Oh, the agony of being taken bra shopping with my Mother & GMA! Especially as a self-conscious gawky teen! This grim ritual doesn't happen to today's teens, but I remember feeling that this was some hallowed woman's ceremony, marking "coming of age." It was particularly dreadful to a young woman who was in no hurry to grow up, but here we were in the fitting rooms of a 1950's city department store.
Here my modesty was sacrificed under the eyes of -- not only my progenitors--but the cold hands of a weary, silver-haired sales woman. There were humiliations inside this Syracuse department store that Ralphie of the Christmas Story (c) would never experience. Afterward, I didn't feel a proud part of the woman's clan, only bummed that I was. This was not assisted by the boys in school, who would walk behind girls to run their fingers hard down their backs to discover if they were "wearing." If we were, hooting with laughter, they'd shout the news into the hallways. HA-HA-HA!
Fortunately, I was skinny, so in winter, in baggy sweaters, I could still go without. Mother Nature's twin gifts had no problem standing up to freedom and nothing was obvious, whether the observer was close or otherwise.
Those were the days!
The initial change came with my first baby and a crazy determination to breastfeed. "Crazy" because this was definitely not done in the early 60's. In the big city hospital where I delivered, I was angrily told, while still on the delivery table: "You'll be sorry!" Now, my namesake aunt had had to search far and wide for a bottle formula that wouldn't make her allergic-to-everything newborns ill, I was fiercely determined not to go down the same road.
Yes, breastfeeding in those days took a lot of footwork. I'd had to find nursing bras. Back to the department store! When you are young and living on what your young husband earns tending a computer in the back room of a bank, this took planning. Disposable pads or cutting up sanitary towels to line the cups was expensive, so I did what my grandma had done, folding handkerchiefs into squares for insertion into the bra. After the baby came, our two room apartment was draped in laundry lines on which hankies hung to dry.
As a history nerd, I'd investigated histories of European underwear. For centuries, front or back lace up stays, and, later, full corsets, supported fuller or heavier breasts.
My grandmother, when a young woman in the teens and twenties, explained she had sometimes bound her breasts in cloth bandage strips, in order to achieve the trendy flat flapper look. She said they had also sewed handkerchiefs onto a ribbon strip. Constructing the shoulder straps was always the hard part, as they hoped to accommodate individual widths of shoulder.
The twenties marked the foundation (ha!) of the bra industry as we know it today. Maidenform was first with a patent, which appeared in their ads in newspapers. Here, they warned would-be buyers to see "proof of patent" before they asked any salesman at their door--hawking "intimates" from a suitcase--to come in.
We are all familiar with the "bullet" bras, which appeared in the thirties, flourished in the 40's and 50's and are still with us today, though a rounder look is more current fashion. Madonna's stage gear is a parody, but how hard and unyielding bullet bras make the bosom, changing the shape until it bears no resemblance to the actual soft, nurturing breast where babies feed!
Personally, I've welcomed sports bras as well as the leisure bras that are available today. Modern women are beginning to like the look of the Roman ladies playing sports in a kind of bandeau.
I share my mother-in-law's often expressed wish that "these things would just FALL OFF!" when we were done using them for the purpose Nature originally intended.
~~Juliet Waldron
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How interesting! Thanks for sharing that bit of history, Juliet.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting. :)
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