Richard Thompson Ford is a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of the book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.

In terms of what women were once required to wear, he says:

Richard Thompson Ford: I think it’s fair to say that this was not only a regulation of women’s sexuality and moral virtue, but it also effectively was a way to exclude women from traditionally masculine jobs. Jobs that were the most well-paid and the most proximate to power.