Image and tweet via James Perloff's twitter page
My elementary and secondary boarding school education in England required that we wear school uniforms. The girls' uniforms were skirts. ALL the time. We never complained. Much later in my last year in the secondary school (I left at 17, and a year before "graduation" to go to college in the US), we were allowed pants during a select period in the coldest days in the Winter Term - not the spring or fall.
The only other variation to the uniform was summer dresses during the hot summer days in the late Spring Term. Rather than the grey or navy blue of the school uniform, we were allowed to wear a light blue, and dresses of our choice (with approval by the housemistress of course). I had a dress from the Dutch department store C&A, which I wore for many years after.
The point of the uniforms wasn't really uniformity. It was more about concentrating on academics rather than fashion and self-pruning, which girls at that age (12 -18) are prone to do.
(For boys - a topic for a later post - it was about solidarity. School uniforms, with their schools' particular colors and insignia, promote loyalty and cohesiveness.)
But for girls, uniforms were also about modesty.
Skirts teach young (and teenage) girls not to engage in masculine activity, where they are very likely to behave in immodest behavior. Skirts and dresses teach girls to be girls, and later on to be women.
When girls want to be boys, boys will treat them (or will be coerced to treat them) like boys. And boys will stifle (or learn to stifle) their natural desire to help and assist girls, and later, women.
And boys will double guess what it means to behave like a boy, and later to behave like a man. Their importance social education has been curtailed, and worse, deemed BAD!
No opening doors, no "women and children first," no going to war for wives and family.
You're on your own ladies, with your freshly bought pant suits.