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The first modern brassiere to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance was
a bra invented by a young New York socialite named Mary Phelps Jacob in 1910.
Born on 20 April 1891 in New Rochelle, New York, "Polly" (as she
nicknamed herself) was the daughter of a prominent New England family. Her
ancestry included Governor Bradford, the Plymouth Colony's
first governor, and Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat.
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Mary Phelps Jacob, later Polly Peabody,
and finally Caresse Crosby, in about 1929. |
Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as
she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and
he lived high. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good
smells existed." "What I wanted," she said of her privileged
childhood, "usually came to pass." A childhood of privilege included
private school, dancing school, and horse riding school. She was a rather disinterested
student. One commentator writes that for the most part Polly "lived her
life in dreams." (Wolff).
In 1915, at age 24, Polly Jacob married Richard "Dick" Rogers Peabody, son
of one of the three great New England families. By the early 20th century a
case could be made that the Peabodies had supplanted the Cabots and the Lodges
as the most distinguished name in the area. She had for all intents and purposes
arrived socially, having married into American aristocracy. But it was not
to last.
From the Corset to the Brassiere
Up to this time, an unhealthy and painful device called a corset narrowed
an adult women's waist to 13 or fewer inches. The corset is attributed to Catherine
de Médicis, wife of King Henri II of France. She enforced a ban on thick
waists at court attendance during the 1550s. For nearly 350 years, women's
primary means of support was the corset, with laces and stays made of whalebone
or metal.
In 1875, designer Susan Taylor Converse created a garment called the “Union
Under-Flannel” from woolen fabric. The garment is different to previous
items as it has no-bones, eyelets, laces or pulleys. The garment was patented
by manufacturers George Frost and George Phelps, but never gained much attention.
In 1889, French-born corset-maker
Herminie Cadolle invented a two-part undergarment. The top half of her 1889
invention was "designed
to sustain the bosom and supported by the shoulders." (The bottom half
was a corset that covered only the waist and rear.) She called it the 'Well-Being'
or 'Bien-être'. Introduced in Paris,
the Bien-être resembled a Victorian bikini. But Cadolle's far-sighted
design seems to have been kept a close secret among her select customers.
Later in 1893, Marie Tucek patented the first brassiere. Her device
included separate pockets for the breasts, straps that went over the shoulder
which
were fastened by hook-and-eye closures. It looked very much like modern bras
today, but Marie apparently failed to successfully market the patent.
In 1910, Polly Jacob purchased a sheer evening
gown for a social event. At that time, the only acceptable undergarment
was a corset stiffened with whalebone. Polly found that the corset's whalebone
visibly poked out from her plunging neckline and from under the sheer fabric.
Dissatisfied
with
this arrangement, she worked with her maid to stitch two silk handkerchiefs
together with some pink ribbon and cord.
Polly's new undergarment complimented the new fashions introduced
at the time. Family and friends almost immediately asked Polly to create brassieres
for them, too.
One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger,
who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become
a viable business.
The
corset's reign was beginning to topple.
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| Illustration from Mary Jacob Phelps' patent
application 1,115,674. |
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| The modern bra has come a long way. It has gone
from being a simple, functional garment to an object of decoration, meant
to be seen as much as worn. |
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| Bras have evolved into a wide variety of colors and styles
utilizing a array of fabrics. |
 |
| Modern brassieres perform all kinds of miracles, creating
cleavage where little existed, maximizing exposure while still providing
support, uplifting and showing off a woman's assets. |
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| As in the days of Minoa,
when women's breasts were commonly exposed in this fashion, this modern
woman's bra provides uplift and exposure. The difference being that
this brassiere is meant to feature the modern woman's breasts somewhat
more discretely under a blouse or outer layer of clothing, or privately
to a lover. |
While similar inventions for supporting the breasts previously existed, Polly
was the first to patent an undergarment named 'Brassiere,' derived from the
old French word for 'upper arm'.
