Drawer Two
Back To The First Drawer
| Ahead To The Third Drawer
Contents
A Legal Perspective
When I was in law school back in the pre-Internet 70's, the law school subscribed to an on-line legal research service whereby you could run any word or term through every reported case in the United States. Research assistants (which I was) got to use the service gratis. Naturally, I couldn't resist checking all of the decisions mentioning girdles. There were quite a few, falling into about three categories.
First, there were patent cases. There are a ton of patents out there on girdles.
Second, there were the smuggling and shoplifting cases. It seems a girdle is the location of choice for contraband.
Finally, there were the assault cases. There were two or three great cases where a would-be rapist couldn't get past a heavy duty girdle. Finding such reports was doubly satisfying.
-R.C.
How about digging up some of those cases for your curious brethren, R.C.? It would have to be pro bono, though...
Back to Top of Page
Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming!
Back in the early 1960's the Post Office's "Dead Letter Office" in New York City reportedly ran into a unique problem every summer. A lot of women's girdles always showed up in unmarked envelopes. Apparently, secretaries and receptionists in un-air-conditioned offices were taking off their girdles and stashing them in big mailing envelopes, which were inadvertantly collected by mail room staffs, mixed in with ordinary business mail, and deposited at the Post Office. This from some of the women who had actually contacted the Post Office about recovering their property. The Post Office supposedly had quite a collection.
-"P
I can support this story with an anecdote from my own past. Back in 1971, fresh out of college, I worked briefly in the back office of a brokerage firm, the only male among several women.
Among my colleagues was Maddie, the teletype operator. She had a high-pressure job... all the orders went through her fingertips, and when the market was active, she'd type for hours without relief, with brokers leaning in her face and hollering, "Did my trade go through?"
She could handle it, though. A 40-year-old single mother, she could have been the model for Carla, the acid-tongued waitress on "Cheers." She was very funny, and she could be sweet, but boy, you didn't want to mess with her.
Maddie and I got along well, and we stayed in touch for years after I left. She was nearly old enough to be my mother, but she talked and acted in ways I'd never before encountered in a middle-aged woman. Though she'd had a hard life, she'd managed to preserve her figure pretty well, and she was still young enough at heart to have a steady boyfriend with whom... she let me know... she did the deed on a regular basis.
Another thing interested me about Maddie: she wore fairly short dresses, and she always wore a panty girdle. How do I know? Well, I got plenty of glimpses, of course. We worked in close proximity, and there were lots of occasions when she bent down to retrieve files or papers. Couldn't help but notice, right?
Moreover, she came out and told me as much. One day, we were sitting eating lunch, griping about our boss, and I said something like, "You're not cutting her any slack today, are you?"
She said, "I'm just in a bad mood- my girdle is killing me."
Playing dumb, I asked, "Why don't you burn it? I thought you didn't need them anymore with pantyhose."
She said, "What... you want me to join the hang-over generation? No thanks."
"Hang-over?" I asked.
"Yeah- all these women who burned their girdles, now when they sit on a bar stool, they hang over."
We laughed, and she changed the subject. Later in the day, though, she made a joke, and I said, "Sounds like your mood has improved. I take it your girdle's not killing you anymore?"
She grinned and pointed to a small paper bag on her desk. "I took it off. See that bag? It's in there. When you see a woman carrying a paper bag after lunch, that means she took off her girdle and she's carrying it home in her lunch bag."
For the rest of the afternoon, it was hard to keep my eyes off that paper bag. Maddie left the room a couple of times, but I never sunk so low as to open it to see if she were telling the truth. Even a hormone-crazed fetishist has some standards.
-Virginian
Back to Top of Page
On The Record
Many thanks to Percival for this contribution:
Having been a vinyl record collector for a number of years, as well as a life long girdle devotee, I've come across a few examples of girdle references on record.
Selma Diamond Talks and Talks--at one point a long anecdote ends with Miss Diamond thanking Jack Parr for helping her buy a girdle. Story ends with the aside, "It was a good girdle, though!"
Totie Fields (comedy album) second side. An offhand remark is responded to with a single high note from her pianist. "Oooh!" she says, "That bounced off my rubber girdle!"
Erma Bombeck (her only spoken word LP) tells the story of walking into a lingerie shop and seeing a cute little girdle marked One Size Fits All. The girdle has a floral pattern on it featuring little rose buds. Her interest and/or puzzlement leads to inquiries with the sales person. "What happens when a small size woman puts it on? What happens when medium sized woman puts it on?" And so on, until she finally ponders a very large woman, wherein the saleslady responds that the rose buds would bloom and the petals would drop off!
Rusty Warren--Bottoms Up! Usually known for her concerns with "Knockers," Rusty ends this album with a sung praise of the female derriere in which she instructs women to "Throw Their Girdles Away" and let their butts shake all over the place. (She was working against us?)
