THOSE OF US who came of age after the reign of the suspender belt cannot know the disaster of a broken suspender button, nor the need to speedily find a replacement – be it a tiny sew-through button – or an aspirin, as per Katharine Whitehorn’s article ‘Sluts’.1 Even a small piece of coal has held up stockings, in extremis. The suspender button introduces the delicate subject of underwear, skimpy and scanty, as well as voluminous, and in every colour from white to black, not forgetting shades of grey.
Until the 1880s, women were not depicted wearing corsets or any other item of the underwear advertised for sale in newspapers, catalogues and magazines. Heaven forfend that any female flesh be revealed; those garments stood alone (indeed literally so, thanks to their rigid construction). Given the delicacy of the subject and Victorian blushes, one wonders who was the intended beneficiary of the motto ‘By Industry We Thrive’,2 an aphorism embroidered along the tops of a pair of stockings shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Whose heart was meant to beat faster at the sight of those instructive words?
‘Steel-bound and whalebone-lined’3 is how Irene Clephane described the ‘hideous’ late-nineteenth-century fashions worn by her mother and the torture inflicted by the bustle or, rather, the tiny waist that rose above it. The seventeen-inch waists of the 1880s and ’90s caused all manner of harm. Even working-class women were not immune from the fashion: my great-grandma’s nipped-in waist could not have been achieved without tight lacing. Then came the extraordinary S-bend effect created by the ‘straight-fronted’ corset of the Edwardian era, popularised by the couturier Lucile, which found favour among women of more exalted status and, making it impossible for its wearers to stoop, required the service of a pair of ‘lazy tongs’ if a lace handkerchief were dropped. No wonder women were grateful when Paul Poiret’s simple Directoire look came along.
In the nineteenth century, corsetry, even more than millinery, was regarded as indubitably female. Delicate advertisements reassured women of the corsetier’s discretion. In 1914, Chesterfield’s Spirella agent, Mrs W. W. Bateman placed one to ‘thank the many ladies who have called to inspect her Spirella show’4 during the town’s Shopping Festival and invited them to call again. Her corsets were made to order and, what is more, ‘unbreakable’. Before one wonders what the ladies of Chesterfield got up to in their underwear, it is worth remembering that boned corsets meant bone. ‘The number of stays – bones – you had in your corset was a status symbol, so that a woman asked for “a 28-bone corset”.’5 Most corsets were convent-made (as was many an Edwardian trousseau).
By the 1920s, advances in corsetry were such that there were even special corsets for dancing. In the thirties, boned corsets were out, though readers of Miss Modern were advised that ‘the modern figure – however slight – must be corseted to be svelte. Be thankful that firmly woven elastic takes the place of old-fashioned whalebone.’6 The new ‘foundation garments’ could still exercise a degree of old-fashioned purgatory, however, as evidenced by this description:
Struggling into a brand-new roll-on was a feat that demanded muscular power and invincible faith. There were always moments – they seemed like desperate ages – when one was trapped. The bottom edge of the surely hopelessly narrow tube of pink elastic had been prised to just above one’s knees; the top edge had become welded, it seemed, to a place just below the buttocks that the whole thing was eventually supposed to redeem. For terrible, long, red-faced, almost tearful moments, one thought one’s thighs were clamped together for ever … When at last the thing had been lugged and levered into position, and its suspenders tethered to lisle-topped stockings, one walked about feeling exhausted and strangely buoyant: legs and top half moving quite independently of the newly-rigid middle. It didn’t stay rigid for long; after a few washes, the edges of the pink elastic tube began to splay out into thick waves, almost frills, that made one’s waist bulkier than ever.’7
During the 1940s corsets, like so much else, acquired a wartime flavour: Berlei promised they performed a ‘secret service’ – and for ‘only four coupons!’8 By the 1950s, Vogue was advertising a two-way-stretch doll-size girdle, an interesting concept (and size), though there was nothing doll-like about the corset Fiona MacCarthy recalled wearing in 1958.
