Re pants: Not necessarily. He would have seen women in work-appropriate uniforms (WACs and WRENs and Rosie the Riveter.) There`s a great deal of discussion of clothing in the comments to my follow-up post to this one, so you may want to look there.
Re Highsmith - no, that was my point. The 1950s were quite different from the 1940s in New York and in the US military, a much more repressive time. Captain American got frozen at a time of unusual freedom for lesbians and gay men in the English-speaking world. If you try to figure out what the 1940s were like by working backward from the 1950s (or, worse, early 1960s) you are going to make some howling errors.
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Date: 2012-06-17 04:09 am (UTC)Re Highsmith - no, that was my point. The 1950s were quite different from the 1940s in New York and in the US military, a much more repressive time. Captain American got frozen at a time of unusual freedom for lesbians and gay men in the English-speaking world. If you try to figure out what the 1940s were like by working backward from the 1950s (or, worse, early 1960s) you are going to make some howling errors.