No Rollers, No Girdles

By Barbara Groark

What does feminism mean to me? Class, this is our topic for today.

There is the equal pay for equal work part. One summer job I had after high school was in the Wage and Salary section of a major corporation, and I saw for myself the separate wage scales for men and women. This is one of those things kids today find hard to believe, but I also found it offensive then. When I asked the boss about it, he shrugged his shoulders and held out both hands and said, “I didn’t make the rules.” He seemed to agree with me on the unfairness of it, but could do nothing about what the whole general culture and corporate policy had agreed to.

I guess we quieter types can thank the noisier types of the sixties and seventies for bringing some changes about, no matter what we may think of some particular issues. Also, the Catholic school system seemed to prepare us girls to live up to the same general rules as boys, even if there were natural gender differences in some areas. One of my female bosses in the seventies went somewhere each month to have something done to herself so she wouldn’t have a monthly period. Most women ignored that one as unrealistic, but recently I noticed the concept has returned to the general culture, along with the other strange rearrangements of ourselves that are possible now. I hope most people ignore them again.

But possibly more important for the world at large was the invention and mass production of the hand-held hair dryer, which helped eliminate the heavily criticized wearing of daytime and nighttime hair rollers, as well as the discarding of the girdle as a ‘proper foundation garment’ (a term from Sister Coletta’s Clothing Construction I Class).

The rollers I wore in high school to straighten my hair – soup can size and all over my head - made me look like a space alien, or a device to guide the landings of planes. I once saw in a museum a Nigerian head rest: a wooden block women would have at the neck as they lay down at night so they would not ruin the elaborate braided hairdos they had had constructed. That’s how my sisters and I rolled up our pillows at night, so they could be at our necks and below our ears and we would not have to lean the head and rollers against anything. It took some real planning to change positions.

Thank heavens for the Civil Rights Movement. It freed curly-haired people of all types. It took me a few years to go all the way to natural, but I was finally free!

My nieces are straightening their hair now again, with the brush-out and hand dryer method, which is a lot of arm work, and I tried that for a little while, but stopped. More variety of straight and curly and short and long seems to be allowed by fashion than in earlier times. A rainy day is not such a disaster as it used to be.

The girdle was an item of women’s underwear which could be seen as a transitional following the strictures of the old corset and freedom of the ‘no bra’ seventies and ‘no underwear at all’ nineties. Slips were next to be discarded, and then entered the push-up bra and thong 2000s. The last seems to be fading from favor as just too uncomfortable. I haven’t bought new underwear since 1998.

I once attended a demonstration of the Gibson Girl era of dress: 1890-1910, a time when women first started appearing as office secretaries, the corset era, when the ideal was the hourglass figure. Who cared if you couldn’t breathe? The attraction to men at that time was supposed to be the narrow waistline. Were men actually asked? The featured speaker at the demonstration came on stage in ankle boots, long dark A-line skirt, and shirtwaist blouse – white cotton with ruffled high neck and long ‘leg-o-mutton’ sleeves, tucked in at the waist, a lot like the gathered, pouf-shouldered sleeves of the 1970s. Or was that the 80s? Then she started peeling off layers: blouse, overshirt, corset, undershirt, to the long chemise – this was a summer ensemble. Then she put it all on again and explained each step. By the end, most of the audience was feeling absolutely no nostalgia for the Gilded Age. And in that era, men were wearing a lot of layers as well: shirt, undershirt, vest, tie, and jacket. Laborers were an exception, but if you were trying to get ahead, you were imitating your betters, even if you were a maid, and that meant lots of layers of clothing, which may have been meant to convey prosperity – you could afford the cloth. There were also old medical theories, later discarded, about covering your skin to avoid disease.

Younger women discarded corsets about the same time as the advent of the car and the vote for women, but the bra was not invented in France till the 1930s. So the twenties were looking a lot like the seventies, ladies’ underwear-wise.

Do you remember in high school there were several times the Guidance Office put out a directive to girls requesting they did not wear colorful, flower-power or bright, solid-colored bras because you could see the colors through our white uniform blouses, and that was a little disturbing to the male teachers, or so it was presented to us. I went to pastel in compliance. The white or beige old-fashioned standards were out of the question, too much like mom’s and grandmom’s underwear. I’m more understanding of mom and grandmom today. They had other things to do and think about besides their underwear.

Do you find even today that high school girls are competing in clothing and underwear, as revealed in gym class, with other girls rather than trying to draw the attention of boys, or especially male teachers? And don’t most boys who are allowed to be themselves not need to be hit with a bludgeon in order to think about girls?

However, despite a swing back to discomfort in underwear, since the sixties and seventies, there seems to be more of a brother/sister bond between kids in school, and people at work, and that’s an improvement from our high school time, when there was a lot more discomfort between the sexes, although other people seemed to have a little less trouble than I did. And the soccer-girl ponytail and easy up-do that have been around for twenty years or so is both easy and mildly traditional looking.

Time marches on, which is mostly a relief. I’m a little amazed to see the person in the mirror I see today. Cuts take longer to heal. I take soy milk with my morning cereal to control hot flashes. The last time I was in a lingerie department, there was something called shapewear, containing lots of Lycra, that is supposed to do all the things a girdle used to do – give you a waistline and keep the fat contained and disguised as firm muscle – but without feeling like a brick wall from the outside or from the wearer’s perspective. Seems like a lot of responsibility for some underwear, and I haven’t bothered much with it, since Lycra seems hot, summer or winter, and the effect is pretty much negligible despite the hype.

So that means the gym, doesn’t it, girls and boys, if we don’t want to end up looking like Queen Victoria or J. P. Morgan. That means running and walking and dancing. That means keeping the weight down for a more comfortable, joint-healthy future. Maybe we can thank the seventies’ feminists for contributing to the good general health and clothing comfort of boomers of both sexes today and the good things that are happening in geriatric medicine for our parents’ generation.