Youthcraft Girdles were garments of horrible complexity, more like a suit of armour than mere underclothes, encasing our young bodies in what was advertised as a ‘firm but flexible elastic net’. These panty girdles had detachable gussets and suspenders. Were they specially designed to discourage intercourse?9
Amazingly, in the early 1960s, foundation garments were reported to be more popular than ever: ‘The mere thirty million that women spent on corsets ten years ago is now sixty million: the estimate for next year is a gross figure of a quarter as much again,’10 Katharine Whitehorn wrote in The Spectator; over 100 corsetry firms were in business. Spirella, ‘the oldest hands at the game’, had revamped its Oxford Circus showroom and operated through a team of 6,000 Mrs Batemans, many of them part-time, a third of whom had worked for the company for more than twenty years, taking ten measurements for a girdle and six for a bra, before sending them on to the factory.
‘We in our elasticised net and nylon girdles, our boneless wonders, should pity [Edwardian] ladies from our hearts,’11 Alison Adburgham wrote. Today, we pity her generation and sympathise with Mary Quant: ‘I can’t see any reason why foundation garments should not be sleek and modern and pretty and fit and move with the body at the same time.’12 Mary Quant was equally dismissive of suspenders. ‘To me, they look like some sort of fearful surgical device.’14 To solve these problems Quant produced her own ‘Youthlines’ with its ‘girl-loving Lycra’: ‘For living in. Happily. Like skin. Running, jumping, twisting.’13 They and Pretty Polly Stand Easies, advertised in magazines like Nova, were part of the ‘underwear revolution’, as designated in the mid-1960s by Vogue, which, like all other sixties revolutions, was primarily a symbol of youth.
Unlike corsets, the bra is a positive rite of passage, a proud symbol of womanhood; most women remember wearing their first bra. Mrs Smiling in Cold Comfort Farm regards brassieres with a collector’s eye: ‘She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection … in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.’15 Growing up in the 1920s meant flattening the breasts; other eras accentuated them. For Lorna Sage, ‘even if you had hardly any breasts going bra-less [to the school dance in the 1950s] was unthinkable … a lack of elastic armour was a sign of moral idiocy’.16 In those days, a bust meant your school days were numbered. In Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, ‘big girl’ Cynthia, has a bust, ‘A thing no other girl in the convent dared have’.17 So desperate is Baba to have the same that she purloins some tubes of udder cream from her veterinarian father’s surgery and applies it to her breasts. Vogue’s 1960s ‘underwear revolution’, included the ‘no-bra bra’18, an interesting advance on the Floating Action Bra (£1 2s) of the previous decade. In a few years’ time, not wearing a bra would become a feminist statement.
Modern women shed layers as earlier generations piled them on. Daisy Lansbury wrote in 1936, recalling her Edwardian childhood:
I do not suppose there are any little girls who wear one knitted woollen vest, one curious garment in pink flannelette called a chemise, one red stay-belt, pink flannelette knickers, one red crocheted woollen petticoat, one pink flannelette petticoat, and on Sundays, a white embroidered cambric petticoat on top, as I did.19
The Victorian Gwen Raverat could have trumped that with an even longer list. And although young girls of my grandma’s generation struggled with layers of underclothing, how else could they have hoped to stop runaway trains, Railway Children-style, without their flannelette petticoats?
In the early nineteenth century only aristocratic women wore drawers. By the 1890s and the craze for cycling, America’s Mrs Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s invention acquired a necessary popularity. Harrods advertised ‘Very Special’20 black serge knickers with a chamois leather seat for cycling, while at the Army and Navy Stores women awheel could warm their derrières with knee-or ankle-length bloomers in cashmere or fancy mixtures. Those who favoured ‘Sanitary Woollen Clothing’, and could ignore its unattractive greyish-cream pallor, could strike a note for the Aesthetic Movement by choosing Jaeger’s stockinette combinations. Equally ardent 1930s Woodcraft Folk affirmed their allegiance with green underwear, while the elderly ladies who had known better days and whom Jenifer Wayne’s school entertained to a charitable lunch stuffed cakes into the legs of their baggy drawers; the poor but equally resourceful Angela Rodaway hid market vegetables in hers. Three cheers for resourcefulness and strong knicker elastic (which also gave rise to the phrase ‘hand trappers’, on a par with elastic armour).
