7. First Girdle Purchase
Like many women, I'm sure, I identified profoundly with what Susan described of the ritual of the first girdle purchase. Like her, I was a younger sister, and so I was more than prepared for what was going to happen, and, like her, I could scarcely contain my eagerness. I still can't believe that I had the self-control to never secretly try on one of my mother's or sisters' girdles, but I did. And so that spring afternoon in 1962 when, in the company of my mother and sisters, I first put on a girdle, it was my first time.
I am still not entirely certain what it was about beginning to wear a girdle that made it such a compelling feminine rite of passage as compared to my first period, or my first bra. I speculate that it might be explained by the fact that a first period is an introduction to biological womanhood, something 1962 was still somewhat embarassed about, and a first bra was somehow prosaic and even a bit disappointing. I remember my first bra making me feel something like an awkward imposter. It made me acutely aware of how little there was to put in it.
But the first girdle, for me, and for, I suspect many other women, was a genuine entry into well, for lack of a better term, ladyhood. It immediately made me feel, walk, sit, and act like a grown woman, a lady. It was an entry, as it were, into womanhood as a cultural experience, rather than a biological one. It was, at some level, an acceptance of the challenge and rigors of being a lady, and it was interwoven, in my imagination, with all the ribbons and trappings of femininity.
Like Susan, and about 90% of women at the time, my first girdle was purchased the week before Easter. There was something profoundly pagan about Easter (as my Jewish agnostic father often observed to my Polish Catholic mother). It was, in my family, in addition to a sincere religious festival, a pagaent of dressing up and feasting. In my mother's extended family, with a lot of girls, it also was a kind of ritualistic presentation of the stages of maturity of the nubile females. Each year, the finery each girl was allowed to wear was more grown up than what she had been allowed to wear the previous Easter. For all of the girl cousins, the great interest was who was wearing stockings for the first time, who was wearing a girdle, lipstick, perfume, heels, for the first time.
And so, sometime during Holy Week, every year, my mother and her four daughters would go downtown to a marvellous little feminine jewel box of a corset shop, whose windows were always filled with the latest and most tasteful girdles, bras, and slips. This store was owned by a very elegant and romantically European woman, a refugee from Prague, and her windows gave the main street of our town what little it had of romance and eroticism.
On that afternoon in 1962, we five women were all dressed up. We had an appointment to buy dress-up girdles for the girls for all the dress-up occasions of the spring, which included parties and weddings as well as Easter. We went into the back fitting room, a practical room with sewing machines and tape measures and mirrors, which nevertheless also had a delightfully feminine ambiance. My mother kept her grey suit on (she bought her girdles separately, when we weren't around), but we took our dresses off.
Because of the specialness of the occasion, I was fitted first. My sisters were sweetly encouraging and were also not above inserting some gentle humor into the situation. I felt like a princess being dressed for a ball as Mrs. ___ carefully measured me and evaluated my figure with a maternal seriousness. I was enormously gratified when she made it clear to my mother and my giggling sisters that I was certainly ready to wear a girdle. And I concealed my disappointment when she observed that it was not, however, necessary for me quite yet to start wearing them every day ( I was resolved to change my mother's mind on that score as soon as I got her alone). She brought out several girdles for me to try.
I was gratified to see that they were "real" girdles, not "pretend" girdles for a twelve year old, and I mentally resolved that I would walk out of there with a particularly firm satin-fronted, hook and zip long-leg panty girdle that was just like one owned by my eldest sister. That's the one I tried on first. And when I had it on, I felt that it had all been worth waiting for. It was far more comfortable than I had ever expected, and the tight, smooth, held-in feeling was far more pleasant, and to be honest, arousing, than I had ever anticipated. I remembered thinking that I would have to wear something like this all my life and that I didn't mind at all. Now I'm a woman, I felt, and I was sorry that I wouldn't be able to wear it out of the store.
Although I tried on a few of the others, we did buy that one, and that was the girdle I wore all day at Easter, with a wonderfully silky pair of sheer nylons, a delightful cotton full-skirted dress, and my first pair of (1") heels. After our visit to Mrs. ___'s corset shop, we had a ladylike lunch at a restaurant, but that depressed me a little because I was not wearing a girdle and all of the rest of them were. Still, that was the last year it would be like that. I had grown up.
Oh, I know that there's probably something trivial and silly about such an attachment and such associations. And I know that many women did not have the pleasant and comfortable experiences I had, and now continue to have with girdles. But the imagination works in strange and wonderful ways. And I'm glad I have this. I'm glad that it has become part of my adult identity and my relationship with my husband. I only hope that others have things like this, to enrich their lives.
More women recall their first girdle.
Continue to How Can Anyone Tell If You're Wearing A Girdle?
Copyright 1995 by Suzanne. Used with permission of the author.
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Originally Posted April 20, 1997