This is a new feature of the History Blog: occasional pieces focusing on the extraordinary lives of people you might not have heard of before.
Every morning, millions of women around the world wake up and put a bra on. It’s an everyday task, something that few probably put much thought into. But the story of the woman that invented the modern bra is simply amazing.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Mary Phelps Jacob.
Born on January 30, 1891, Mary Phelps Jacob – known as “Polly” to her family – came into a world of power and privilege. Her family were direct decedents of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. Although nowhere near as rich as the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts, Polly’s family nevertheless had enough money to own three large estates in New York City, Long Island and Watertown, Connecticut. But Polly grew up in an age when a family’s name was as important as their bank balance. Based on her last name, Polly was able to attend the best private schools, the most exclusive cotillions, the fanciest horse riding academies… even a garden party hosted by King George V in 1914.
In fact, it was Polly’s “coming out” party in 1910 that inspired her to create the bra. Before this, women were expected to wear uncomfortable corsets to support their busts – a social convention contrived 350 years earlier by Catherine de’ Medici, the wife of King Henry II of France. But a corset simply wouldn’t work with Polly’s choice of dress – a tight-fitting number with a plunging neckline. The corset’s whalebone stays stuck out of the top of her dress, and overall she looked like she was wearing a life jacket underneath the dress. Undaunted, Polly called in her maid, and the two of them took a pair of silk handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon and fashioned something resembling a modern bra.
Polly’s creation proved to be quite a hit with her friends and family members. But it wasn’t until a complete stranger sent Polly a dollar along with a letter begging for one of her bras that Polly realized that the bra could be a commercial success. Accordingly, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Polly the first American patent for a brassiere on November 3, 1914, and Polly went in to business under the name “Caresse Crosby”. But Polly didn’t have any interest in running a business, and she soon sold her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut for a mere $1,500 (around $38,000 in 2018 dollars). Warner Brothers would make an estimated $15 million over the next thirty years with Polly’s patent.
In 1915, Polly married Richard Rogers Peabody, a member of the famous New England Peabody family of bankers, governors, Harvard professors, attorneys and businessmen. The couple quickly had two children, but Polly found herself troubled by her husband’s lack of direction. He was indifferent towards the children, and only seem to enjoy drinking and chasing fire engines, a strange hobby he had picked up at Harvard. When Richard returned from WWI with a severe case of shell shock and a full-blown case of alcoholism, Polly knew the marriage was in deep trouble.
Polly’s life began anew when she met Harry Crosby, the son of yet another blue blood family from Boston. Harry had left school to volunteer for the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in France. There he had several near death experiences, including driving an ambulance that was completely destroyed by a German artillery shell – Harry emerged, literally without a scratch.
Harry had just returned to college in 1921 when he met Polly, and it’s said that he fell in love with her almost instantly. He confessed his love for her in a “Tunnel of Love” at a local amusement park (presumably, it wasn’t a cliché at the time), and the two attended church together a couple of weeks later. This, of course, made for instant gossip fodder for Boston’s blue bloods. Harry begged Polly to divorce Richard, who was in and out of “sanitariums” for his alcoholism, and even once threatened suicide if she didn’t leave her husband.
Harry’s love for Polly was such that he went on a six-day bender and quit his job at Shawmut National Bank, a job he’d had for only eight months. Harry was becoming an embarrassment to his family, so his uncle – financier J.P. Morgan – shipped him off to Paris to work at Morgan, Harjes & Co., the Paris branch of Morgan’s banking empire. Polly was already in Paris at the time, but left in a fit of jealous rage shortly after Crosby’s arrival. Harry proposed to her via telegram (she had divorced Richard at this point), and the next day he boarded the Aquitania, sister ship of the Mauretania and Lusitania, bound for New York. On September 9, 1922 Harry and Polly were married in the Municipal Building in New York City. Two days later, they moved back to Paris.
It was in Paris that their lives really became interesting. They practically embodied the term “idle rich”, buying apartments, country houses and race horses. But the couple’s relationship was soon to take a Bohemian bent. Harry convinced Polly to legally change her name to “Caresse”, and the two explored the world of open marriage, opium smoking and mutual suicide pacts.
Although he would always love Polly (err, Caresse), during this time Harry fell in love with fellow expatriate and Boston Brahmin Constance Coolidge and a fourteen year old girl named “Nubile”. He also continued his odd ways – in 1927 he inherited the book collection of his cousin Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, who had been a lawyer, diplomat, and close friend of Henry James, Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust. Although Harry kept many of the books, he would often take delight in taking a priceless first edition and slipping it into one of the flea market stalls that lined the Seine.
