Tie-On Pockets
Starting during the Renaissance, European men’s clothing had numerous sewn-pockets in their coats, breeches, jackets, and waistcoats. Women’s clothing did not. The most likely explanation being what Paul Johnson offered in writing for The Spectator in 2011: “Men have pockets to keep things in, women for decoration.” According to Chelsea G. Summers in her 2016 Vox piece titled “The Politics of Pockets:” “Tease apart that quote and you get a fairly essentialist view of gender roles as they play out in clothing. Men’s dress is designed for utility; women’s dress is designed for beauty. It’s not a giant leap to see how pockets, or the lack thereof, reinforce sexist ideas of gender. Men are busy doing things; women are busy being looked at. Who needs pockets?”
Oh. Missed the memo. Apparently other women did too because starting in about 1650 to approximately the end of the 19th century, women simply created their own. Called “tie-on pockets,” these typically pear-shaped pockets, featured a vertical opening, and could be worn singly, in pairs, or sometimes even in threes. Tied around the waist, they were accessible through openings in the dress and petticoats. Often quite large – many were 15.5 inches long and 12 inches wide – they could contain a lot of possessions. And they often did.
Title: Pocket
Date: ca. 1784
Culture: American
Medium: cotton, wool
Credit Line: Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Bequest of Marie Bernice Bitzer, by exchange, 1996
Accession Number: 2009.300.2241
Items typically found in tie-on pockets included: the “housewife” (a small case that held sewing tools such as a pincushion and thimble), scissors, a pencil, penknife, cash, and keys.
But private things were held as well. Since there were few options for the safe storage of precious objects available to women, pockets were frequently used. Women of rank often carried startling quantities of ornate little valuables such as snuff boxes, personal seals, smelling bottles, toothpick cases, earrings, precious buttons, combs, bodkins, pocketbooks and pocket-sized almanacs, silk purses and even watches. They were also known to carry miniaturized botanical field guides and telescopes to refer to while on walks and rambles.
The covert, private nature of pockets meant that they were sometimes used to conceal other secrets including amorous writings or, in political times, even seditious ones. Notably for me, of course, they were particularly useful to carry out crimes, especially theft. According to records from criminal proceedings at the Old Bailey in London, in 1807, Hannah Stevens used her capacious pockets to stash three pairs of stockings and seventeen pairs of gloves, and in 1777, Jane Griffiths made off with two live ducks belonging to her neighbor.
Pockets afforded women an important piece of autonomy in times where women had very little. It gave them greater freedom, independence, and mobility. And even though small, it gave them a “room of one’s own.” — Virginia Woolf
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Produced as part of Bags: Inside Out (10/13/21-1/16/22)
With thanks to Barbara Burman, independent scholar, and Ariane Fennetaux, Assistant Professor of History, Université de Paris; authors of The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900, published by Yale University Press.
