Mary Phelps Jacob
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Image:1929-caresse-crosby.jpg The first modern brassiere to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance was a bra invented by a New York socialite named Mary Phelps Jacob in 1910. Born on 20 April 1891 in New Rochelle, New York, "Polly" was the daughter of a prominent New England family. Her ancestry included William Bradford, the Plymouth Colony's first governor and Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat.
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 uninterested student. One commentator writes that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams." (Wolff).
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Marries into Boston Society
In 1915, Polly Jacob married Richard 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.
Up to this time, women's undergarments included the corset, which sometimes was used to narrow an adult woman's waist to 17, 15 or even fewer inches. The corset is attributed to Catherine de' Medici, wife of King Henry 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 1910, at age 19, Mary Phelps Jacob had just purchased a sheer evening gown for one of her social events. At that time, the only acceptable undergarment was a corset stiffened with whalebone. Polly found that the whalebones visibly poked out around the plunging neckline and under the sheer fabric. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, she worked with her maid to fashion two silk handkerchiefs together with some pink ribbon and cord. The corset's reign was beginning to topple.
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.
First Patent for a Brassiere
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, but abruptly changed to the present breast enhancing form 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 Marries Harry Crosby and Joins the Paris Intellectuals
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 Jacob Peabody's transformation was her introduction and eventual marriage to Harry 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 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 9 September 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.
Founds the Black Sun Press With Her Husband
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). They 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.
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.
Founded Artists Colony in Europe
In 1940 Caresse divorced Bert Young and moved to Italy by 1950 where she planned to create an artists colony. She published an autobiography in 1953 called The Passionate Years. Caresse died in relative obscurity on January 24, 1970, but she lived long enough to see the bra go through a number of transformations and become immensely popular all over the world.
External links
- Mary Phelps Jacob Inventor of the Week Archive November 2001 (December 2003)
- "Caresse Crosby, Infield." Cosmic Baseball Association, 1998 (December 2003)
- "The Brassiere." Useless Information. (December 2003)
This article is originally based upon material originally written by Brian Phelps and licensed for use in Wikipedia under the GFDL.