Clodagh Finn: More pockets in women’s clothes, please

'Miserable faux pockets that aren’t sewn shut are  another fashion abomination that has robbed us of the instant access to a well-made pocket.'

Oh, for a dress with pockets. Those hidden folds of wonder that allow us to keep what is important close — a personal charm, a well-sharpened pencil, a tampon, a penknife, a piece of sea glass, emergency biscuits or a crumpled receipt with a scribbled note-to-self.

Turn out a woman’s pockets and you will see what she deems necessary to get her through the day.

Here’s one magnificent example from Irish writer, editor and philanthropist Anna Maria Hall’s 1849 novel, fittingly called Grandmamma’s Pockets.

Grandmamma’s capacious pocket contained — take a breath — needles, keys, knives, spoons, forks, scissors, a thimble (solid and with deep indentations), a nutmeg grater, a snuffbox, spectacles, buttons, tweezers and a “most perfect, tiny, hard-headed brass hammer”.

That is not even a complete list but the point of Hall’s novel was to show what a good housewife needed to go about her business efficiently. The staggering array of sundry items could be carried with you, hands-free, thanks to the wonderful tie-on pockets that were a feature of women’s clothing in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. A pocket was a detachable piece of material that women of all social classes, from washer-woman to duchess, wore tied around her waist. She filled it with all kinds of everyday objects — gloves, coins, love letters and, in one case, two live ducks — which could be easily accessed through openings in skirts and petticoats.

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If you ever wondered how Lucy Locket, of the famous rhyme, managed to actually lose her pocket, it was because it became untied from her waist. In real life, that was a commonplace occurrence and you’ll find newspaper adverts offering rewards for the return of lost or stolen pockets.

Unfortunately, you’d have to return to the 19th century to find a pocket deep enough to meet the modern woman’s average needs. Ever since designers decided that pockets ruined the line of their figure-hugging creations, women have been left with mean-spirited flaps that wouldn’t even hold a credit card safely. And that’s assuming those miserable faux pockets aren’t sewn shut, another fashion abomination that has robbed us of the instant access to a well-made pocket.

Anyone who has fumbled about in a handbag will know what I mean. It’s not that I’m against the hold-all, but there is no denying that the arrival of the handbag has left us out of pocket in more ways than one.

It would be interesting to add up how much a woman spends on handbags in a lifetime, but that’s a calculation for another day. What interests me here is that the must-have accessory has allowed — even encouraged — the makers of women’s clothes to shun pockets.

If we had proper pockets, we could store our valuables safely within them and go about our daily business unencumbered, arms swinging and free.

To understand the politics of pockets — and, yes, pockets are political — you have to go back several hundred years when the medieval purse, worn on belts, was replaced by pockets.

Tie-on pockets were a feature of women’s clothing in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The first pockets were sewn into men’s trousers — but not women’s clothing. Instead, from the late 17th to 19th centuries, women wore tie-on pockets. And it wasn’t long before the pocket, like so many other items of female clothing, was embroidered with a range of meaning.

In Grandmamma’s case, quoted in The Pocket, an outstanding hidden history of women’s lives by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, this voluminous receptacle offers the key to being a good housewife.

But pockets were also seen as a symbol of self-sufficiency, even proto-independence; an inviolate private space that a woman could call her own. Although, few feminine spaces are ever left intact. The tie-on pocket, worn so close to a woman’s skin, also led to erotic, illicit, and often vulgar associations.

The Pocket is an outstanding hidden history of women’s lives by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux.

And yet when it went out of fashion to be replaced by the reticule or purse, women protested about the loss. Burman and Fennetaux recall how American women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton described the losing battle she had with her dressmaker in 1895 when she asked for pockets in her dress. Pocket-less clothes hampered women’s mobility and independence, she argued.

In 1901, she illustrated that point with this evocative description. She described a woman rushing to a boat with “her train in one hand, her umbrella and handkerchief in the other, and her purse held in her teeth!”

That unfortunate spectacle could have been avoided if dressmakers had used part of her dress train to make a deep pocket, she said. The new woman of the 1900s was fighting not only for votes — but for pockets.

They had some success with the former when, in 1918, women in the UK over 30 with property won the right to vote. There was less success in the campaign for pockets, though.

As artist Gwen Raverat so wonderfully put it in her memoir Period Piece in 1952: “After writing so bitterly about the clothes of my youth, I must now be just, and admit that they had one great advantage over the clothes we wear nowadays. We had pockets.

“What lovely hoards I kept in them: always pencils and India-rubbers and a small sketch-book and a very large pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar, bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful objects. Sometimes even a handkerchief. For a year or two I also carried about a small book of Rembrandt’s etchings, for purposes of worship.

“Why mayn’t we have Pockets? Who forbids it? We have got Woman’s Suffrage, but why must we still always be inferior to Men?”

It is profoundly depressing to see that, decades on, we are still campaigning for real pockets in women’s clothes.

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I remember punching the air at some point in 2018 when a mother pleaded with clothes manufacturers to put pockets in girls’ trousers. In a viral tweet, she wrote: “My 3yo is SO ANGRY when she doesn’t have pockets or the pockets are fake. She has THINGS TO HOLD, like rocks and Power Rangers. She’s resorted to putting stuff down her shirt. come on. pockets for girls please.”

There have been some advances. And thank heavens for author, pocket enthusiast and Tik Tok sensation Rosie Talbot who returned to the 18th century for inspiration and sewed “very big pockets” into her handmade bustle skirt.She wanted to fit in the essentials, she said: “Phone, keys, a paperback, my iPad, and maybe a bottle of wine.”

Progress, however, has been halting and slow. Isn’t it time to start a campaign for bigger, bolder pockets? Who’s in?