Immodest Modesty

Underwear is worn solely for the purpose of adornment, not necessity. As the most intimate form of dress, underwear has a myriad of meanings and connotations. During the nineteenth century, underwear began to convey a sense of immodest modesty in terms of female sexuality. Nobody actually needs underwear. The significance of underwear is not what it does, but what it means. The changes in women’s underwear during the nineteenth century brought about change in the social constructs of women’s sexuality.

Underwear as we know it today has only been around since the nineteenth century which implies that underwear was not deemed a necessity. Before the nineteenth century, undergarments consisted of shifts and stockings that were worn by both genders for warmth and comfort.[1]  Until the twentieth century, women wore open underwear.[2]  This open construction provided easy access to the female body which shows that the underwear was used as a way to control women’s sexuality. The association of divided garments or trousers with masculinity, and undivided garments or skirts with femininity, influenced the design, use and implications of women’s underwear. [3]

The gendered division of clothing characterized underwear until the nineteenth century, when women began to wear underwear constructed of two leg tubes attached to a waistband.[4]  Before this time, the two leg tubes underwear were only worn by men for warmth and to protect outer garments from wearing effects of direct bodily contact.[5] The women’s version of this underwear was feminized by fabric, ornamentation, and open-crotch construction, the separate leg sections of nineteenth-century underwear were joined only at the waistband.[6] The open seam extended below the waistband, front to back, exposing inner thighs as well as genitals.[7]

Figure 1 Early 20th Century Open- Crotch Drawers. Artefact 982.183.1 Courtesy Ontario Royal Museum.

The new female garment’s design upheld gender distinctions regulated by dress that a divided garment for women challenged, and by the mid-1800s open drawers were a required component of respectable middle-class women’s dress in the United States and industrializing Western Europe. The transition from open to closed underwear demonstrates how the duality of modesty and eroticism operates in social constructs responsive to and productive of changes in understanding women’s sexuality.[8]

While the shift in underwear showed the duality of modesty and eroticism, it also demonstrated the difference in views of men and women. Distinctive male and female dress represented the different daily lives of middle-class men and women. Flashy or extravagant fashion was considered feminine.^[9] This was especially true for the middle class, which sought its own identity by distinguishing itself through manners and morals from the aristocracy and the peasant classes.^[10] Divided undergarments became part of women’s fashionable dress during the early nineteenth century, a period of heightened gender differentiation, when bourgeois values replaced those of deposed aristocracies throughout the West.[11]

The newly redefined middle class also differentiated between the underwear that was acceptable for young girls and women to wear which communicated a shift from being a young child to being sexually available. Differences between nineteenth-century girls’ and women’s dress reveal the sexual meanings of crotch construction in women’s underwear. Underwear for girls transformed into short breeches and pantalettes.[12] A rite of passage for girls in transition to adulthood was abandoning pantalettes.[13] Visible drawers worn by most girls under short dresses had a closed crotch, distinct from the drawers their mothers and older sisters were beginning to wear in the nineteenth century’s early decades.[14]

Because young girls wore closed- crotch underwear, it encouraged girls to participate in active play, solidifying the message of young women’s shift to wearing open drawers, corsets, and other layers of underclothing. This also shows that young women were not supposed to be active. Their constricting undergarments made it hard to move and difficult to perform many tasks. Putting on adult apparel restricted movement, and evokes ‘coming-of-age’ rituals that in many cultures assign the status of potential sexual partner. Wearing open-crotch drawers was a signal, if not reality, to a young woman and the men in her community that she was sexually available.

Young girls were not sexually available, so it was acceptable for their underwear to be exposed below the dress hem; however, this differed greatly for young women who were sexually available. Underwear worn by young women during the nineteenth century’s first decades extended below the dress hem in order to display their lace trim.[15] The exposure of girls’ underwear below dress hems was condoned.[16] However, this practice among young women proved controversial for moral reasons, and by 1820 drawer length receded so they were hidden when a woman was fully dressed.[17] By the 1840s, open-crotch drawers, made of lightweight fabrics such as muslins and lawns, were worn by most women of the middle classes.[18]

With the changes in the fabrics from which the underwear were constructed, there was also a change in the type of skirts that women wore. In the 1850s, women began to wear broad bell shaped skirts, achieved through many heavy layers of petticoats suspended from a tightly corseted waist.[19] Because underwear had an open crotch, if a woman lost her balance completely, her lower legs might remain covered but her upper thighs and genitals may become exposed. Despite this much remarked upon potential exposure– whether of naked flesh or of legs and crotch shielded by fabric – a woman dressed in open crotch underwear conformed to contemporary notions of propriety and modesty.

The growing volume of the bell-shaped skirt silhouette from the 1840s to the 1860s stimulated further male interest in viewing the lower female body region hidden in the increasing space created by layers of petticoats and hoops. The changing fashions in underwear encouraged this interest, though underwear also protected bare legs from the direct gaze of men as long as the wearer remained upright. Two images, both titled ‘A Street View’ and published in the New York City newspaper the Weekly Rake in the 1840s, illustrate men’s fascination with viewing the nether regions hidden beneath women’s long and full skirts.[20] One illustration (Figure 2) shows a woman on a street who has just fallen and landed on her bottom, exposing legs spread apart above her in the air. She wears both stockings and drawers, but a well-dressed man standing above her is staring directly between her legs.

