2 weeks Ago By Nell Frizzell
A strange thing happens when you type “suit maternity” into pretty much any online clothing site: a black hole appears. The same thing happens if you walk into a high-street shop as a gestating person looking for a suit. I’m not a physicist, but I suspect the phenomenon is less the product of gravitational laws and more to do with good old-fashioned misogyny.
I have now reached the stage of pregnancy where I no longer look like a woman who has eaten an extra large portion of fish and chips, but like someone who is growing a baby. Actually, a child. Second time around, my bump is significantly bigger than it was with my first – and made itself apparent far earlier.
As a result, I am struggling to shovel my magnificent body into any of my existing clothes. I am also, for the first time in 15 years, regularly attending a formal place of work (in this case, a secondary school) where people wear blazers, ties and shiny shoes. There is, as they say, a gap in my wardrobe.
As this is Secondhand September, and I am by nature a fashion scavenger rather than predator, I decided to look first at the secondhand options: Vinted, Oxfam, an amazing maternity clothing library in my neighbourhood. There were floaty summer dresses, stretchy jeans, Breton stripes everywhere and some particularly striking elasticated numbers that looked like the unlikely love children of gym equipment and stripping costumes. But an actual suit? Nowhere to be seen.
Early the next morning, while staring blinking at my screen before my son woke up, I lapsed into some low-level procrastination by googling “maternity suit formal”. This time, I was shown metallic ballgowns, navy lace bridesmaid dresses and – you guessed it – floaty, floral frocks. But suits? Coordinated jackets and trousers? Things with sharp tailoring and pointed collars? Not so much.
All of which points towards one rather damning conclusion; we simply do not expect pregnant women to be doing “professional” jobs. Now, I really consider any regular paid work a profession, but you know what I mean: law, education, politics, management. The old-fashioned, wood-panelled world of high-paid, high-status work that, for several centuries, was pretty exclusively enacted by men and is now, slowly but surely, being accessed by mainly middle-class, often white women.
The failure to dress pregnant women for these jobs strikes me as more than just an inconvenience or an anomaly; it speaks to a deep-seated misogynistic view of competence and fertility. Pregnant people are not expected, perhaps not even trusted, to hold that much responsibility (even though they are, quite literally, handling a matter of life and death in their womb). Our intellectual capacity is off-handedly dismissed, our commitment called into question, our qualifications eclipsed by the existence of a foetus.
Just look at the data coming from Pregnant Then Screwed to understand the continued crisis in maternal employment rights. Quite why Western society assumes that the moment a bump appears, lawyers, teachers and politicians all head off to a life of coffee mornings, nightclubs and picnics is bizarre – especially when you consider the eye-watering cost of childcare for anyone returning to full-time paid work . For my part, I’ll be heading off to school this morning, wearing my husband’s shirt, a pair of trousers held together with a safety pin and my suit jacket, entirely undone.
If Alfred Hitchcock is selling off his old wardrobe, please do let me know..