On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for the 'Backless
Brassiere'. Her patent was for a device
that was lightweight, soft and separated the breasts naturally. Polly christened
her business with the name Caresse Crosby. While a definite improvement, her
brassiere did not offer breasts a lot of support, and were more flattening
than flattering. In fact, the breast-flattening style was popularized by
the Flapper look during the Roaring Twenties. With the popularity of
actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, the present
breast-enhancing style gained popularity during the thirties and forties.
Running a business either was not enjoyable to Polly
or she failed to properly market
the product, for she soon sold the brassiere patent to the Warner Brothers
Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500 (or over $25,600
in today's money). Shortly afterwards, in 1917, the U.S. War Industries Board
asked women
to stop
buying corsets to free up metal for war production. This step liberated
some
28,000
tons
of metal, enough to build two battleships.
It has been said that the bra took
off the way it did in large part because of World War I. The Great War shook
up gender roles, putting many women to work in factories and uniforms for
the
first
time.
Women needed practical, comfortable undergarments.
Warner went on to earn more than fifteen million dollars
from the bra patent over the next thirty years.
During the flat-chested Flapper era in the 1920’s, a Russian
immigrant named Ida Rosenthal noticed that a bra that fit one woman did not
fit another
woman
of the same
bra size.
With the help of her husband
William, they founded Maidenform. Ida was responsible for grouping women
into bust
size categories (cup sizes) and developed bras for every stage of life (puberty
to maturity).
In the 1930s, Warner produces the first popular all-elastic bra, which shows
off a woman's curves.
Polly Divorces Richard Peabody and Remarries
After Polly sold her brassiere patent, she had two children: a son, William
Jacob in 1916, and a daughter, Polly ("Poleen") the following year.
Her husband Richard Peabody was a well-educated but undirected man and a
reluctant father. She found he had only three real interests, all acquired
at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase fire
engines. He would soon suffer the personal consequences of his WWI experiences
and became an alcoholic. Polly's life was difficult during the war years
and when her husband returned home, significantly changed, her life soon
changed abruptly too.
The catalyst for Polly Peabody's transformation was her introduction
and eventual marriage to Harry Grew Crosby, a wealthy scion of a socially
prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war.
Harry
attended private schools and until age 19 and he appeared to be well on the
path to a comfortable life as a member of the upper middle class. His experiences
in World War I changed everything.
In the pattern of other sons of the elite
from New England, he volunteered for the American Field Service Ambulance
Corps. He served in the Second Battle
of Verdun. After the Battle of Orme, his section (the 29th, attached to
the 120th French Division)
was
cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was awarded the Croix
de Guerre.
While completing school after WWI, Harry met Polly. She was 28, six
years older than Harry, with two small children. By some accounts, Harry
fell in love with Mrs. Peabody in about
two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement
park. Two weeks later they made love. Their scandalous courtship was
the gossip of blue-blood Boston. Polly finally divorced Richard Peabody who
was in and out of sanitariums
fighting his alcohol abuse, and on September 9, 1922 Harry and Polly were
married. Two days later they moved to France to join other American expatriates,
probably much to the relief of their respective families. Harry at first
worked for his famous uncle, American capitalist J.P. Morgan, who was also
Harry's godfather,
in a
job arranged
for him
in
a Paris bank. But he soon tired of work.
Polly and Harry purchased a race horse and then two more. They traveled
to North Africa where it is reported they first smoked opium, a habit to
which they would return
again and again. From 1922 to 1925, the Crosbys led the
life of the rich expatriates. They lived a glamorous and luxurious lifestyle
that included an "open marriage," a mutual suicide pact, and
cremation instructions
they carried with them. Their lifestyle was financed by selling
the bonds and stocks whose dividends were previously the basis of Harry's
income.
The Black Sun Press is Founded
After publishing two volumes that they were unhappy with, the Crosbys found
a master printer named Roger Lescaret whose previous work had been largely
funeral notices. He printed Harry’s poems in a fine edition. Harry
and Caresse were very happy with the book, Red Skeletons. It contained
illustrations by their friend Alastair (Hans Henning von Voight). The decided
to found a press, first called Éditions
Narcisse— after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. It was
created to publish its founders’ attempts
at verse in beautifully bound, hand-set books.
