Carry for Women

Why this guide exists

Most material on this subject is thin, condescending, or written for someone else and recolored.

Here is what usually happens when a company writes about women and concealed carry.

They take an article written for men, cut it in half, add a paragraph about handbags, and put a lighter color on the cover. Sometimes they add a line about asking your husband what he thinks. Occasionally they suggest a smaller gun on the theory that you would prefer something less intimidating, which is a polite way of saying they assume you can't handle the real one.

You have almost certainly read that article. Possibly several times.

We're going to do something different, and it isn't complicated. We're going to treat carry as an engineering problem with real constraints — and treat you as the engineer.

The one idea this whole guide rests on

Carrying a firearm is a system, not a purchase. The gun, the holster, the belt or the thing standing in for a belt, the clothing, the position, and the practice all depend on each other. Change one and you change all of them.

That matters more for women than for men, and for a boring structural reason: men's clothing was standardized around a rigid waistband and functional pockets. Women's clothing wasn't. So the entire mainstream carry industry quietly assumes a piece of infrastructure that a huge share of its readers don't have on any given day.

That's not a problem with you. It's a design constraint. And design constraints have solutions.

What "failure" actually looks like

Ask a room of experienced carriers what goes wrong and you'll hear about draw strokes and calibers. Ask them what actually went wrong in their own first year and you'll hear something much simpler:

• It was uncomfortable, so it came off at lunch.
• It didn't work with what she was wearing, so it stayed home.
• She couldn't reach it in the driver's seat, and realized that was where she spent most of her day.
• She was never sure whether it was showing, so she stopped enjoying leaving the house.

Notice that not one of those is a marksmanship problem. The most common failure in concealed carry isn't a bad draw — it's not having the gun at all, because the rig didn't fit the day.

So that's the standard this guide is written to. Not "what's tactically optimal." What will you still be wearing in six months?

We sell holsters. You should read everything here knowing that. What we've tried to do is make this guide worth your time even if you never buy anything from us — which is also why you'll find our own products' limitations written out in plain language, in the same size type as everything else.