Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 37

Class Comfort—from Corset to Brassiere 33 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 -