Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 35

Class Comfort: The Transition from the Corset to the Brassiere, 1910-1930 Of all the changes that beleaguered women at the onset of modernity, one of the most fundamental was the transformation of the ideal female body image. Nine teenth-century corsets had molded the figure by cinching in the waist and exagger ating the proportions of bust and hips. This voluptuous model glorified the mature dignity of the matriarchs who reigned supreme at the Fin de Siecle. But the New Woman could not stride purposefully through modern life while confined by a Victorian corset. Before another generation had grown to adulthood this volup tuous figure looked like a relic, and the foundation garments that had been em ployed to achieve it were relegated to the unfashionably stout or to the resignedly middle-aged. Yet as the Teens dissolved into the Twenties, women who had aban doned the corset found themselves bound by still more insidious constraints. The decade of the 1920s wore an aura of possibility for all American women. Full citizenship had finally been granted and national prosperity made the good life appear to be accessible to every citizen. Freedom was in the air, but it re mained an elusive siren. Because the willowy figure of the Jazz Age flapper was no more common in nature than the voluptuous Gibson Girl's had been, women who had abandoned the corset found themselves bound by more insidious restric tions. Without corsets to shape them, most women had to resort to diet and exer cise if they hoped to achieve the ideal figure. This essay examines the relationship between class and body image as it ex plores methods women have used to force their bodies to conform to a fashionable ideal. It also looks at the influence of popular culture - specifically the tango craze - on class relations as well as on this bodily ideal. In the early 1900s, the older generation of women - regardless of class probably laced themselves into their corsets to signify compliance with the moral restrictions dictated by the social elite. But their daughters found freedom of move ment more attractive than the old-fashioned class markers. In the early Teens young women from different social strata began, for the first time, to mix freely in a public culture of leisure. As a new generation of middle- and upper-class women began to frequent public dance halls and cabarets, amusement parks and movie houses (originally patronized only by the working class) I suggest that they may have seen working women’s uncorseted bodies as a new paragon. Rare is the young woman of any era who neglects to appraise the attributes of her sexual competitors and to appropriate what she can.