WOMEN-----wearing pants

Is it halachically wrong to wear pants now in days, because pants are no longer considered "beged ish"? And is it better to wear pants, or a skirt that does not cover the knees?


Pants are still prohibited nowadays. Even if there is no prohibition of beged ish, it is still a violation of Tznius.

Also, there are poskim, such as Minchas Yitzchok, who rule that pants are still beged ish today, because once a garment is designed for one gender it can't change.

I am assuming that the reasoning behind such a psak is that since pants are not tzniusdik for a woman, they can never be considered a legitimate female garment.

But even though many poskim do not consider it beged ish today, the tznius issue still applies.

Blouses were always what women wore, from when men wore shirts. Pants for women only began long after it was an established male garment.

Besides that, it would seem to me based on the Poskim that the only time an established male garment would not be able to become a female one is if there was an objective reason why men and not women wore it.

In other words, the reason why women didn’t wear pants is because it was not Tzniusdik, therefore pants are intrinsically a garment appropriate for men and not women. Therefore, even if women end up making their own pants, it would still remain a male garment, that is, a garment appropriate for a male and not a female.

But in the case of a shirt, it is intrinsically as appropriate for a woman as a man, and therefore, if it would become the custom for women to wear their own version of it (a blouse) it would not be considered a male garment.