A quick Google search suggests it might have to do with upper class women traditionally having servants to dress them whereas men generally dressed themselves. However, I couldn't find any articles that cited sources so I was wondering if this answer actually holds up.
It doesn't! I'm happy to quote my previous answer on the subject for you:
The unfortunate answer is that we don’t really know. It’s true that there’s a very common bit of folk wisdom on the subject, posted here in several now-removed comments, stating that men historically dressed themselves and women were historically dressed by servants, so buttons would be arranged to be most convenient for the person doing the dressing, assuming that they were right-handed – but this is largely based on assumption rather than any kind of established fact.
Let’s look at the recent history of buttons in Western dress, Early Modern forward. Men didn’t start to wear upper garments that typically fastened down the front with buttons until the development of the doublet in the mid-sixteenth century. Here’s an early example:
"Portrait of a Gentleman" by Jan Gossaert, ca. 1530; Clark Art Institute 1968.298
As you can see there, the buttons are placed on the proper (wearer’s) right of the opening. This is the case on the vast majority of extant pieces and drawn/painted/printed images of men all the way through to the present. Pretty simple.
It’s not so simple for women’s clothing. There is evidence of the doublet fashion influencing women’s dress in the late sixteenth century to the extent of using buttons to fasten women’s gowns down the front, on occasion. Here’s an example of that:
“Portrait of a Noblewoman” by Lavinia Fontana, ca. 1580; National Museum of Women in the Arts
Note that her bodice fastens with buttons placed on the proper right side as well. This is the case with all the other images showing women in buttoning gowns in this period that I’m aware of: they button exactly as men’s doublets do.
Over the course of the early seventeenth century, functional front buttons were abandoned: women would more typically pin or lace jackets closed in front, and lace their gown bodices behind. The buttons made a comeback, however, near the very end of the century, on riding habits – women’s riding habits were made essentially like men’s coats, but longer and cut to fit smoothly over stays. Here’s a lovely example in red and gold:
"Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici in Hunting Dress" by Jan Frans van Douven, ca. 1695; Pitti Palace
And as you can see, the buttons are on the proper right. The same is true for other images of late seventeenth and eighteenth century women’s riding habits.
"Lady Worsley” by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776; Harewood House (Heard of the movie The Scandalous Lady W with Natalie Dormer? That’s her.)
The next garment to start using buttons was the compère, a stomacher made in two pieces with either side sewn to the gown’s bodice, buttoning in the center, which was fashionable in the 1760s and early 1770s. These most frequently seem to have the buttons on the proper right (though not universally):
"Miss Ramsay in a Red Dress" by Allan Ramsay, ca. 1763; Tate Collection T01893
“Martha Vinson” by Jeremiah Theus, ca. 1766; Gibbes Museum of Art 1934.009.0002
Française, ca. 1775; Les Arts Decoratifs 2009.2.1-2
Influences from men’s dress filtered into women’s in the 1780s, causing the development of a form of gown called a redingote, typified by collar/lapels, long sleeves (usually cuffed), and buttons, either decorative or functional. Because this was a high-fashion style, relatively few were made (compared to your average plain silk gown) and so very few still exist, and portraiture in this period could be somewhat impressionistic – so it’s hard to say what the majority of redingotes probably were like, and images that are clear and have a close view can show it going either way:
Buttons held on in outerwear when women’s gown closures returned to the back soon after 1800, being used sometimes on spencers (short jackets), pelisses (long jackets), and other items. As with redingotes, buttons could be placed on either side of the opening, but by the 1830s there seems to have been a general preference for buttoning right-over-left rather than the reverse.
Spencer, ca. 1815; Metropolitan Museum of Art 1975.34.9
Spencer and dress, ca. 1822; Metropolitan Museum of Art 2010.149a-b
It’s not until the later 1850s that women’s day dresses regularly fastened in front again, and began to be fastened with buttons almost all of the time. By this point, women’s bodices buttoning right-over-left, with the buttons on the proper left side, was overwhelmingly the norm – as it still is today.
Day dress, ca. 1858; Victoria & Albert Museum T.90-1964
I hope it’s clear why this problematizes the popular story that it has to do with women being dressed by servants on the basis of logistics. It’s most likely that the women who were buttoned into their clothing by servants were the earlier ones in the narrative above – the ones in doublet-like gowns in the late sixteenth century, or in their very grand riding habits in the late seventeenth century, all of which tended a) to be worn by the most elite women, and b) to use very many small buttons – whose clothing buttoned in the same fashion as men’s. What we see later, when the “women’s style” was developing and then entrenched, is the use of more sizable buttons and a shift down the social scale. Remember, only women who were quite affluent would have had the possibility of having a personal servant/lady’s maid at all: most would have relied on a sister, mother, daughter, husband, or maid-of-all-work just to act as a second pair of hands and take care of things the clothing-wearer couldn’t. Men of the same class as those very affluent ladies would have had their own valets/personal servants who would or could have helped them dress, by the way; I think the idea that men dressed themselves and women didn’t, even to the extent of not taking care of buttons they could easily reach, stems from a somewhat antiquated view of women as victims of fashion rather than active participants in it. At any rate, in any family with a woman being taken charge of in her dressing by a lady’s maid, there would also be a man who was dressed by his valet.
So, to go back to that basic answer – we don’t know. It may have something to do with the increasing view of women and men as highly different creatures who needed to be as differentiated in as many ways as possible, even down to a subtle change in buttoning direction, but there's no primary or secondary source that really discusses this change, as far as I know.
