you guys listening feel exactly the same. Please let us know your thoughts on the Great Pocket Debate by commenting on our YouTube channel. We'd love to hear your opinions and questions. And don't forget to subscribe to Hear for the History on BBC Sounds or check out our YouTube channel.

40:35Alice Loxton:until next time goodbye goodbye

40:45Alice Loxton:hi there it's ben here again i just wanted to say to all of you in our time listeners if you enjoyed that episode head over to here for the history podcast where you'll find more episodes on food language and many more me and alice will see you there

41:04Alice Loxton:Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

41:38Alice Loxton:So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts.

41:43Ben Henderson:Thank you. Bye.