America Had No Bras Until 1914 — What Did Women Wear Instead?

America Had No Bras Until 1914 — What Did Women Wear Instead? In 1913, a nineteen-year-old New York socialite got dressed for a party, and by accident, she started a revolution. She wasn't trying to change history. She just wanted her new gown to lie flat against her body without a piece of whale poking through the fabric. But what she stumbled into that night would end three centuries of a very different relationship between American women and their own bodies. Because here's the thing most people don't realize: for the first roughly three hundred years of European settlement in America, there was no bra. Not one. What women had instead was steel, wood, and whale.