-Percival
I can think of a couple of others, both novelty items:
The Spike Jones Orchestra did a number about a horse race titled, Beetle Bomb. The horses all have names that lend themselves to wordplay. As the track announcer calls the race, at one point he intones, "And now it's Girdle in the stretch..."
On Allan Sherman's My Son The Folk Singer (or was it the followup, My Son The Celebrity?) he sings a parody of Molly Malone, wherein the streets of Dublin are so narrow that the heroine's "girdle keeps scraping the walls on each side."
-Virginian
A few more entries that may be of interest to you:
Madonna-Vogue-12-inch single. The cover photo features an absolutely exquisite profile of the material girl in a black open-bottom corselette with garters holding up stockings. The outfit notwithstanding, our heroine is seen in a pose that obviously reflects her pleasure in being girdled. Hooray for Madonna!
Nanette Workman-self titled- Big Tree Records. The cover features women lounging around in boas and lingerie suggesting the waiting room in a brothel. Flip to back cover: One of the ladies is sitting with a leg up revealing a white long-leg panty girdle with lace cuff. Small, subtle pleasure, but nice to stumble across in a used record shop!
For total kitsch: Pajama Slave Dancers-Blood, Sweat, and Beers! Cover features sex kitten lounging on leopard skin in a black bustier and white, lace-up open bottom girdle with garters holding up stockings with holes and runs. Terrible music, but interesting fetish art!
-Percival
Since you're collecting references to girdles in songs and such, I was reminded of what just might be the original. In "Annie Get Your Gun," the well-known song "Anything You Can Do..." contains all kinds of back and forth stuff, like "I can shoot a partridge with a single cartridge." "I can shoot a sparrow with a bow and arrow." But the one that caught my ear when I heard the song recently was "I can jump a hurdle." "I can wear a girdle." (!)
-Bill
Back to Top of Page
I Read It In Reader's Digest, Part Two
In pondering the subject of girdles, an old story (from Reader's Digest, I think) came back to me. This is supposed to be true.
In Great Britain during World War II nearly everything was in short supply. This applied especially to strategically vital materials such as rubber. Accordingly, some obscure government ministry or other issued a series of pamphlets on how best to care for clothing items so as to prolong their useful life for as long as possible.
On the subject of rubber girdles, it occurred to the writer that most of the damage to the garments occurred as they were being taken off, and so one pamphlet contained this advice on girdle removal: "A girdle is best removed with a nice, quick jerk."
Of course, readers saw the double entendre in this sentence and complained about it, so the next issue of the pamphlet was revised. This time, it announced: "A girdle is best removed by a good strong yank."
-Bill
Back to Top of Page
Hippie Chicks in Girdles?
Looking back, the years 1967 and 1968 seem a golden era for girdle aficionados: after miniskirts put them on display, before pantyhose put them out of business. As an example of the sort of incongruous situation one encountered back then, I can point to one girl who sort of fancied herself the "class hippie." She hung out in the Village, wore grannie glasses, chunky wooden beads, and ridiculously short skirts. How short? Well, every time she moved, her micro-micro-mini gave everyone in the room a good look at the panty girdle and gartered stockings beneath.
The concept of "hippie chick in a girdle" may be hard to believe today, but that was the way things were that year.
-Virginian
Oh yes, I remember the "girdled hippie chick" phenomenon quite well. Though I never dressed in hippie fashion, I did consider myself a literary bohemian type and did my share of hanging out in the Village. One of my best friends in 1967 was the class hippie chick, a lovely girl with long Pre-Raphaelite hair and what was actually an interestingly beat-hippy transition wardrobe. Though she was quite slender in a willowy way, and though she was the only girl in the class who had a clear preference for tights over stockings (usually black), she had to undress in gym class too and reveal to the rest of us that for all of her unconventionality, she had a nifty collection of size small or even x-small panty girdles that she never went without. I honestly think that the reason why girdles were so absolutely universal (I genuinely do not remember a single girl in my high school who did not wear them every day at school) were those gym classes.
There was no way for you not to wear one without every girl in your gym class knowing and presumably judging. You could dress in a wide variety of ways, you could even live in a wide variety of ways, and think a wide variety of things. But if you didn't wear a girdle, you would be known as the one girl in the school who didn't wear one. And in front of that particular unpitying audience, that would be a very hard thing for an adolescent to deal with.
It's a little horrifying in retrospect. But as Susan B. pointed out, you didn't think of it as such. You thought no more of it than you thought of the necessity to close your mouth when you were eating. I do remember seeing a poll in Seventeen magazine around 1965 that indicated that 85% of high school girls wore them regularly. I still to this day don't know where they found the 15% who didn't.