By the time the name of the press was changed in
mid-1928 to the Black Sun Press, the careers of both the Caresse and Harry
Crosby were in high gear. The Black Sun Press is famous for having published
lavishly bound, typographically impeccable versions of unusual books, including The
Fall of the House of Usher, their Hindu Love Book, and letters by Henry
James to Walter Berry, Harry’s
cousin. As their literary tastes matured, they
began to publish the works of their Parisian literary friends. This included
D. H. Lawrence’s The
Sun and Escaped
Cock (sometimes reprinted under the title The Man Who Died);
James Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (work — later
incorporated into Finnegans Wake; and short stories by Kay Boyle.
In 1929, their best year, they published fourteen works by James
Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound, among others. Caresse published her
own
book of
poetry, Crosses of Gold.
The Crosbys had what people later in the twenty-first century would
call an "open marriage" and both had numerous extramarital affairs. They
apparently remained devoted to each other nonetheless. While Caresse maintained
the joie de vivre of a moneyed and carefree 1920s heroine, Harry
grew darker in his moods and became increasingly obsessed with death.
In 1928, Harry Crosby met Josephine Noyes Rotch, whom he would
call the "Youngest
Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was descended from a family
that first settled in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine would inspire
Crosby's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Miss
Rotch was twenty, ten years younger than Harry. The two fell in love. In
a letter
to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Crosby wrote:
I am having an affair with a girl I met (not introduced)
at the Lido. She is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine. I like
girls when they are very young before they have any minds.
Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when it ceased.
Then Josephine Bigelow's new husband got busy with school, and Josephine
contacted Harry again. Their affair rekindled, they traveled to Detroit
and checked
into an expensive, $12 a day hotel as husband and wife. For four days they
took meals in their room, smoked opium, battled, and made love.
On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where they agreed that
Josephine should return to Boston to her husband. But on December 9 she
had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby who was staying with Caresse at the
Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem is:
Death is our marriage.
On December 9, Harry Crosby made the following entry into his notebook:
One is not in love unless one desires to die with
one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.
These are Crosby's very last entries into his journal. On December
10, 1929, in an apparent suicide pact, Harry was found in bed
with a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine,
who had a matching hole in her left temple. Harry was still clutching
the pistol in one hand, Josephine in the other. Harry apparently shot
Josephine and then, according to the coroner, several hours later,
he shot himself.
After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse continued her writing and publishing
work at Black Sun. She also established Crosby Continental Editions, a book
company that published paperback books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
Dorothy Parker, among others.
In 1937, at age 47, she married Selbert Young, a football player nearly
twenty years her junior. She bought and renovated Hampton Manor, a ruined
but splendid home in Bowling Green, Virginia. She opened an art gallery in
Washington D.C. and started Portfolio, a magazine about art and
literature. She also was politically active and founded the organization
Women Against War. She later bought a castle north of Rome that gave her
the title of Principessa, and later mountain-top retreats in Cyprus
and Delphi. Thus she had homes in Bowling Green, Virginia, in Washington,
D.C., a sprawling apartment at 137 East Fifty-Fourth Street in New York City,
as well as her residences in Europe.
Henry Miller and Opus Pistorum
In Paris during 1933, Caresse had met Henry Miller. When he returned to
the U.S. in 1940, he confessed to Caresse his lack of success in getting
his work published. Miller's autobiographical book Tropic of Cancer was
banned in the U.S. as pornographic, and he could get no other work published.
She invited him to take a room in her New York apartment where she infrequently
lived, which he accepted, though she did not provide him with money.
Desperate for cash, Miller fell to churning out pornography on commission
for an Oklahoma oil baron, but after two 100-page stories that brought him
$200, he could do no more. Now he wanted to tour the United States by car
and write about it. He got a $750 advance, and persuaded the oil man's agent
to advance him another $200. He was preparing to leave on the trip but still
have not provided the work promised. He thought then of Caresse Crosby. She
was already pitching in ideas and pieces of writing to Anaïs Nin's New York
City smut club for fun, not money. Caresse was facile and clever, wrote easily
and quickly, with little effort.
