OLD NEWS: Squeezed by the ties that bind

President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Margaret visited Camp Pike in North Little Rock in May 1918, sang her little heart out for the troops and said nothing controversial at all.
President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Margaret visited Camp Pike in North Little Rock in May 1918, sang her little heart out for the troops and said nothing controversial at all.

As chilly spring turns to armpit-drenching spring, at least we aren't sweating over corset rust.

One hundred years ago, Arkansas women apparently did. We know this thanks to ads for "The summer corset" -- Warner's Guaranteed Rust Proof Corset -- ads for which appeared often in Little Rock newspapers, including the May 5, 1918, Arkansas Gazette.

From earlier ads in the Arkansas Democrat, we know that these torso-cinching undergarments were sold with an "iron clad guarantee" of satisfaction, being so light and airy that women of even the amplest proportions should not object to wearing one.

Best of all you could dunk them in a tub -- use soap and water freely -- with nary a single sign of rust.

And here I was imagining that corsets were stiffed by whalebone, wood or dragon's teeth. But no, steel stays had become the rule in the second half of the 19th century, when a fancy corset might involve a pound of metal.

After the United States entered the Great War in Europe, the Army and Navy required so much metal for things such as belt buckles and battleships that a temporary federal agency took charge of distributing high-priority raw materials to industries and individual firms. Some online histories of the brassiere state that in 1917 this U.S. War Industries Board actually ordered women to stop wearing corsets to save steel and that they patriotically did. But this is gross exaggeration.

In "American Industry in the War, a Report of the War Industries Board," submitted to the president March 3, 1921, by the then-disbanded board's chairman Bernard M. Baruch, corsets are mentioned among long lists of manufactured items placed on conservation schedules.

"Under this procedure," the report states, "rationing and curtailment, involving substantial savings of iron or steel, was instituted during the summer and fall of 1918, over such industries as passenger automobiles, pianos, cutlery, stoves, enameled ware, refrigerators, clothes wringers, corsets, metal beds, boilers, radiators, baby carriages, gas stoves and appliances, tin plate, talking machines, agricultural implements, farm tractors, bicycles, electric heating apparatus, oil stoves, watches, watch cases, sewing machines, metal stamps, electric fans, safes and vaults, lawn mowers, pottery, padlocks, builder's hardware, scales and balances, sporting arms, cash registers, rat and animal traps, talking machine needles, ice cream freezers, vacuum cleaners, road making machinery, cast iron boilers and radiators."

The practice of using tin to weight silk dresses was ended.

The report also notes in passing that peacetime corset factories had converted to the manufacture of "medical corps belts and fencing masks."

Supposedly this federal oversight saved enough metal from not-created corsets alone to build one or two battleships, depending on which blog one quotes. But even if the effort built three battleships, the Gazette and Democrat throughout the war and on beyond remained replete with ads for corsets.

Whatever was said, Arkansas women didn't drop everything and strip.

Anyway, some brands, like Warner's corsets, were not stiffened with metal. They used Coraline, made from fibers of ixtle, a bromeliad.

Meanwhile there's lots of evidence that women were hectored into giving up other clothing habits.

A century ago this week, the 14th biennial convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs brought clubwomen from around the nation to Hot Springs. Its first afternoon was a "Conservation of Clothing Conference," beginning at 2:30 p.m. in the Hotel Eastman's ballroom, Miss Pearl McDonald, vice chairman, presiding.

Gazette staff correspondent Miss Leah Bradley opened her report from Hot Springs with a description of the frippery-shaming that ensued:

"Two-thirds of the women present are in blouses, covered with tawdry laces that would not live through the season and not alone is this unpatriotic, but they are not buying in fairness to the incomes of the husbands," Mrs. William Pedrick of Baltimore told the conservation of clothing conference here this afternoon ...

Incidentally, Mrs. Pedrick was dressed in a 3-year-old blue serge costume, very individual in outline.

Mrs. Alice Foster McCullock of Indiana, "a most attractive young woman," stood on a table to show off her "very attractive" plaid skirt, which she said was "particularly adapted for work on stepladders and other places where skirts are taboo."

Mrs. W.B. Sharp, said to be the best dressed woman in Texas, stood on a platform to model a 3-year-old costume that once had been a coat-suit, then a coat dress and finally a one-piece. And Miss Georgia Bacon of Massachusetts appeared in an 8-year-old dress that formerly had been a three-piece suit and that she had bought from a bargain counter and that had become, in effect, a Russian blouse costume.

It was a beautiful and serviceable piece of silk, in which Miss Bacon was most becoming as she stood before the admiring eyes of the audience.

The biennial moved on to more serious subjects. It agreed to ban formal black mourning for dead soldiers in favor of a simple armband, because elements of the dye were needed for the war. It resolved to dress sensibly and sanely. Also discussed were the perils of unionism and Mormonism, prison labor, conditions and wages of working women, divorce laws, feebleminded orphans, the needs of disabled soldiers.

Suffrage came up as a political undercurrent during the election of new officers, but under the federation's big parasol, women of greatly differing views were able to socialize and enjoy being on the town together.

But when a speaker at one session asked to see the hands of women who had unpatriotically bought new outfits for the convention, the message was clear: Dress and be judged.

A lot was asked of women in 1918. If they were young and pretty, it was their duty to sing. But mostly they must manage homes with modern perspicacity and thrift, sew for themselves and their children, keep gardens, attend uplifting programs, knit sweaters and roll bandages.

Those with the leisure to join clubs were to work together to combat social ills, improving conditions for children and the poor. They were all called to a high-minded womanhood full of duties.

This is a line of thought encouraged by looking at an array of individual faces in one of the photographs the Arkansas State Archives has posted online in its new gallery "Arkansas in the Great War Part II: The War at Home." (See arkansasonline.com/5718/faces.) These were members of the state Women's Council of Defense, appointed by Gov. Charles Brough to mobilize women to do whatever was needed while the men and boys were risking their lives in training cantonments or fighting in France.

These are the faces of women who are used to responsibility. And corsets.

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This ad for rust-proof corsets appeared May 5, 1918, in the Arkansas Gazette.

ActiveStyle on 05/07/2018

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