| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality. By Jill Fields. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xvi, 375 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-520-22369-1. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25261-5.)
Jill Fields has pursued "the dynamics of gendered fashion, power, and sexuality" in full-bore feminist style (p. 256). Her research spans 1900 to 1959, with brief reference to nineteenth-century lingerie. She employs consumer periodicals, catalogs, "house" newspapers, trade journals, union records, interviews, films, and some extant undergarments. Fields focuses on the United States, occasionally mentioning Canadian trends. Her chapters are entitled, "Drawers," "Corsets and Girdles," "Brassieres," "The Meaning of Black Lingerie," "The Invisible Woman," "The Production of Glamour," and "Return of the Repressed (Waist), 1947–1952."	1
Labor historians will find useful her analysis in chapter 6 of the vicissitudes of the White Goods Workers Local 62, International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ilgwu), centered in New York City. Fields has utilized ilgwu papers to show progress in organizing workers, despite internal and external struggles, through the 1950s. Workers positioned themselves as both producers and consumers of fashion, using a well-styled appearance to gain respect from management and the general public. Pins and Needles, a 1937–1938 union-produced musical revue about the lingerie industry, made a further bid for empathy from a general audience.	. . .

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