More than gum and coins are stuffed in these ‘pockets’

•  ALEXANDRA JACOBS

NEW YORK: This review of Hannah Carlson’s cultural study of pockets was grievously delayed. Why? Your critic lost her keys … again. No, they weren’t AirTagged. Before the little jinglers were located, shoved in a side compartment of the carrier my family had used to adopt two distracting kittens, I was positive they’d been dropped in the parking lot of the animal shelter, two hours away upstate, and was anxiously strategising how to coax the overworked staff into conducting a search.

But a friend, whose wife is always losing things, had reassured me that the keys would be found closer to home. “They’re usually in a pocket,” he said with the natural calm of someone whose clothing comes generously outfitted with them. In other words, a man.

“Pocket sexism” is a central tenet of Carlson’s book, whose topic might sound so mundane as to be a parody, a la that musical number about stools in Christopher Guest’s 1996 masterpiece “Waiting for Guffman.” Like envelopes or test tubes, pockets are defined by empty space. Without contents they are nothing but potential: a merely ornamental pocket being commentary at best, deeply frustrating at worst. They are waiting for stuff.

Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, painstakingly traces how the acquisition of pockets was — and to some extent still is — a rite of passage in Western culture for boys but not girls. “She has THINGS TO HOLD, like rocks and Power Rangers,” she quotes one mother imploring clothing manufacturers in a viral tweet about the deficit in her toddler’s wardrobe. “She’s resorted to putting stuff down her shirt.”

For at least 100 years, American magazines, fiction and art depicted with affectionate wonderment the oddments young lads might Tom Sawyerishly shove into the sides of their pants, from pennywhistles and knives, to marbles and bottle caps, to a live rat or turtle. But not their own hands, authority figures scolded, as this would bring them all too close to the genitals — though such a gesture eventually came to signal “insouciance and outlaw cool.”

James Dean and his jeans!, I thought immediately. They’re not in these pages, far more highbrow and thoughtful than your standard-issue fashion monograph; nor are the members of the Lollipop Guild in “The Wizard of Oz,” thrusting thumbs down into their functional breeches after their feminine counterparts, the Lullaby League, twirl away in decorative tutus.

Walt Whitman is here, upending and offending the upright Victorians with his revolutionary frontispiece portrait for “Leaves of Grass,” hand defiantly in pocket. So is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, swimming with his clothes stuffed full of biscuits. Unlike female kangaroos, human women (and other historically second-class citizens) have always had a harder time securing storage close to their person. Emily Dickinson was one of the few who argued successfully with her dressmaker to get a compartment for pencil and paper. She “had a room of her own — and a reliable pocket,” Carlson writes.

Such modifications are rare in America, where the feminine silhouette has been so sacrosanct that even the coats of the Women’s Army Corps in World War II lacked adequate storage. “Did even a pack of cigarettes threaten to disfigure the breast, making it lumpy and misshapen, a sort of metaphor for servicemen’s worst fears — that after joining the army, women would no longer be recognizable as women ?” the author wonders.