Girdle vs. Goedel: the Pink Ice Girdle Ballet of 1951 vs. Logic. Part I of the History of Holding Things In

JF Ptak Science Books  

[My thanks to Patti Digh for providing the idea for the Goedel part of this adventure into Playtex and Logic--she did so because (a) they fit together and (b) girdle/Goedel sounded almost identical to a woman who once lived in Munich!]   

In the long history of Holding Things In, perhaps the newest of its members was upon us only recently. In the long, deep past we have held our breath, hidden our anger, stowed our emotions, and so on, but it was only recently that we began to hold our bellies in.  One of the masters of Holding Things In for this period turns out to be the sublime logician and re-inventor of modern mathematics (by putting one piece of the great Hilbert to sleep), Kurt Goedel, who towards the mistakenly-self-engineered end of his life, held on to everything, virtually--he organized and filed almost very piece of paper that he came into contact with at any level, became ever more reclusive, and at the end (due to his theories of people/institutions wanting to kill him) refused food and, of all things, water.  Surrounded by the smartest people on the planet (including his friends Einstein and von Neumann) up there at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Goedel withered away until he had almost no shadow. It is a bad irony that he could be so inconceivably unmovable and restrained while at the same time, and in the same life, offered such incredible newness to the maths--both ends of the mountain at the same time.

1951, the year in which these girdle advertisements appeared in Life magazine, was also the year that Goedel present us with the Goedel  metric, and also in which he received (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein award (and of course delivered his famous Gibbs lecture  "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications").

The popular introduction of the girdle I think that this happened at about the same time for the sexes, only these conveniences were much more often advertised for women than they were for men.  Slender and non-existent waistlines for women were more of a cultural identifier than a slim-hipped man, and the ads for his cheaters appeared far less frequently than those for women.

The first widespread appearance of the girdle for the sake of vanity must have occurred during the 19th century, or perhaps a little later is my best guess--but the first time the device began to appear for the common woman must've come around the time when there was time for leisure, or shopping, or of being seen in public in short intervals.  And that I believe is a Victorian-age invention.

But the binder doesn't come into fabulous presence until the distribution of mass population illustrated magazines, or I should say the advertisements that made these magazines possible:  production like LIFE (from which these 1951 images come) reached far more women than the popular older periodicals like Harper's Weekly or other polite mid-19th century journals for women.  The advertisements were certainly more enticing, the possibilities more rewarding, and the girdle comfort levels far higher than their predecessors, and the availability of disposable income for women far greater--and so incidentals like the girdle became more greatly commodified, and moved into the "essentials" category. 

The idea of these ads seem horribly revolutionary: on the one hand, the badly-named and hyphenated  Playtex product "Pink-Ice" squeezed women into new tight but  malleable molds, while at the same time promised some sort of ballet-like freedom because of it. Like the creeping ("two steps forward and one step back") communism of the time, Playtex promised the possibilities of enhanced freedom through restrictive clothing (in a "peace through strength" vision).  In any event, and in spite all of what I just wrote, the pictures are kind of amazing.  

[I'm well aware that this may be one of the worst things ever written about Kurt Goedel--the Renault Dauphine of Goedeliana.  But it doesn't matter, because in all of his powers, Goedel could absolutely prove that g_d existed, and that  I don't.]

 

 

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

> girdle/Goedel sounded almost identical to a woman who once lived in Munich!

Actually they're pronounced the same for the larger proportion of UK speakers, whose English (notably in RP English) is non-rhotic, so doesn't sound the internal "r" in "girdle".

Being from the south coast, I'm slightly rhotic, so I do pronounce the "r" - though not to the extent of older native Devon speakers, who'd even pronounce "Goedel" with an "r".