Mary Phelps Jacob

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Mary Phelps Jacob (April 30, 1891 - January 24, 1970) was a New York socialite, who in 1910^[1] invented the first modern brassiere to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Marries into Boston society 3 Receives patent for a brassiere 4 Polly marries Harry Crosby and joins the Paris intellectuals 5 Founds the Black Sun Press with her husband 6 Harry meets Josephine Rotch 7 Ghost writes Opus Pistorum for Henry Miller 8 Returns to the United States and becomes politically active 9 Dies of heart disease and pneumonia 10 External links 11 References

[edit] Early life

Born on April 30, 1891,^[1] 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. The family had estates in New York, Long Island, and Watertown, Connecticut. 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. In 1914 she attended a garden party hosted by the King of England.^[1] Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams."

[edit] Marries into Boston society

In 1915, Polly Jacob married Richard Rogers Peabody, son of one of the three great New England Peabody 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 her New York society debut.^[2] 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 complemented 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.

[edit] Receives patent for a brassiere

On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Mary P. Jacob for the 'Backless Brassiere'.^[3] Although patents for bra-like undergarments date to at least the 1860s, the US Patent Office had only recently decided that they merited a distinct category (they were typically filed as "corsets" or simply as "upper body coverings"). Jacob's patent was the first to be filed in the new category "Brassiere", derived from the old French word for 'upper arm'. Polly's design was lightweight, soft, and naturally separated the breasts (or more accurately, did not force them together). While a definite improvement in terms of lightness and visibility, her brassiere did not offer breasts a lot of support, and was more flattening than flattering.

Running the business that she had christened with the name Caresse Crosby either was not enjoyable to Polly or she failed to properly market the product, for she soon sold the brassiere patent to the Warners Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500 (roughly equivalent to $25,600 in 2003). In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, Caresse maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced" when Warner bought her patent. Although they never produced the exact design described in the patent, Warner went on to earn more than fifteen million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

It has been said that the bra took off the way it did in large part because of World War I. In 1917, Bernard Baruch, chairman of 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.^[4] 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.

During the flat-chested Flapper era in the 1920’s, Russian immigrant and dressmaker Ida Rosenthal noticed that a bra suited for 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's breasts into a standardized system of A-D cup sizes, and developed bras for every stage of life (puberty to maturity). In the 1930s, with the fashion emphasis movement towards the full-figured, well-proportioned woman, the Warners Brothers company produced the first popular all-elastic (Lastex) bra which were more effective in enhancing a woman's curves. During the early 1940s, due to the scarcity of material, styles were limited. After World War II ended, companies began offering a variety of styles using silk and other previously unavailable fabrics to meet the pent-up demand of modern women.

[edit] 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 to 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 World War I, 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's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums fighting his alcohol abuse when Polly finally divorced him. On 9 September 1922 Harry and Polly were married. Two days later they moved with her children to France to join other American expatriates, probably much to the relief of their respective families. Harry was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist J. P. Morgan, who was also Harry's godfather. Harry worked in a job arranged for him at Morgan et Cie., the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. But he soon tired of work.

From 1922 to 1925, the Crosbys led the life of the rich expatriates. Polly and Harry purchased a race horse and then two more. They lived in a fashionable apartment on the Rue de Lille, and bought a mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville, France, that they named "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). They traveled to North Africa where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle included an open marriage, a mutual suicide pact, and cremation instructions they carried with them. Harry sent a telegram home to Boston: "PLEASE SELL 10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE." So their lifestyle was initially financed by selling the bonds and stocks whose dividends were previously the basis of Harry's income. In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry's collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, and proceeded to devour them, and then sell and give them away.

[edit] 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, Red Skeletons. It contained illustrations by their friend Alastair (Hans Henning von Voight). In April, 1927, they founded a press, or book publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. They used the press to publish their own attempts at verse in beautifully bound, hand-set books.

In 1928, they changed the name of the press to the Black Sun Press. Their press rapidly gained notice for publishing beautifully bound, typographically flawless editions of unusual books. They included a Hindu Love Book, The Fall of the House of Usher, and letters by Harry’s cousin, Henry James, to Walter Berry. Their literary tastes matured and they sought out their Parisian literary friends and offered to publish their writing. Their friends included D. H. Lawrence, for whom they published The Escaped Cock (also published as The Man Who Died). They also published James Joyce’s story Tales Told of Shem and Shaun which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake. Kay Boyle was another friend whose work they published. During 1929, they published fourteen works by Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Rene Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound among others. Caresse wrote a book of poetry, Crosses of Gold, which they also published.