And yes, when things changed around 1970-1, girdles disappeared as required garments, but they hardly went away entirely. In addition to the small number of die-hards who continued to wear them regularly, there were still plenty of women (most, I think) who kept a few girdles around to wear with really clingy dresses, suits, and on special occasions. They really didn't disappear entirely for younger women with decent figures until control top pantyhose became at least moderately useful in about 1977.
-Suzanne
My guess is the girdle took some time to disappear totally. Because I was basically in a hippie community in 1971, I didn't have much exposure. But I had a job in early 1971, transcribing and typing for a bunch of graduate students, all of whom dressed extremely casually per the norm. But one day, one of the women had some kind of pre-prelim, some sort of official affair in front of her committee. I sat in this room, where the students hung out to shoot the shit when they didn't feel like working. This woman came into the room and was being her normal self, talking with the others. Except this day she was in a skirt; probably because it was such a rare occasion, she forgot her "modesty," and routinely exposed about 3 inches of her white panty girdle the whole time she was in the room. And this was in "radical" Berkeley! So I would think it wasn't so much that the girdle was totally gone, as that people just didn't dress up, but when they did, they went back to their "roots."
-Tim
Back to Top of Page
Sex In Advertising, Fifties-Style
From The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957
While sex was soft-pedaled for marketing in depth, its use as a simple eye stopper took more daring forms. The public had become jaded and permissive. The brassiere and girdle appeals, for example, became bolder, with overtones of masochism, body exhibitionism, and so on. One ad widely exhibited showed a lovely girl with blond tresses, dressed only in her bra and girdle, being dragged by the hair across the floor by a modern caveman. The gay title was "Come out of the bone age, darling!" Another girdle ad showed a girl and her boy-friend at a Coney Island type of wind tunnel with the wind blowing her skirt above her head and exposing her entire mid-section, which, of course, was encased in the girdle being offered for sale. She was giggling modestly.
Back to Top of Page
Oh, Come On, Now!
A bit of irony: note the rhetorical similarities in the following passages.
"Garter belts were the greatest joke ever concocted by man for woman to wear. I remember the scars from the fasteners engraved on my legs from junior high on. Just to look pretty in hose. What torture!"
-Quoted in What We Wore, Ellen Melnikoff, 1984
"As many of us assume pantyhose and mammogram machines were developed by men (with no experience of what actually using those objects is like), this ad must have been developed (and OK'd) by a group of non-quilters...
-Erica A. Corbett, posting in Usenet group rec.crafts.textiles.quilting, 1997
Funny how the times change but the rhetorical devices stay the same. Somehow I get this image of a Cro-Magnon woman griping some Paleolithic morning, "Ugh- mammoth fur robe scratchy. Designed by man to make woman mad."
-Virginian
Back to Top of Page
Tactful Deception
Sharon G. writes on Usenet...
I am a former bra and girdle buyer for a large chain of department stores and I bet I could top any one of your returned-merchandise stories.
I say "bra and girdle buyer" because it was during the 70's when even skinny ladies wore girdles so, almost every female human was a customer. (Editor's note- are you sure about the timing, Sharon?)
One thing I learned early on when because the staff in the store was all out sick, except one overworked lady, I had to do some fittings, which I was trained to do...and I was in my early 20's at the time.
This robust lady came in for a girdle which went by waist sizes. I measured her in the fitting room when she was undressed... you never measure over clothing and belts and the old girdle... and she measured a 36-inch waist. Mistake was I mentioned the number and she got highly indignant and told me she was a 27- inch waist.
When I told the story to the sales girl, she said, "Oh, that was Mrs So-and-So, she always returned her girdles because the elastic stretched out so fast." The fitters would tell her she was a 27... that is what she wanted to hear, and sell her a 36, with the size cut out. This stopped her from blowing out her badly-fitted girdles and she still thought she was a 27 waist.
Back to Top of Page
Vanna White Joins the Club!
I was watching Wheel of Fortune here in the Toledo area at 7:00 pm our time and at the end of the show Vanna (who was wearing black, skin-tight toreador type pants) said coyly to Pat, "I have a secret."
Pat asked what it was and Vanna replied, "I'm wearing a foundation garment."
Pat asked what she meant and Vanna said, "I'm wearing a girdle."
The sweetheart!
These things are not said gratuitously; do you suppose Vanna has signed a contract with one of the foundation manufactureres and this is the beginning of an ad campaign featuring sweet Vanna in girdles?
-Phil
Back to Top of Page
A People Watcher
Some very interesting celebrity photos in the September 15, 1997, issue of People magazine. The photos can be found on page 149 (Kristen Johnson of Third Rock From the Sun, what is that under her dress?) and page 151 (Glenn Close in what the caption states is a firm foundation).
It looks like we are not alone and even Hollywood is getting into the act!
-Newt
Back to Top of Page
Continue to Drawer Three
Return to Main Girdle Drawer Page
Page designed and maintained by 
Originally Posted April 20, 1997