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wear the pants
Idioms and Phrases
Exercise controlling authority in a household, as in Grandma wears the pants at our house . This idiom, generally applied to women and dating from the mid-1500s, a time when they wore only skirts, equates pants with an authoritative and properly masculine role. Originally put as wear the breeches , it remains in use despite current fashions.Example Sentences
Players can wear the pants down or wear them high to show off the special socks.
He improvised a replacement line that Hughes used in the film: “When you meet your Mr. Right, make sure he knows you wear the pants in the family.”
I tried something different, and the one time I actually told someone that I prefer traditional male-female roles—that I don’t like to “wear the pants” in a relationship—he misconstrued that as I want to be controlled.
And there are ways of communicating your preference for traditional gender roles that might be more effective than “I don’t like to wear the pants.”
I feel at times that if we want equal rights, and we want to be heard and respected, we also have to wear the pants at the same time.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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