Although women’s underwear was supposed to cover the women’s nether region when upright, it provided no protection if the women happened to fall which added to male fixation. At this point the underwear was a tool that enabled men to get a quick glance of a woman’s nether regions. This correlates shows how gender prescribing access to power. Men had power over women in all regards, including women’s sexuality and women’s undergarments.

Figure 2 'A Street View', The Weekly Rake (1842). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

During the time of increased volume in the volume of women’s skirts and a male fixation with viewing women’s nether regions, there was also a great change in the manufacturing of textiles. The advent of the textile mill and the commercialization of the textile industry also brought about new styles in women’s underwear. The development of new dyes, machinery, and textiles had a great effect on the clothing industry, including women’s undergarments. The inventions of the toothed cotton gin, the power loom, and the foot- and- water powered machinery in the late eighteenth century made factory production of cloth possible.[21] It also made clothing more available and styles spread quicker from the upper class to the lower classes.

Chemical dyes for undergarments were introduced in the 1860s which promoted the idea that colored underwear made readily available by the advancements in the textile industry was not only made for concealment, but also to be seen. This novel underwear was frilly, richly colored with decorations that made them designed, constructed, and worn with the idea that they were meant to be seen.[22] These new underwear was meant to conceal and also display the area that it was concealing. The change in women’s underwear from unadorned to highly adorned shows a shift in the views of women’s sexuality. This decorative underwear promoted the idea of immodest modesty.  The immodest modesty produced a of sense eroticism by drawing attention to the concealed, yet highly adorned, part of the body. The change in women’s underwear displays is a change in style of dress in order to be sexually attractive to men. The adornment on the underwear meant that a woman was supposed to show off her underwear to a man.

The changes in women’s undergarments communicated the idea that women could be both respectable and express their sexuality. “As moral concerns shifted and Victorian structures of behavior became less compelling, an increasing number of women claimed the right to sexual desire, pleasure, and respectability.”[23] It was unheard of for women to be able to possess sexual desire, pleasure, and respectability simultaneously.

To add to the respectability of women’s sexuality, a few medical and psychological frameworks that regard female sexuality were gaining legitimacy.[24] For Victorian scientists, sexuality represented a “biological urge to procreate and further evolution.”[25] This view of sexuality was revolutionary; before this time, white, middle-class women were viewed as sexually passionless.^[26] This view was beginning to change with the advent of adorned underwear. Women’s sexuality was gaining legitimacy in medical and scientific journals of the nineteenth century. Female sexuality was also becoming more recognized through the commercialization of women’s sexual expression.

During this period, consumer culture was commercializing female sexual expression. In western culture, gender prescribes distinct behaviors for men and women, and regulates access to power.^[27] Underwear was a tool that was used to control women’s sexuality, and when the underwear began to change, so did the social constructs regarding female sexuality. The view that women were passionless and possessed no sexuality was starting to shift as women began to express their sexuality by wearing underwear that was meant to conceal and also be seen. The open- crotch, highly adorned undergarments of the nineteenth century reinforce the idea that female sexuality was becoming more and more acceptable and recognized.

Bibliography

1.      Fields, J. "Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800–1930." Gender & History 14, no. 3 (November 2002): 492-515. History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed September 29, 2011).

2.      “Fashion,” http://library.thinkquest.org/C004179/fashion.htm.

Archive." Textile History 40, no. 2: 185-201. History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed September 29, 2011).

3.      Fields, Jill. "Drawers." In An Intimate Affair: women, lingerie, and sexuality. Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.

4.      Houlbrook, Matt. 2010. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. Victorian Studies. 53, no. 1: 183-185,193.

5.      Storr, Merl. 2002. Classy Lingerie. Feminist Review. 18-36.

           

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[1] Storr, Merl. 2002. Classy Lingerie. Feminist Review. 18.

[2] Storr, Classy Lingerie. 18

[3] Storr, Classy Lingerie. 18.

[4] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 493.

[5] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 494.

[6] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 495.

[7] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 495

[8] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 498.

[9] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 498.

[10] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 501.

[11] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 500.

[12] Fields. “Drawers.” 10.

[13] Fields. “Drawers.” 10.

[14] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 502.

[15] Fields. “Drawers.” 11.

[16] Fields. “Drawers.” 11.

[17] Fields. “Drawers.” 11.

[18] Fields. “Drawers.” 11.

[19] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 497.

[20] Fields. “Erotic Modesty.” 499.

[21] “Fashion,” http://library.thinkquest.org/C004179/fashion.htm.

Archive." Textile History 40, no. 2: 185-201.

[22] Fields. “Drawers.” 22.

[23] Fields. “Drawers.” 22.

[24] Fields. “Drawers.” 22.

[25] Houlbrook, Matt. 2010. Desire: A History of European Sexuality. Victorian Studies. 183.

[26] Fields. “Drawers.” 22.

[27] Fields, J. "Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800–1930." Gender & History 14, no. 3 (November 2002): 492.