Stout underwear can dampen the spirits, however. A character in a Barbara Pym novel despairs of hers: ‘It was depressing the way the same old things turned up every week.’ When a friend comes to stay, the kitchen is ‘festooned with lines of depressing-looking underwear – fawn locknit knickers and petticoats of the same material. It was even drearier than mine.’21 But there is something to be said for ‘spinsterish’ underclothes: lumpy, grey underwear saves a Barbara Comyns heroine from a dastardly fate.
The independent young flapper striding into the future in her sheath-like dress wore fewer underclothes than her forebears. A dainty Princess Petticoat (8s 11d) and matching knickers (6s 11d) in delicate shades of artificial silk could be purchased from Gorringes for a ladylike 15s. ‘The cami-knicker at its best is a thing of sheer delight,’22 a contemporary journalist swooned. The fictional Miss Pettigrew discovers that silk underclothes make her feel ‘wicked, daring, ready for anything. She left her hesitations behind with her home-made woollens.’23
Many women made their own underclothes – and by hand; even after the widespread use of sewing machines, a mystique persisted that hand-made underclothes were superior. A character in Barbara Comyns’s A Touch of Mistletoe, who is intent on doing things properly, reassures her sister that ‘real people feel almost ill if they have a machine stitch anywhere near them’. Wartime contriving demanded particular dexterity with a needle and scissors. ‘Delia cuts out two brassieres for me from my old college blouse, and we proceed to sew,’ May Smith wrote in 1941; two years later she made ‘a nifty brassiere out of an old petticoat and embroider[ed] same’.24
Dainty petticoats, camisoles and camiknickers in satin, silk or artificial silk were loved by young women even if older generations thought such skimpy clothing ‘ridiculous’. However, a 1920s advertisement ‘for those dainty undies that you always put on fresh’25 serves as a reminder that, while some flitted about in lace-edged drawers, in times gone by not all underwear was changed daily. Frothy confections notwithstanding, Agnes Miall advised hard-working bachelor girls to opt for sober woollen combinations.
By 1932, some were tempted by camiknickers in lace georgette with the new ‘sunbathing’ effect at the sides, or ‘scanties’26, the new slim-fitting knickers designed to replace ‘panties and belt’ under shorts or beach dresses. Ruby Keeler sang of packing her scanties to ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’. Before the kill-joy recommendations of the Hays Code, early 1930s Hollywood was remarkably upfront in its allusions: think Dick Powell with his giant can opener, all set to open Ruby Keeler’s tin-can clothing in Gold Diggers of 1933.
Black underwear has long had racy connotations, as Caithleen explains in The Country Girls.
The black underwear was Baba’s idea. She said that we wouldn’t have to wash it so often; and that it was useful if we ever had a street accident, or if men were trying to strip us in the backs of cars. Baba thought of all these things. I got black nylons too. I read somewhere that they were ‘literary’.27
Black underwear was part of growing up and becoming a woman, as Baba tells her. ‘We want to live. Drink gin … We want to go places.’
Skimpy underwear was not just a matter of clothing but also of modernity (and sex). Jenifer Wayne recalled ‘a flighty, precocious, and to me incomprehensible type’ who boarded her school bus. While Jenifer wore long oatmeal socks with elastic garters, ‘Of course, she wore stockings; and there was a scandalous story that she had once been seen going up to the top deck of the bus in cami-knickers – satin, with lace and wide-open legs – instead of the regulation navy bloomers.’28
By then young women could read Elinor Glyn’s short-story collection It. Three years later, even My Home was advising its readers, via a short story ‘Ticket to Heaven’, that ‘Men don’t fall in love with a woman’s sense of fairness or her sterling worth … They fall in love with that world-famous quality, “IT”.’29 IT’s moment was brief, however, and all too soon subsumed by romance. As Katharine Whitehorn recalled, it took years for women’s magazine editors to be able to stop writing ‘romance’ when they meant ‘sex’.