Caresse accepted Henry's proposal. She wrote the title given her by Henry
Miller "Opus Pistorum" at the top, and started right in. Henry
left for his car tour of America. Caresse churned out 200 pages and the collector's
agent asked for more.
Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted-no literary aspirations-just
plain sex. In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller.
Caresse churned out another 200 pages, spending her time writing while her
husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night.
In her diary, Anaïs Nin observed that everyone who wrote pornography with
her wrote out of a self that was opposite to her or his identity, but identical
with his desire. Polly or Caresse experienced years of social constraints
imposed by her upper-class association in New York. She had a doomed and
troublesome romanticism with Harry Crosby. She participated in a decade or
more of intellectual lovers in Paris during the 1920s. Perhaps it was a release
for Caresse just to take love as casual lust and let it go at that.
Her Later Years
In 1950 Caresse divorced Bert Young and moved to Italy where she planned
to create an artists colony. She published an autobiography in 1953 called The
Passionate Years. In the last years of her life, Crosby tried to build
a world citizen center that would bring together political leaders and the
artistic community in Greece and then in Cyprus. She was frustrated by political
obstacles. She hired her friend Buckminster Fuller to design
the structure, but in 1970, she died in Rome of heart failure at age 79,
before its completion.
Like Harry, Caresse Crosby is remembered primarily for her activities as
a publisher, but she is also remembered as the inventor of the first modern
bra. Caresse died in relative obscurity, but she
lived long enough to see the bra go through a number of transformations and
become immensely popular all over the world.
The Modern Bra
All kinds of bras have been created for every conceivable purpose, to do
all the things that corsets have done in previous generations: minimize,
uplift, show cleavage, maximize, or plain show off. Training bras for newly
developing young girls seem like an oxymoron, and in reality aren't really
meant for support as much as for camouflage. Jogging or sports bras are a
more recent innovation for the woman who wants to work out, and some are
meant to be worn as outerwear. Statistics show the average American woman
today owns six bras. Out of those six, one of is a strapless bra and one
is a color other than white.
Despite all of the many advances and improvements in brassieres, perhaps
a Surgeon General's warning is still required. In 1994, Berbel Zumner, age
23, was walking through a park in Vienna. Berbel had large breasts and wore
a brassiere with underwire support to support her ample frame. She was killed
when lightening struck her brassiere.
[in 2004, it was reported that a movie about Harry and Caresse was in development
by Fine Line Features. Only a director has been attached to the project,
and no completion date has been set.]
References and Sources
American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 1997, Volume 12/Number
4
Daily Record (Scotland) 21 October 1994
Mary Phelps Jacob Inventor
of the Week Archive November 2001 (December 2003)
"Caresse Crosby, Infield." Cosmic
Baseball Association, 1998 (December 2003)
Brassieres:
An Engineering Miracle From Science and Mechanics, February,
1964.
By Edward Nanas
"The Brassiere." Useless
Information. (December 2003)
Bra
sizes Sizes.com July 11, 2001 (retreived June 2004)
Edward Germain, Editor, Harry Crosby, Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries
of Harry Crosby. Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press. 1977.
Conover, Anne. Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun
to Roccasinibalda. Santa
Barbara, California: Capra Press,
1989.
Wolff, Geoffrey Black Sun. Random House: New York. 1976.
Cox, Shelley "Introduction: The Black Sun Press," ICarbS 3:2
(1977), 3-4.
Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek. Patently Female (John Wiley,
2002) p. 134-139.
Caresse Crosby The Passionate Years (Ecco Press).
A
Brief History Of The Nipple, by Amil
Niazi. November 15, 2005 (December 21, 2005)
Biographical
Sketch, Southern Illinois State University
Freeman, Susan K. Femininity
and Fashion since the Victorian Era Journal of Women's History 16.4 (2004)
191-206 (Accessed November 2006)
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