“Pants are inherently a Beged Ish”
“My Rosh Yeshiva told me that years ago, the first women who wore pants were not allowed to because it’s a beged ish. Now, however, there are pants made specifically for women, and it is normal for women to wear them.”
WADR, they are both wrong. Trousers have been worn by both men and women for thousands of years. They went out of style for women in Christian Europe, but not in the Islamic Middle East, so the absolute ban on women wearing trousers is a clearly goyish influence from the Christians.
Trousers came back into style for American women on the frontier in the 19th century, wearing men’s pants for outdoor work and for riding horses. Levi’s finally produced a model of blue jeans for women in the 1930s and they became an immediate hit. Today the overwhelming majority of Jewish and non-Jewish women in free countries wear trousers at least part of the time.
Meanwhile, to this day, modest Muslim women wear trousers (often with a long tunic covering the top of their trousers).