The man-made fabrics that became increasingly popular from the 1950s resulted in all sorts of gauzy nylon nightgowns, ‘babydolls’ among them. The ‘Gifts She’ll Adore’ offered by Swallow’s lingerie department in 1965 were all double-denier nylon and included, for those romantic occasions, ‘Juliette’ a ‘delightfully feminine waltz-length double nightgown with a lace encrusted fitted bra and a fully circular swing skirt’30 in white/white, white/marshmallow or white/glazier blue (89s 6d). It would be hard to tell whether the subsequent frisson was caused by desire or static.
With an innocence we would today find touching, one late-nineteenth century couple sought full-length nightgowns for their honeymoon. Innocence is not far along the spectrum from desperate ignorance, however. Although she gave birth to five children, the Edwardian Kathleen Dayus never saw her husband naked; convent girls were not the only ones struggling to dress and undress beneath the shelter of their nightgowns. And even in the early 1960s the instruction to sales assistants was that the shop-window dummy should never be left unclothed.
When Joan Wyndham acquired a pair of peacock-blue Jaeger pyjamas (Jaeger had come a long way since that greyish-wool stockinette), her fellow WAAFs wanted to borrow them for dirty weekends. ‘And some of them are virgins!’31 She and her closest friends wanted to know how to get more pleasure from sex. They invested in a thirty-bob tube of clitoris cream and were delighted to discover that, when rubbed on, the ‘magic ointment’ worked.
As reliable contraception became more widely available, fewer women needed to trust to hot baths, gin and doing the mending as ways of avoiding pregnancy. Though Marie Stopes published Married Love in 1918 and opened a family-planning clinic three years later, it was years before women had easy access to contraception and the knowledge they needed. Although the Family Planning Association began its work in 1930, it met with opposition in its early years; Naomi Mitchison helped found a North Kensington clinic, and in times of acute desperation, allowed abortions to be performed at her home to safeguard women’s lives.
The FPA estimated that in 1951 the average age at which women first had sex was twenty-one. Though the Pill made a major breakthrough ten years later, it was only available to married women; it was 1970 before the Pill could be prescribed to single women nationwide. Fay Weldon put it pithily: ‘Getting married and not pregnant? There’s posh for you.’32 The women writers of the 1960s did much to break taboos. Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction tackled back-street abortion with a candour unavailable to her literary forebears Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys; Lynne Reid-Banks’s The L-Shaped Room and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone showed that, contrary to expectations, sex was not always bartered for a wedding ring. In 1968 only 28 per cent of (predominantly middle-class) women used the contraceptive pill. By 1975 its use had increased to 75 per cent and spread to all social classes. ‘Younger women don’t realise what hell it was … The perpetual anxiety. It was a real revolution,’33 Mary Quant told the Observer’s Rachel Cooke.
The revolution in underwear was tights, which went into mass production in the mid-sixties. ‘This Christmas should be fab – I’m hanging up my stretch tights!’34 a Punch cartoon joked in 1963, although a 1965 ‘Swallow’s of Chesterfield’ Christmas brochure featured gift-packed nylons, not tights. Twiggy Lawson recalls how expensive they were when they first became available. Nonetheless, tights meant freedom, along with the miniskirt, and no more schoolboys pinging schoolgirls’ suspenders.
Tights were another revolution that passed my grandma’s generation by. Annie never wore them. I remember her corsets, though: barricades of Germolene-pink elastic and shiny satin. Like Enid Bagnold’s name tapes, my grandma’s corsets came in handy in an unexpected way. In the early 1960s they transported a tiny fir tree, hidden within their folds, through customs: what customs officer enquired closely into a lady’s underwear?