About 2,700 people have contacted the fund with complaints about sexual harassment, and about 5 percent of those work in retail. Retail employees are particularly vulnerable because of their relatively low status within their companies, murky systems for reporting incidents, and the fact that economic insecurity may prevent these workers from taking action that might result in losing or leaving their jobs.

“The question is whether an employer can refuse to hire a qualified black woman with well-kept natural [dreadlocks], because of the stereotypical belief that [dreadlocks] ‘tend to get messy,’ when [dreadlocks] are physiologically, culturally, and historically associated with African Americans,” plaintiff Chastisty Jones said.

Experts link the high rate of sexual harassment in retail to the particular vulnerability of its workforce, its low wages, and a hazy, complicated, and sometimes ineffective complaint process following an incident. In retail, workers tend to be women and specifically women of color. Being a woman, or a woman of color makes workers more vulnerable to sexual harassment because sexual harassers tend to be “looking for someone who is not going to report or if they do report, are not going to be believed or taken seriously,” she says.

According to the press release the company provided to Racked, “SPoRT makeup began with a simple desire to honor the Rockford Peaches 75th Anniversary with a Signature lipstick, called ‘Peach Diva.’” However, “once … archival photos were discovered that emphasized the role that makeup played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, it was decided to add a broader range of makeup products to reflect the League’s insistence that players had to ‘look like women and play like men.’”

“When we embrace something as only ‘natural,’ it means that it can’t really be changed — that it’s baked into who we are. Anyone then who strays too far from expectations that surround this naturalness is odd, deviant, and often deserving of punishment or exclusion,” Sarah Fenstermaker, the recently retired director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender explains. To be a man and want to wear feminine flounces puts a crack in the theory that these classifications are inherent, which makes you question just how natural the power that comes with masculinity is. And in a male-dominated society, that question is a big deal. Which is why we weed out and ostracize anyone who deviates — femme gay men, butch lesbians, nonbinary individuals, trans people, and straight men who like skirts.

The sentiment of “there’s a hundred other girls that would do this job for free” permeates not only professional cheerleading but so many women-dominated industries that systematically undervalue and mistreat their workers. The film industry, for example, has only recently had to contend with its decades of sexism and sexual assault due to the outpouring of allegations against a growing number of harassers, as has the restaurant industry.

To demonstrate their bereavement, widows were to spend two and a half years proceeding through three stages of mourning — deep mourning, full or second mourning, and half mourning — each with its own fashion requirements and restrictions on behavior. Deep mourning lasted a year and a day and required a widow to wear simple black dresses and don a full-length black veil anytime she left the house. Called a “weeping veil,” this shroud was made of a crimped silk fabric called crape, and wearing it allowed one to “weep with propriety,” as the women’s magazine M’me Demorest’s Quarterly Mirror of Fashions put it in 1862. Unfortunately, due to the dyes and chemicals used to the process the fabric, these veils could also cause skin irritation, respiratory illness, blindness, and even death.

As a child, Keckley learned dressmaking from her mother, and she excelled in this work by her teens. Later, a marriage proposal from James Keckley prompted the dressmaker to use her craft, and loans from patrons, to raise enough money to buy freedom for herself and her son, as she did not want to wed while enslaved. In 1855, Keckley purchased her freedom from Garland for a hefty $1,200, equivalent to nearly $33,000 today.

In 1910, Hampton’s Magazine perfectly described the female takeover: "Buying and selling, serving and being served — women. On every floor, in every aisle, at every counter, women...At every cashier’s desk, and the wrappers’ desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which an occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place."

Most men’s gloves are made for their wider, larger hands, and so women end up “floating” in them, uncomfortable and, more importantly, at a higher risk of injury. Gloves being marketed as essentially unisex as not just another case of a retailer turning a gender-nonspecific good (like, say, a pen) into a “lady’s product” by making it pink and sparkly: When you are, as Le puts it, “throwing a bag of bones at a heavy bag repeatedly,” as combat sports drills often require, one-size-fits-most can be a pretty perilous solution.

Nitti’s appearance when she was first arrested matched the prosecution’s story. After her makeover, her appearance matched her own defense. It took a female lawyer, which was rare at the time, to recognize and address this issue, leading to female defendants having agency and learning to dress the parts they needed to play in court. It would, of course, be better to do without these stereotypes and role playing at all, which disproportionately hurt poor women or women who don’t fit certain beauty standards, like Nitti. But these women were dealing with the world as it is, rather than as it should be.