Newlywed Lois Rabinowitz, 28-year-old secretary, is seen after she got a lecture on how to dress and was ejected from traffic court in New York City for wearing tight slacks on August 9, 1960. She went to court to pay a $10 fine for her employer, who was charged with speeding on East River Drive. Judge Edward D. Caiazzo would not allow her to pay the fine, adding “you will have to come back August 11, and you will have to be properly dressed.”
Her husband Irving, delayed in parking his car, arrived later and paid the fine. Magistrate Caiazzo advised Irving to “start now and clamp down a little, or it’ll be too late.”
Reporters were called in and Rabinowitz was photographed wearing the offending outfit. Caiazzo stated that “I get excited about this because I hold womanhood on a high plane and it hurts my sensibilities to see women tearing themselves down from this high pedestal.”
Gail Collins, in her 2009 book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present said Caiazzo’s statement “was a convoluted expression of the classic view of sexual differences: women did not wear the pants in the family—or anywhere else, for that matter. In return, they were allowed to stand on a pedestal.”
Gail Collins, a New York Times Op-ed columnist and former editor of the op-ed page, begins her book with the story of Rabinowitz to show how attitudes and opportunities for women started changing in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. As Collins says, “The conviction that women’s place was in the home, that they were weaker than men and weren’t really up to life in the public world… were beliefs that had existed for thousands of years, and they were shattered in my lifetime. That thought still knocks me out.”
Women are still battling for equality, but a few decades ago women were chastised for appearing in court wearing trousers. Now the magistrate is likely to be a woman.
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