Dear Susan,

Here is an interesting variation on petticoat discipline that I recall from high school back in the seventies.  Back then we had compulsory physical education, or P.E. as it was called.  It wasn't much fun.  As a consequence some of us would look for ways to get out of it and the easiest was to say you had forgotten your P.E. clothes.  The teacher was wise to this, and had a particularly dreadful way of reminding boys not to forget their kit in future.

We were a co-ed school and the girls were treated differently.  However if you were a boy the teacher's wife had made a pair of special bloomers for you.  They were fairly baggy with elastic at waist and thighs, and in very feminine flowery print material.  It would be into these and nothing else.  You would then be sent for a jog round the oval.  This of course was past where the girls where doing their sport.  That was definitely the worst part.  The other boys didn't tease a bloomered boy too much, but the girls were merciless.  It was generally the roughest of the boys that suffered this fate.  Real sissy boys either had beautifully turned out gym clothes, or a note from their mum.  I was one of the latter.

For girls who left their regulation clothes at home, they started off being made to do sport just in their undies, but this was soon stopped as you can imagine how inappropriate that was.From then on there were always spare female tunics for any girl who forgot her gear, not that many did.  Interestingly, many girls used to not wear the bottom part of their tunics as they were a bit like the afore mentioned bloomers.  It used to be fun to get a position near their end of the oval, so as to spy some panties as they went about their activities.  Rather naughty I know, but it's hard for boys to help that kind of thing.

Another thing I recall is that the female teachers used to put ribbons in the hair of naughty boys.  The other punishment of course was being made to sit next to a girl.
Yours faithfully,

Marcia

Marcia, from the petticoated.com typing pool, has sent in this wonderful memoir, and I can confirm that 'pretty pants punishment', as a nephew of mine said it was called at his school,  was used on boys who 'forgot' their P.E. clothes at quite a number of schools in the 70s. Sometimes the pants would be very pretty and feminine, with frothy ruffles of white lace sewn onto the bloomers, and they quickly ensured that the sports clothes were not left out of school bags in the future.

This was all well after my time. When I was at school , the girls had to wear light blue, very puffy bloomers, almost like rompers, and we had to make our own in sewing class. The punishment of boys by making them wear similar bloomers had not been thought of in those days, but it would have had a very salutory effect if the boys who didn't bother to bring their own P.E. gear had been made to not only wear pastel coloured, and possibly lace trimmed, bloomers, but had had to make their own in sewing class with the girls.

Incidentally, this practice was the last wide spread use of public petticoat discipline of which I am aware. It is a great pity that it fell into disuse. 'Ribboning' boys was common at schools in the 60s, when long hair became a distressing issue for many teachers. I have always thought that long hair on young boys looked charming, and it is worth mentioning that short hair for males was a fashion that only commenced with the industrial revolution, because otherwise long locks might become entangled with the machinery. I was always amazed at the ignorance of those teachers who did not realise that males have worn long hair for the greater part of history.

Still, tying a pert butterfly bow in a boy's hair is a very quick and effective variant of petticoat discipline, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too much.
Susan