A few days ago I was watching something set in the Roaring
Twenties and, of course, there were all these women walking around in flapper
dresses. Naturally, my first thought was, I
am way too busty for a flapper dress, but my second thought was, None of these women seem to be wearing bras.
I wonder if they had bras back then.
My great-grandmother is long dead, which is a shame, because
she wouldn’t have hesitated to regale me with stories of her old-fashioned
undergarments and all the most exciting times she got to take them off, which is exactly why I wasn't allowed to sit in Grandma's room unsupervised when I was a kid. So, I
had to turn to the Internet instead.
I’d remembered hearing or reading somewhere that, back in
the day, women relied on their corsets to both squeeze the life out of them and
support their breasts. The earliest bras date back to the Minoan civilization of
ancient Greece, where, about 3,000 years ago, female athletes were said to
compete whilst wearing garments similar to the modern bikini. Later, Greek women wore
breast bands called apodesmos, which
consisted of a strap of wool or linen that was wrapped around the breasts and
tied at the back. Roman women adopted a similar garment, seen here depicted on a fresco at Pompeii:
However, these garments didn't always cover or hide the breasts; sometimes the breasts were left exposed, with the breast-band supporting and accentuating them from underneath, as seen in this statue of the Snake Goddess:
However, these garments didn't always cover or hide the breasts; sometimes the breasts were left exposed, with the breast-band supporting and accentuating them from underneath, as seen in this statue of the Snake Goddess:
In the Middle Ages in Europe, women did wear garments to
support the breasts. These linens, like the 600-year-old
underclothes discovered during renovations of an Austrian castle in 2012,
looked exactly like the wire-free bras women wear today, right down to the
decorative lace. Prior to the discovery of these bras, it was thought that women
did not wear bras in Europe during the Middle Ages, but instead relied on the
structure of their gowns to provide support. By the Renaissance, corsets had
become popular among upper class European women, and around the same time in
East Asia, Chinese and Vietnamese women began wearing a dudou (Chinese) or yếm (Vietnamese), a square or
diamond-shaped silk bodice worn in the manner of a halter-top.
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A child-sized dudou on display at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Image by Michelle Pemberton from Wikimedia Commons |
The
corset saw a temporary decline in popularity during the years of the French
Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, due to its association with the aristocracy,
but enjoyed resurgence during the Victorian Era, when tightlacing became a
popular way to emphasize the female form. By the 20th century,
however, women’s increased interest in physical activity led to the development
of more modern, supportive bra-like undergarments, and the production of shorter,
more girdle-like corsets that served to control that age-old nemesis, tummy
fat. The late Victorian period saw the emergency of the Clothing Reform Movement, driven by concerned health
professionals and early feminists. Organizations such as the Reform Dress
Association, the Rational Dress Society, and the National Dress Reform
Association fought for women’s rights to breathe and move normally. As more
women became interested in sports, especially bicycling, feminists like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps encouraged women to “Burn up the
corsets!...Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your
thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your
emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.”
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Jacob's bra, as pictured in her patent application. |
When other women expressed interest in the bra and one offered Jacobs a dollar for the garment, she decided to try selling them, but had little success. Eventually, Jacob would sell her patent for the design to Warners Brothers Corset Company for the equivalent of $21,000.