From now on women in Paris will no longer flout the law if they wear a pair of trousers. Photo:Leather fashion fashionista |
Women in
Paris can finally wear trousers without fear of criminal prosecution after the
government said a more than 200-year-old ban no longer had any legal effect.
Najat
Vallaud-Belkacem, France's minister of women's rights, said in a statement that
the ban, imposed on November 17, 1800, was incompatible with modern French
values and laws.
The
municipal order required Parisian women to seek permission from local police if
they wanted to "dress like a man" by wearing trousers.
It was
modified in 1892 and 1909 to allow women to wear trousers if they were
"holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse" but had
officially remained on the books.
Answering a
question in the Official Journal of the French Senate,Vallaud-Belkacem said
that while it had not been formally struck down, the order was in effect
abrogated.
"This
order was aimed first of all at limiting the access of women to certain offices
or occupations by preventing them from dressing in the manner of men," she
said.
"This
order is incompatible with the principles of equality between women and men....
From that incompatibility stems the implicit abrogation of the order," she
said.
Parisian
women had demanded the right to wear trousers during the French Revolution,
when working-class revolutionaries were known as "sans-culottes" for
wearing trousers instead of the silk-knee breeches (culottes) favoured by the
bourgeoisie.
Women's
dress continues to stir political passions in France, with Cecile Duflot, the
37-year-old Green housing minister, criticised last May for wearing jeans to
the first cabinet meeting of Socialist President Francois Hollande's new
government.
She was
later subjected to jeers and wolf-whistles while wearing a floral summer dress
in the National Assembly.
A number of
women also broke parliamentary protocol by wearing jeans during an extended
debate at the weekend over France's planned legalisation of gay marriage.
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