Sunday Best

Financial Review 22.12.06
 

Traditionally a family would reserve their best clothes – their ‘Sunday Best’-- for church.  In the middle of last century, and especially in the States, the mother and her teenage daughters would invariably be wearing their best girdles.
Today many people think that a girdle was worn primarily to flatten the stomach and reduce the waist but in fact its primary purpose was to reshape the woman's buttocks to give the fashionable ‘mono-butt’ displayed so well in this photo.  Modern students often wonder why even the skinniest woman would consider a girdle an essential part of her wardrobe, but without it she could not achieve this fashionable shape, no matter how slender her waist.

(This photo appeared in an article about the book "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel Dennett, Viking, 2006., in the Australian Financial Review 22-26.12.2006)

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