So I just finished reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg (here's a summary if you haven't read it). It's basically about an middle-aged lady making friends with an older woman, who tells her about this small town in Alabama in the 1920s/30s, and especially about two women, Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison.
Early on Idgie is portrayed as a tomboy, and at about ten years old decides to never wear dresses again. And she doesn't. For a funeral her mom has a suit made for her, despite the strange looks from the dressmaker. From what the book says, Idgie never wears a dress or a skirt again. She seems to be born in about 1907/08, so she comes of age during the 20s.
My question is, could a woman who refused to wear dresses/skirts live normally in the 20s/30s? And how would a woman like this have been treated? Were there any women like this? As a writer myself I would like to write a character like this, but I'm not sure she would be entirely realistic.
Whistle Stop is a tiny town, and I know the story is fiction. But I like to analyze historical accuracy of stories, and this bothers me. Wouldn't Idgie have been kicked out of school for refusing to wear a skirt or dress? She visits a bigger town (Valdosta, GA) at several times and sits in a store chatting with the owner. Wouldn't she have been afraid of not being allowed in places because she was wearing pants? Wouldn't this cause her a whole lot of problems?
Thanks!
"What would have happened to a woman who acted unconventionally?" is always a slightly impossible question to answer, because we tend to have very few examples to draw from and they often show a wide variety of possibilities - we often find both memoirs relating women being stopped from trying to be too different, as well as accounts of true iconoclasts who did anything they wanted while avoiding many consequences.
Here, what I can tell you is that wearing trousers in the 1920s would have been seen as very transgressive indeed. Despite the popular perception of women's fashions in that period as boyish, the slim figure was often seen as "girlish", and there was a heavy use of pastels, chiffons, lace, and embroidery in dress, particularly in the earlier part of the decade - even without a heavily emphasized hourglass figure, women were not seen as imitating masculinity, on the whole. Jodhpurs were acceptable for riding a horse or bicycle astride, but not really outside of that context - even sportswear for golf and tennis was still typically an outfit with a skirt. Very loose trousers made an appearance largely as beachwear, though by 1931 the silky "evening pajama" was fashionable among the rich and daring, mainly inside their own homes, with only the most daring wearing them to other people's dinner parties.
However, in 1933, the "mannish look" became fashionable. This could affect all forms of an outfit: while a dashing woman could carry it off in tailored, wide-legged trousers, she might wear a skirt with a blouse and tie, heeled oxford shoes, a pullover, a double-breasted coat with exaggerated shoulders, and/or a slouchy, fedora-esque hat. The style is often linked to a desire to look more professional in the office, or for ease and convenience, but I would associate it more with the novelty of the fashion in conjunction with the glamour of stars who dressed that way, like (most famously) Marlene Dietrich. This look would continue to be fashionable to some extent through the rest of the decade, and young collegiate women would begin to wear a much "sloppier" form of trousers and casual tops on campus, to the ire of school administrations and male students alike.
So, it's unlikely that a woman would have completely transitioned into trousers for everyday dress in the early 1920s. She would certainly have attracted odd looks and been considered deeply unconventional and unfeminine, possibly a lesbian (if the person regarding her was aware of lesbianism). However, the actual public reaction to her would vary depending on her social status and how otherwise accepted she was by her community. If she were rich and/or very well-liked, it might be dismissed as charming eccentricity or, by the 1930s, hyper-fashionability; if neither, she would be more likely to be asked to leave church, dances, shops, and town events.