We HAVE come a long way, Baby!

Mom, Grandma and "Aunt" Kath

This is a late 1940’s picture of my Mom with her Mom and a good friend of the family, Aunt Kath. They are at the cottage sitting out in the sun enjoying the day together. They have not been anywhere special; this is just how you would find them dressed any day of the week. If this were a picture of my cousins and I, we would be in shorts (I may be bigger than what people deem proper for shorts, but I live at the beach and I wear shorts), cotton tops or bathing suit tops and maybe, flip flops.

Even though Amelia Earhart had introduced trousers for women in the 1920’s, they didn’t catch on in Western Michigan. Grandma wore either a housedress which would be in soft shades of plaid or flowered or her church dress which was solid navy. Housedresses were made of cotton and had to be washed in a ringer washing machine, rinsed in tubs, starched, and ironed. They all have on their housedresses. Mom and Grandma have on necklaces, Grandma her pearls; Mom and Aunt Kath both have on clip earrings (ouch). All this for a day at the cottage sitting in the sun when they were not preparing huge meals for all the family.

However it is the shoes! It is the hose needed to wear the shoes! In the eighteen years I was with Grandma, I never saw her wear a different shoe than the one in the picture. Laced-up and with a thick heel, those shoes weren’t light weight. Can you imagine Grandma trying to run to catch a plane in those shoes? Mom, when I was little, tried to run in her heavy-stiff shoes with me to catch a bus; we ended up pin wheeling down the sidewalk and landing in a pile. Mom swore she would never run to catch a bus again. And it isn’t only the shoes. To wear the shoes Grandma and Aunt Kath are wearing the required hose. There were no panty hose until the late 1960’s so they had to have on a garter belt or a girdle as they sat in the sun. Mom, on the left, has on much more stylish shoes. They are called spectator pumps and were made popular in the 1930’s by the Duke of Windsor. They are two toned white and black much like a saddle shoe only the colors are opposite of a saddle shoe. The toe and heel are black and the instep area is white. They are orthopedic shoes and very heavy. Mom, Bless Her, had a thing for orthopedic shoes. Now my Mom liked to be comfortable. At first I thought the picture showed her with her famous rolled down hose. Women who did not want to wear a girdle or garter belt would roll each hose down and form a fat circle of hose around each ankle. Oh, the embarrassment of a young girl when her Mother has her hose around her ankles. However, I took out my magnifying glass and it looks like she has a pair of my Dad’s stockings on in the photo, as my Daughter would say MOTHER!, no girdle or garter belt needed.

It was the custom then to have your hair done once a week at the beauty parlor and wear hairnets over the hair to keep it in place the rest of the week. They all have on their hairnets. When I was young I had very oily hair that needed to be washed every day. My Grandma thought something dire would happened to me if I washed my hair every day and there were always comments made, but I refused to go to school with oily stringy hair.

Notice that Mom’s dress is looser in the front than Aunt Kath’s. Mom had been a Flapper in the 1920’s when the flat-chested boyish look had been in vogue. Mom never did get into wearing bras although she would wear one when she had to get really dressed up. Mom was into comfort. She wanted to be comfortable and worked hard to make other people comfortable around her.

In the 1960’s bras were burned to protest conformity and women’s servitude. My former mother-in-law warned me about what happened to the Flapper’s when they didn’t wear any support but I didn’t need her warning. I had my comfortable free swinging Mom as an example.

SOME INTERESTING AND/OR SHOCKING THINGS I LEARN ABOUT WOMEN AND THEIR “CLOTHES.”
I have found as I grow older and older that I use terms that are no longer understood. I once told a young man working at a church function dishing out ice cream that he would make a good soda jerk, a term used for the person that worked behind the soda fountain in a drugstore. He thought I was calling him a jerk and was quite offended.

Therefore I decided I had best describe the term Flapper. I found a wonderful description of a Flapper in About.com. “In the 1920’s, a new woman was born. She smoked, drank, danced, and voted. She cut her hair, wore make-up, and went to petting parties. She was giddy and took risks.” MOTHER, I just thought you wore short skirts, danced the Charleston, and wore lots of long beaded necklaces--too much information for a daughter.

According to the History of the Bra by Jenelle Rose bras go back to 2500 B.C. to drawings done by the Minoan civilization on the Greek Isle of Crete. From the 1500’s to 1920’s the corset ruled. In 1820 a "corst mecanizue" was invented to allow women to squeeze into their corsets with the help of pulleys. During World War I, women were forced into the work place making the wearing of a corset a problem. In 1917 the U.S. War Industries Board requests women to stop buying corsets to reduce the consumption of metal. According to Jenelle Rose, sources say up to 28,000 tons of metal was conserved through this effort-enough to build two battleships. The 1920’s ushered in the Jazz Age and you couldn’t dance the new dances in a corset.

It wasn’t until the 1930’s that the bra as we know it became popular. So women wore corsets which deformed their bodies in many cases for over 400 years but after 30 years of wearing a bra they started to burn them in the 1960’s. Thankfully that didn’t last and women are back in their bras. As I have run through airports, once holding the hands of two little grand-daughters, I have thought the liberation of women came from a comfortable bra and good athletic shoes.

history1900s.about.com/od/1920s/a/flappers.htm
www.jenellerose.com/htmlpostings/history_of_the_bra