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Chapter Four
describes
Dupont’s efforts
to invent the
perfect stretch
fiber for girdles.
Why girdles?
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
• ‘To Serve a market, fill a need’ is the way Dupont Magazine in
1980 described the long standing aims of the company
generally.
• This had been the model set by explosives, a commodity that
was always in steady demand, perceived as a need rather
than a want, a product that was so taken for granted that it’s
presence in everyday life was unquestioned.
• Nylon stockings were another product seen as a social
necessity – no woman would dream of going out of the house
without wearing stockings. In the 1930’s, Dupont became
interested in another product that fulfilled a social ‘need’ –
the girdle.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
• Girdles were elasticated ‘foundation garments’ worn under clothes
to give women the ’right’ shape.
• There is no parallel in modern textiles to the stiffness of early girdle
fabric, which compressed the body in a way that would now be
considered intolerable.
• Once in a girdle, normal body movements like bending were
awkward, eating was often uncomfortable, and sitting for any
length of time could become painful. Yet, despite the discomfort,
women always wore girdles when they went out, and put their
daughters into girdles when they were still in school.
• In mid-Twentieth century America, all woman were expected to
wear girdles.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Why did women wear girdles?
During ethnography among women who were old enough to
have worn girdles on a regular basis, the three most common
explanations were these:
• An unwritten rule: ‘I don’t remember anyone saying anything,
it was understood that you wore a girdle, you just did it.
• For ‘health’: Expressed in vague terms as a ’need for support’
or a fear that without a girdle, one would somehow ‘just flop
over’.
• To ‘look good’. It was considered impossible to look ‘good’ in
clothes without the aid of girdles – but what did ‘good’ mean?
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Clothing as a ‘moral system’
• In discussing the Victorian corset, the forerunner of the girdle,
Bernard Rudofsky argued that clothes and underclothes are
instruments of moral philosophy, the materialisation of norms and
values, a ‘moral system’ in wearable form.
• According to Rudofsky, in Victorian times the corset was seen as
‘the hallmark of virtue, while the ‘lack of a corset was the visible
sign of depravity.(Rudofsky 1974:110-1)’. In mid-twentieth century
America, the girdle was seen in the same way.
• Recommended reading. Rudofsky, Bernard 1974.The Unfashionable
Human Body. New York, Anchor Books.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Perspectives on the girdle
In anthropological terms the girdle was above all else a
symbol, a statement in commodity form. But what
exactly was it saying? There are several ways to
approach this.
• From a political/economic perspective, you can place
the girdle within the broad narratives of American
business and political history, and show it to be the
outcome of a confluence of factors that include
phenomenal economic growth, unprecedented levels
of mass production and consumption, sweeping social
change and new chemical manufacturing processes.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Social control and conformity
• Social change is always balanced by increased social
control to maintain overall stability, and in the United
States in the 1950’s this was exacerbated as the
confidence of the immediate post-war years gave way to
the Cold War and the perceived threat of Communism.
• In 1950’s America, these factors were reflected in a strict
unwritten dress code, and garments designed to
reinforce the mass values of capitalism and the image of
a society in control of itself. These were epitomized by
the grey flannel suit and other forms of prescriptive
clothing for men, and a strict dress code for women –
including the girdle.
2011 Taylor and Francis
As Mary Douglas
showed in Natural
Symbols (1996:xxxv),
the more value people
set on social
constraints, the more
value they set on
symbols of bodily
control.
© Taylor and Francis
Adding gender to this model,
the ritualisation of dress in
1950’s America can be seen
as a materialization of the
desire to reinforce polarised
gender roles, as an aspect of
control in the face of change,
and in support of the cult of
family and ‘normality’ which
always arises in postwar
periods.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
Feminist anthropology and the girdle
• Feminist anthropology and women’s studies, which
promote female autonomy, tend to see the girdle primarily
as an instrument of patriarchal oppression. Thorsten
Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1953) was an
exponent of this view, describing the corset as a mutilation
that transformed women into chattels, economically
dependent on men.
• There is also the question of sexuality, how and by whom it
is constructed, and its relationship to social control, issues
raised originally by Michel Foucault. In this paradigm, the
girdle can be seen as the ultimate instrument of social,
physical and sexual control, the garment that defined
domination and the dominated.
©2011 Taylor and Francis
• In addition, there is an extensive critical
literature on how women’s bodies have been
commodified, standardized and controlled in
various ways, how women became alienated
from their own bodies and bodily processes,
how ideologies of ‘health’ and ‘beauty’
enforce social control, and how images and
expectations of women’s bodies are
inextricably entangled with economic and
social processes.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
• The cultural biography of Lycra presented in Lycra: How a
Fiber Shaped America touches on these approaches and
provides material for future analyses within them and in
other fields, but it takes a broader, less explicitly political
perspective.
• Instead, the study focuses on how one of America’s
largest and most powerful corporations once saw
women, how that changed over time, and how these
changes influenced the stuff they produced or didn’t
produce for women. Lycra offers unique insights into the
process because it came to the market on the cusp of a
major social transformation with which it became
entangled, and because the fiber came to have a defining
relationship with the women of the baby boomer birth
cohort.
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
Discussion questions – Chapter Four
1) Discuss Bernard Rudofsky’s assertion that
clothing is a moral system.
2) Dress codes: describe the dress code or ‘look’
of an identifiable group – for example the
‘Preppy Look’. What are it’s elements, what do
they say about the people who wear the
clothes, walk the walk and talk the talk?
© 2011 Taylor and Francis
3) Describe the clothing worn by men and women in
1950’s America – how did they promote conformity?
How do you think clothes act as instruments of social
control?
4) Do you agree or disagree with the interpretation
made by some feminist historians and
anthropologists that girdles were an instrument of
patriarchal oppression?
5) How were clothes ‘gendered’ in the 1950’s, and how
is that different to the way we dress today?
©2011 Taylor and Francis