Women's Watches: From Hidden To Haute
The watch widely considered the first wristwatch ever made wasn’t a man’s tool adapted for a smaller wrist — it was commissioned in 1810 specifically for a woman: Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples and Napoleon’s sister, ordered an oblong repeating watch to be worn on a bracelet from Abraham-Louis Breguet. The record survives; the original piece was lost long ago, and Breguet later built a museum reconstruction, the “Reine de Naples,” as its modern homage line.
The wristwatch starts as a woman’s watch
For most of the 19th century, wristwatches were considered a women’s accessory — bracelet watches, ornamental as much as functional — while men carried pocket watches almost exclusively. That only flipped around World War I, when soldiers needed to check the time hands-free and “wristlets” strapped onto pocket-watch movements became standard-issue. The wristwatch’s masculine reputation, which shaped a century of marketing afterward, is a relatively recent invention layered on top of a form the industry originally built for women.
Cartier and the shift toward serious design
Louis Cartier designed the Santos in 1904 for aviator friend Alberto Santos-Dumont — a men’s piece, but Cartier’s other early 20th-century watches, the Baignoire (1912) and later the Tank (1917, reportedly inspired by the silhouette of a Renault tank), were aimed squarely at women and treated as serious jewelry-adjacent design rather than mere ornament. The Tank Française and Baignoire lines are still core Cartier references today, worn by men and women both, which says something about how thin that original gendered line really was.
Complicated movements, not simplified ones
Patek Philippe’s ref. 4947, launched in 2011, was built as a full perpetual calendar for a women’s case — not a men’s complication shrunk down or simplified, a genuine grand complication on a smaller scale. It mattered because most “women’s complicated watches” before it were rare exceptions rather than a deliberate category; Patek treated the movement engineering with the same seriousness as its men’s Grand Complications line.
Women building movements today
Rebecca Struthers is one of the few watchmakers in the world — of any gender — who builds watches entirely by hand from raw materials, and holds a PhD in horological science; she and her husband founded Struthers Watchmakers in Birmingham in 2012. Carole Forestier-Kasapi spent years as Cartier’s director of movement development, credited with several of the brand’s in-house calibers during its push into serious manufacture status in the 2000s and 2010s. Catherine Eberlé-Wang co-owns Louis Erard, a modest Swiss brand (founded 1929) she’s used to punch well above its price point through collaborations with independent designers like Alain Silberstein and Vianney Halter.
The numbers still lag
A 2019 report from the Fédération de l’Industrie Horlogère Suisse put women at roughly 30% of the Swiss watch industry’s total workforce — and that figure skews heavily toward administrative and retail roles rather than the watchmaker’s bench, where the share is meaningfully lower. Structural change is slow: watchmaking apprenticeships and technical schools in Switzerland have historically skewed male, and the pipeline problem shows up decades later in who ends up running a manufacture’s movement department.
Watches designed for, not at, women
Fears Watch Company’s Brunswick, sized down without shrinking its proportions into something delicate, is part of a broader shift toward watches designed around actual wrists and actual mechanical interest rather than assumptions about what women want from a watch. It’s a return, in a sense, to where the category started in 1810 — not a novelty being retrofitted onto men’s watchmaking, but a serious watch built with a woman in mind from the first sketch.
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