Heather's point about drawers/braies/breeches = masculinity is paramount. Beyond that, though, the lack of underwear on women is not nearly so "impractical" as some people seem to assume.
To begin with, it's worth noting that underwear worn with a long skirt can make toileting really awkward, especially if you're squatting over a chamberpot/ditch/whatever. If you have to pull everything up so that you can then pull something down, and then you have to straddle and squat over a target ... quite a balancing act if you're wearing drawers, and even with slit drawers (that don't need pulling down), you still have to reach under the skirts to get the fabric out of the line of fire. Without any drawers, it's an easy matter to step over the pot and squat, using your knees to help spread the skirts away from the body. Of course it would be more complicated during menstruation, but it is for us too. (Spread-and-squat is still typical in certain cultures in which women wear long robes. I remember a picturesque description by a Western female traveler on a bus ride through the middle east: When it came time for a pit stop, the bus stopped out in the middle of the desert. The women went on one side of the bus and sank gracefully down to the sand, their skirts spread in circles around them. The men went to the other side of the bus and peed against the bus [what is it about having to have a standing target, anyway?]. The pants-wearing female Westerner had a much harder time of it -- I believe she learned to carry an umbrella to use as a portable wall.) For men, toileting is done differently from women at least half the time, which changes the mechanical considerations. It's interesting to note that in tunic-wearing periods, men often had shorter garments than women did, which would mean less bulk to lift out of the way. Of course there were many influences on style besides anatomical ones, but this issue may have been one factor in the gender differences in hem length. And as someone else has noted, braies/breeches/drawers were not universal on men even in these periods. It's quite possible, too, that men found it equally useful to go without underwear under long, full robes like houppelandes. Several people have brought up the question of cold climate with the idea that drawers would be logical/necessary for warmth. Just as one data point, I routinely go without underwear when in costume, and I have never noticed any chill up the skirts; the only parts I've noticed to suffer in cold weather are the feet. Given the proper number of layers in the skirts and the use of insulating natural fibers, the area under the skirts seems to maintain its own warm environment. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
