Pockets may seem trivial and ordinary, but the emerging history of pockets reveals them to be far more complex. Recent scholarship has revealed the gendered significance and historical role of tie-on pockets that illuminates the embodied materiality of clothing and its connection to gender, power, and status. Despite being a somewhat common object in museum collections, curators have not documented tie-on pockets in systematic ways because women primarily wore them. 

Pockets sewn into clothing manifested as a male privilege in the 16th Century, a reflection of men’s perceived status, power, and functional needs. Not afforded the privilege of sewn-in pockets, women from all levels of society adopted tie-on pockets in the mid-17th Century until the end of the 19th Century. Primarily an object produced by women for women, the use of large tie-on pockets quickly became widespread allowing women to carry valuable, personal, and functional possessions with them. Tied under the outer dress or skirt but easily accessible through slits, tie-on pockets transformed women’s lives by affording them the security of a hidden space to carry precious, taboo, or gender-restricted objects with them at all times. As such, in addition to functionality, tie-on pockets served as a powerful tool of resistance to the gendered restrictions imposed on women across all classes. 

Contemporary clothing reveals these same gendered patterns, with women’s clothing typically lacking pockets or possessing smaller, less functional pockets compared to men’s. This means access to pockets remains a gender-based provision, much to many women’s irritation. While women designers in particular have been identified for including pockets thereby increasing the functionality of women’s clothing during the 20th and 21st Centuries, the issues surrounding women’s pockets persist. For many women, pockets matter! Pockets remain talked about and desired by women today, as evident in a quick search of social media. In contrast, their significance and impact appear under-appreciated by those that have them: Men. 

Close inspection of the history of pockets reveals the embodied materiality of clothing as a gendered form and the transformative potential of objects, such as pockets, to undermine these impositions. Because society’s focus typically favors the overt political and social power routinely associated with men, women’s histories remain obscure or hidden. But unpacking women’s hidden histories provides valuable insights into significant social and cultural elements, often changing how and what we understand, and the ways that these dynamics connect to contemporary gender issues. This work (re)presents an effort to forefront women’s engagement with pockets as an historical and ongoing feminist issue and point of concern.