[edit] Harry meets Josephine Rotch

Harry Crosby fancied himself as a poet, and wrote many poems dedicated to Caresse. The poems often focused on the sun, which became to him a symbol of perfection, enthusiasm, freedom, heat, and destruction. His writing increasingly contained references to dissolution and suicide.

In 1928, Harry met 20 year old Josephine Noyes Rotch, whom he would call the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was descended from a family that first settled in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Ten years his junior, Harry fell in love with Josephine. In a letter to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Crosby wrote:

I am having an affair with a girl I met (not introduced) at the Lido. She is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine. I like girls when they are very young before they have any minds.

Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when it ceased. Then Josephine Bigelow's new husband got busy with school, and Josephine contacted Harry again. Their affair rekindled, they traveled to Detroit and checked into an expensive, $12 a day hotel as husband and wife. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, battled, and made love.

On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where they agreed that Josephine should return to Boston to her husband. But on December 9 she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem is:

Death is our marriage.

On December 9, Harry Crosby made the following entry into his notebook:

One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.

These are Crosby's very last entries into his journal. On December 10, 1929, in an apparent suicide pact, Harry was found in bed with a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple. Harry was still clutching the pistol in one hand, Josephine in the other. Harry apparently shot Josephine and then, according to the coroner, several hours later, he shot himself.

After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse continued her writing and publishing work at Black Sun Press. She also established Crosby Continental Editions with Jacques Porel, a book company that published paperback books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, among others. Ahead of her time, her paperback books did not sell well, and the press closed in 1933.

[edit] Ghost writes Opus Pistorum for Henry Miller

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 spacious New York apartment on East 54th Street 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 at a dollar per page, 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. In her journal, Nin wrote, "Harvey Breit, Robert Duncan, George Barker, Caresse Crosby, all of us concentrating our skills in a tour de force, supplying the old man with such an abundance of perverse felicities, that now he begged for more.^[5]" 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, according to his New York agent. No literary aspirations, just plain sex. In her journal, Nin wrote, "'Less poetry,' said the voice over the telephone. 'Be specific.'"^[5] 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.

[edit] Returns to the United States and becomes politically active

While visiting her daughter Polly in Hollywood, Caresse met Selbert "Bert" Saffold Young, a football player nearly twenty years her junior. In 1936 they moved east. Caresse bought and renovated Hampton Manor, a Hereford cattle farm with a big home in Bowling Green, Virginia. Bert was infrequently home, but Caresse did not lack for company. Salvador Dalí was a long-term visitor, writing much of his autobiography while there. Long-term and frequent visitors also included Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

By 1941, having divorced Bert, Caresse moved to Washington D.C., where she opened what was then the city's only modern art gallery. She also started Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, a magazine that sought to continue her work with young and avant-garde writers and artists. She published six editions before she ran out of funds and sponsors. This was her last major publishing effort.

She became politically active and founded the organizations Women Against War and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community" which other activists like Buckminster Fuller also supported. Caresse followed that with a plan to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi, Greece, where she bought land, but she was opposed by the Greek government. When this failed, she sought to create the "World Man Center" in Cyprus, which was to include a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. This effort too came to naught and she continued to search for a center for her world citizen project.

In the 1950s she rented and later bought a dilapidated seventy-two room, fifteenth century castle named Roccasinibalda north of Rome, which gave her the title of Principessa. Henry Miller described Roccasinibalda as the "Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills"^[6]. Other artists visited for a weekend or an entire season. Caresse for a time divided her time between Roccasinibalda, which in the winter was too cold and unlivable, Hampton Manor in Bowling Green, Virginia, a home in Washington, D.C., a sprawling apartment at 137 East 54th Street in New York City, as well as a residence in Rome. In 1953, Caresse published her autobiography, The Passionate Years.

[edit] Dies of heart disease and pneumonia

Suffering from heart disease, she received what was then still-experimental open heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. She died in relative obscurity from complications from pneumonia in Rome on January 24, 1970, aged 78. But she lived long enough to see the bra go through a number of transformations and become a standard undergarment for women all over the world. Her first two husbands and her son Bill preceded her in death. She was survived by her daughter Polleen Peabody de Mun North Drysdale and two granddaughters.

[edit] 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.

[edit] References