Uplift

Welcome to a new twist in an ongoing Slate experiment. For a few years now, we've been doing our book reviews as epistolary correspondences between two critics—usually big shots in whatever field the book is about. Now Slate is switching to a cast of 12 reviewers, chosen not for their expertise in any one area but because they're curious, sensible, and witty general readers whose criteria for evaluating a book are probably a lot like yours. Each week, you'll hear two of the folks below discussing a new book or group of books. The other Clubbers may interrupt them with comments and questions. And we hope you will, too, by submitting postings to "The Fray," Slate's reader feedback forum.

Participants include:

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Debra J. Dickerson is the author An American Story. Her next book, The End of Blackness, will be published in October 2003.

James Fallows, the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel.

Jodi Kantor, the New York editor of Slate.

Sarah Lyall, a correspondent in the London bureau of the New York Times.

Nell Minow, the editor of the Corporate Library, which covers corporate governance and performance, and writer of Movie Mom, reviews of films and videos.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.

Judith Shulevitz, the "Close Reader" columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Erik Tarloff, the author of Face-Time and The Man Who Wrote the Book. (Click here to buy Face-Time and here to buy The Man Who Wrote the Book.)

Ted Widmer, the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City and the co-author of Campaigns: A Century of Presidential Races, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Marjorie Williams, the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Who are these people?

This week, "The Book Club" unclasps Uplift, a history of the American bra.

This week's reading.

Buy the book.

Dear Nell,

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Last night I dreamed I delivered the State of the Union address in my Maidenform bra.

Has there ever been a tag line so ripe for re-appropriation? And as you suggest, the world may not have been ready for the election ad in 1953. Thirteen years later, hecklers greeted Lurleen Wallace's candidacy for the governorship of Alabama with signs reading, "I Dreamed I Was Elected Governor in My Maidenform Bra." Happily, the insult didn't work; Wallace won with 64 percent of the vote. But strangely and sadly, she died of breast cancer less than halfway through her term.

What a wonderfully preposterous mother-daughter ad you mention. Uplift presents another winner in this category, featuring a mother protectively nuzzling her newly Teenform-bra-clad daughter. In the accompanying copy, Teenform boasts that it "keeps an understanding eye on teenage problems in growing up, with informative booklets prepared under the guidance of the Child Study Association." The ad fusses protectively over daughters—an astute way of assuaging parents' fears about the onset of sexual maturity. There's something quaint and touching about this. For all the aggressive claims made by present-day bras—flawless shape, tighter curves—none of them promise anything as grand as safe passage to adulthood.

On a similar note, Uplift makes a nice point of how the undergarment industry turned a girl's first bra-shopping trip into a coming of age ritual, on a par with going to the prom. My theory is that girls needed an alternative to that much less dignified milestone that comes at about the same time as the first bra purchase. There's nothing to romanticize about your first trip to the drugstore to buy menstrual accessories, and it was very canny of the part of retailers to create a happier, more glamorous scenario for Becoming a Woman.

I'm glad you mentioned the Victoria's Secret catalog, which—speaking of adolescents—seems to have replaced Playboy as the 16-year-old boy's periodical of choice. A quick skim of its Web site provides a great postscript to the book. Turns out that Victoria's Secret's bazaar of sultry enticements includes … corsets! Of course, not the same corsets that damaged internal organs and not the ones so mandatory that even pregnant women had to wear them. These updated corsets have no teeth, literally or figuratively—they're strapless bras with a little more fabric and a lot more drama. Take a look at this number, designed for a bride, or this flower-bedecked confection. The corset, arguably the most-hated garment in the history of fashion, has become an object of desire. Other old-fashioned accoutrements have been reinterpreted too: Victoria's Secret sells garters, not because they hold up stockings, but because grooms still play the crude game of launching them at weddings. These re-vamped (and I do mean vamped), purely decorative undergarments offer your average, sports-bra-wearing chick a kind of old-fashioned womanliness, I guess.

So, Victoria's Secret isn't selling anything as prosaic as support, as the catalog's acres of cleavage and oceans of scanty lace make clear. But why should it? If you want firm breasts nowadays, you can buy them, and not from a catalog either. Surely the biggest breast news these days is women's ability to permanently modify them—to custom-build minimizers or Wonderbras from the inside out, so to speak. As a Fray poster guesses, Uplift pretty much skips any discussion of breast reduction or augmentation. Which is a pity, because plastic surgery is a natural—maybe that's the wrong word—next chapter for its history of body modification. In the 19^th century, women relied mostly on undergarments to modify their shapes. Early bras, expected to perform heavy lifting, were marketed with this in mind: One early brand was called Nature's Rival. As the 20^th century progressed, women turned to diet and exercise to reshape their bodies—which is one reason why they could switch from corset-alia to comparatively skimpy bras. But starting a couple of decades ago, breast size became a matter of choice instead of destiny: Nubbins could easily be inflated into something heftier, and super-droopers traded in for sleeker models. The American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery reports that 300,000 chests—or should that be 600,000 individual breasts?—were augmented in 2001. The numbers for mammaplasty (another method of enlargement) and breast reduction were equally formidable.

And yet even women with the perkiest of perky breasts—women with more elaborate equipment installed inside their chests than they could ever wear outside them—still wear bras. Perhaps they do it for the same reason that women still buy mock corsets. Which tells you something about the totemic power of these particular pieces of underwear.

Yours,
Jodi

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