Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 37
Class Comfort—from Corset to Brassiere
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maid was having more fun at her own leisure activities than the employers, who
had to finish their card games without the ace of spades.
Elite women like those in the cartoon had found that technology was spurring
rapid changes in every aspect of their lives. Fashions imitating the haute couture,
previously affordable only for the privileged few, were now available to a much
broader section of society. “Shops now,” sighed the editorial voice
Harper's
Bazaar in the spring of 1912, “put clothes within the reach of great multitudes of
women, which thirty years ago would have been accessible only to that small
number who got their things in Paris” {Harper's Bazaar 1912, 250). Even the
absent maid was now able to exercise some increased measure of consumer power.
In addition, rumblings of political equality for women in the 1910s fueled work
ing-class dreams of social equality. Faced with a changing outer world, elite women
needed these restrictive undergarments less to enhance the latest fashion line than
to prove their leisured status and to support their inner vision of inviolable class
distinctions.
Yet by the 1910s the concept of leisure time as associated only with the rich
had eroded. Indeed, Progressive-era efforts to construct leisure-time activities
deemed appropriate for the working classes had evolved into a class-ambiguous
culture of leisure. Public dance halls, amusement parks, vaudeville and moving
picture shows, originally intended as wholesome entertainment for the working
class, provided the opportunity for a new “promiscuous mixing” (Erenberg 20) of
all cultures and classes. Progressives and conservatives alike found reason to ob
ject to this challenge to old mores and sought to refine leisure activities upward
toward middle-class standards.
“Cheap amusements for the poor,” acknowledges a Progressive-era Harper's
Bazaar, “such as Coney Island, and music in parks, which were born out of the
best of philanthropic intent, now are also enjoyed by the rich.” Whether or not
ladies like those in the cartoon were tempted by the new mass culture, they doubt
less knew someone who was. According to this Bazaar editorialist, “The theatre
and the public dance halls now draw the greatest number of young people” from
all classes {Harper's Bazaar May 1912, 250). As the classes began to mix in a
public arena, class lines began to blur. The old-fashioned popular culture — enter
tainment designed for a working-class audience — became refined for middleclass consumption. Far from being restrained by trickling-down Victorian gentil
ity, working-class enthusiasm for the new public culture, enhanced as it was by
relaxation of earlier sexual restraint, had bubbled up to entice the rich.
While working-class women lacked neither moral constraints nor standards
of appropriate dress, recent scholarship shows that they enjoyed more leeway in
both than did their upper-class contemporaries. Historians Kathy Peiss and Nan
Enstad concur that working women devised their own style of dressing which -