Harry and Polly (err, Caresse) loved poetry and prose, so in April of 1927 the couple founded their own publishing company, Éditions Narcisse. Initially it was a vanity imprint that only published the couple’s own poetry. But in 1928 the couple changed the name to the Black Sun Press, and the company rapidly gained a reputation for making beautiful books. This was thanks to a printer named Roger Lescaret, a hitherto unknown typographical genius who had mostly printed funeral notices before meeting the Crosbys. Unfortunately, Black Sun reflected the eclectic tastes of its owners. The imprint’s first non-Crosby books were a Hindu “love manual” and a reprint of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
In time, however, the couple sought out works from new, unusual and unknown authors. In this, Harry and Polly showed an incredible knack for spotting literary talent. Black Sun would be one of the first (if not the first) publishing houses to print the works of 20th century giants such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Rene Crevel, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. To give a modern analogy, it’s as if I, with no prior experience, started a small record company and managed to sign The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd before they were famous. Mary Phelps Jacob’s impact on modern literature was simply staggering.
Polly’s already strange life would take an even darker turn in 1928. That’s when Harry met Josephine Noyes Rotch, a 20 year-old whose ancestors founded Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1690. Harry fell in love, and the couple had a passionate affair until Josephine married some time later that same year. Josephine’s husband was still in college and busy studying most of the time, and so she quickly became bored with her life. She rekindled her affair with Harry in 1929, when the Crosbys returned to New York for a family visit. Harry and Josephine checked in to a hotel in Detroit and spent the next four days eating room service, smoking opium and having sex.
On December 7, 1929, the two returned to New York.
On December 10, the couple was found in bed. Josephine had a .25 caliber bullet hole in her left temple, and Harry had a similar hole in his right temple. He was found with one arm wrapped around Josephine and the gun in his other hand. The couple left no suicide note, and for days New York newspapers ran stories wondering what exactly had happened.
Polly kept the Black Sun Press going, and in 1933 she met a then-penniless Henry Miller in Paris. Upon his return to the US in 1940, Miller found his work branded as “pornography”, and he could not get anything published. In fact, Miller was so broke that he was reduced to writing pornography for an Oklahoma oilman for a dollar a page. Miller really wanted to travel the US by car and write about it – as Jack Kerouac would do with On The Road several years later – but he was still on the hook for 200 pages for the oilman. This amounted to almost $3000 in modern dollars, and Miller really needed the money. He thought of Polly, who was already writing porn for fun with Anaïs Nin’s “smut club”. Nin (along with Polly, Harvey Breit, Robert Duncan and George Barker) took up Miller’s cause, drowning the oil man under an avalanche of pornography that kept him begging for more. Polly in particular enjoyed the task, and she’d write late into the night while her newest husband – a football player named Bert Young she’d met while visiting her daughter in California – drank himself to sleep each night.
Bert didn’t care much for Polly’s literary friends, and was often absent from the couple’s home in Bowling Green, Virginia. In fact, the entire marriage seems pretty inexplicable – one wonders if sex was the only thing they had in common, as Bert was 20 years her junior. Polly, however, didn’t lack for company, as Salvador Dalí, Nin and Miller were frequent (and often long-term) visitors.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the couple divorced in 1941, and the nomadic Polly then moved to Washington DC, where she opened the city’s first modern art galley. She also started a literary magazine called Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, but could only afford to publish six issues before shutting it down. At this time Polly also became interested in politics, founding groups called Citizens of the World and Women Against War (unrelated to the modern group of the same name). It was during this time that she met yet another genius, the American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Fuller shared her views, and the two tried to open a “Citizens of the World center” in Delphi, Greece. This was strongly opposed by the Greek government, so Polly made plans to build a similar center (complete with Fuller-designed geodesic dome) in Cyprus. This also came to nothing.
In her later years, Polly would buy a fifteenth century castle just north of Rome named Roccasinibalda, which allowed her the title Principessa. She turned the castle into a haven for artists and authors. Polly found the winter climate at Roccasinibalda a bit too cold for her liking, so she frequently moved between there, Hampton Manor (her house in Bowling Green), a home in Washington, DC, a huge apartment at 137 East 54th Street in New York City (where Miller lived during his lean years), as well as a home in Rome. In 1953, Polly published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She would eventually pass away in Rome on January 24, 1970 from pneumonia, a complication from an experimental heart surgery she underwent at the Mayo Clinic.
It’s interesting that the bra would later become a symbol of oppression for the feminist movement, given that Polly initially liberated women from the much less comfortable corset, not to mention led one of the most libertine lifestyles of the 20th century. Although it’s an urban legend that feminists burned their bras at a rallies in the 1960s, it is true that many women visibly and theatrically threw their bras into trash cans at several protests. Perhaps amusingly, going braless was initially a symbol of “female freedom”… until feminists discovered that braless men were titillating to men… and then bras came back into vogue again.