Somehow men having fewer options than women/been told what to wear is men’s fault and patriarchy or whatever, idk.
The only reason women are allowed to wear pants now is because we demanded it.
It used to be illegal for women to wear pants. Take a wild guess as to who were the ones to make those laws.
There are examples of women in Europe and the US wearing pants long before it was socially acceptable, as writer Kathleen Cooper detailed in The Toast, even though in countries such as the US, England, and France they could actually be jailed for it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some would dress as men to do things such as join the military. The most famous example was probably 18th-century Englishwoman Hannah Snell, who served for years in the British navy and later become a minor celebrity after revealing that she was a woman. During the US Civil War, Mary Walker, an assistant surgeon with the Union Army, chose pants over skirts (and was once arrested for impersonating a man).
In polite society, though, the fight to make it permissible for women in the US and Europe to wear pants began in earnest in the 1850s, with the women’s rights movement. Feminists were seeking liberation, not just from patriarchal oppression, but from the restrictions of corsets. Though Edwardian and Victorian women had adopted them voluntarily, the undergarments literally made it difficult to move, sometimes even to breathe. Suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw dress reform as part of their battle for rights, and some adopted an alternative outfit in the form of baggy “Turkish” pantaloons worn with a knee-length skirt. In April 1851, Amelia Bloomer, the editor of the first women’s newspaper, The Lily, told her readers about it, and thereafter the pants picked up the nickname bloomers.