Casting off the corsets - a history of women's underwear

 Corsets, constipation and Oliver Cromwell - Dulcie Lewis's new short history of women's underwear is  definitely educational...and frankly a little bit scary!

1. Ethical undies: The Victorians were so obsessed with underwear that they published books on the subject. According to The Ethics of Underwear (1889): 'Correct underclothing, under all circumstances, shows a nicely balanced mind, and a sense of the fitness of things, which some people can never acquire'.

2. Immovable bowels: Victorian women spent a lot of time on their chamber pots. Apparently, during the period many doctors thought that women were prone to constipation, as so many tightly-corsetted ladies sought medical help.

3. My red beret is going to Oxfam: 'Women of easy virtue were thought to advertise their availability by wearing a red hat'. 

4. Knickers to the men: Underwear was once used to suggest sexual equality. In the 1890s, the young members of the Rational Dress Society donned 'masculine' tweed and wool knickerbockers to aid them in manly pursuits, like cycling and climbing mountains.

5. Witchcraft and eyeliner: Oliver Cromwell was apparently responsible for a bizarre piece of legislation entitled 'Vice of painting and wearing Patches and immodest Dresses of Women'. Part of this anti-beauty bill stated that any woman who used 'artificial teeth, iron stays, hoops or bolstered hips' to trap a man into marriage, could be tried as a witch and her marriage annulled.

  

Casting off the Corsets is published by Countryside Books

Blue by name...plaque proposed for London's first stripper

Bombs might have been raining down on London, but that didn't stop Phyllis Dixey getting her kit off for a packed theatre of Tommies three times a day. 

Phyllis has the dubious distinction of being the very first woman in England to perform a naked striptease. During the 1930s, nude shows were only legal if performers remained completely motionless. But, at the Tivoli Theatre, in unlikely Hull, variety singer Phyllis Dixey flouted the “If you move, it’s rude” rule and used ostrich feathers to tantalise her audience glimpses of her birthday suit during her 'Confessions Of A Fan Dancer' act, in November 1942.

This shocking peformance was swiftly investigated by the police, but everything was smoothed over when the Lord Chamberlain, then responsible for stage censorship, granted his approval. Phyllis went on to form a company of dancers and put on striptease shows at the Whitehall Theatre in Soho, throughout the early 40s.

English Heritage has raised eyebrows by announcing its plans to honour London’s ‘Queen of Striptease’ with a blue plaque. Net curtains have been set twitching along a quiet Surbiton street by the organisation's request to put up a plaque inscribed ‘Phyllis Dixey 1914 to 1964, Striptease Artiste lived here in flat number 15’. Some have suggested that she is more discreetly referred to as a ‘fan dancer’ or ‘burlesque performer’ instead.

Despite a brief foray in film (starring in Dual Alibi with Herbert Lom), Phyllis's post-war career floundered, and she found herself playing provincial theatres, under pressure to reveal increasing amounts of flesh. Her lowest point came when she was fined £5 for indecency after a show in Scunthorpe. Declared bankrupt and living out her retirement in obscurity, Phyllis died aged 50, in 1964.
 

Celebrating Shelagh Delaney

Pioneering female playwright Shelagh Delaney died this week. A bright working class Lancashire lass born in 1939, Shelagh transformed herself from usherette to award-winning playwright at just 18.

After leaving school with a handful of O-Levels, there were few career options open to Shelagh, who spurned teaching and took on a series of dead end jobs, while she enjoyed going out dancing at the weekend.
 
She began writing her first play, A Taste of Honey, infuriated by a performance of Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme, which she felt showed "insensivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals".

Written in a fortnight, A Taste of Honey exploded on to the stage and quickly became considered the most performed play by a female playwright in post-war Britain. The play's teenage heroine Jo is dragged on midnight flits between dingy Salford bedsits by her feckless mother Helen, who is bent on marrying her flashy younger suitor (and concealing the fact that she's over 40).

Rita Tushingham as Jo
and Paul Danquah as Jimmy

Jo briefly finds happiness when she meets Jimmy, a black sailor, but he disappears, leaving her pregnant and homeless. The only functional relationship in the play is between Jo and Gordon, a young gay shop assistant, who she sets up home with.

The play was daring and controversial for its time, dealing with issues like race, homosexuality and teen pregnancy, but it was a great success. The rights to the 1961 film version, starring Rita Tushingham, earned Shelagh a whopping (for the time) £20,000, and her screenplay, co-writted with director Tony Richardson, won a BAFTA for best screenplay.

Shelagh never acheived quite the same splash with any of her other work, but she went on to write well-received screenplays for film and television, as well as radio plays, including a Ruth Ellis biopic, Dance with a Stranger (1895).

A Taste of Honey is one of my favourite films. Sharp, bitter, and funny - and one of Morrisey's main inspirations for The Smiths lyrics - it's well worth a watch!

Olive Schreiner's Letters Online

A fantastic new project run by several UK universities has paid homage to the work of pioneering feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).

South African-born Olive wrote daringly about big issues for the time - racism, women's education and agnoticism. Her novels, like The Story of an African Farm, were hugely popular, and her political writing provoked and inspired contemporaries. 

Olive's 5,500 plus letters are now scattered throughout the world in over 40 locations, but the Olive Schreiner Letters Online project will make them all accessible at www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk from January 2012.