Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 42

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Popular Culture Review

women and girls, you will recall long, cruel corsets and garters that trussed
them like fowls for the roasting. [Most] dancers are wearing the new
combination of brassiere and silk bloomers, finished with ruffles of lace
[that] give full play in the various steps. {Dancing 144-146)
For the mature figure Irene recommended the “Castle Corset,” made almost
entirely of elastic, as “no amount of grace ... and no amount of the knowledge of
the most intricate steps will help you to dance charmingly unless your corset has
‘give’ to
{Dancing 142).
More comfortable alternatives to the long-boned corset, like the Castle corset,
were certainly available to women from the early 1910s, and by the beginning of
World War I these options were more likely to be deemed acceptable, at least for
the younger generation. New technology made less-expensive clothing available
to a wider range of consumers. Full participation in modern life began to mean
adoption of the less-restrictive modes of both dress and behavior previously ac
cepted only by the lower class (Steele 237; Ewing 136; Davis 107; Kaiser 484).
War work, whether wage work or volunteer, not only permitted, but often
required a new disregard for decorum. One British historian reported that “some
Land Army girls abandoned their restrictive corsets, almost literally, in the field”
(Carter 72). But whether operating machinery in a munitions factory or volunteer
ing for the Red Cross, women working for the war needed freedom of movement
allowed by neither the old-fashioned foundation garment nor by the moral codes
which it had come to represent. A general loosening of moral restrictions, marked
by unsupervised mingling of the sexes in public places, had worked its way up
ward from the working class. This trend that had seemed scandalous when fash
ions began to move upward from the public dance halls and movie houses into the
cabarets and cotillions, was considered more acceptable in wartime. Middle- and
upper-class women could then exercise options of dress previously enjoyed mainly
by working women in the name of patriotism if not in the interes Ё