The birth of feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s featured young women burning bras as a counterpoint to young men burning their draft cards. Bra burning was a social statement.
Now there’s more discussion regarding the medical merits of those demonstrations.
Ironically, it was an American woman who invented the bra around the turn of the 20th century, according to Ken L. Smith, a health educator and Breast Health Facilitator for the American Cancer Society.
Up until the beginning of the 20th century, corsets were what made women exhibit that desired hourglass figure and inadvertently pushed up the bust line for fashionable clothing of that time. The problem was, corsets messed with internal organs while shaping those hourglass figures, and their tightness resulted in women fainting easily and often.
The birth of the bra
In 1893, Marie Tucek made a “breast supporter” that looked like a modern brassiere. But, later, Mary Phelps Jacobs designed a better version and called it a brassiere. She patented it and sold the patent to a company named Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500. It caught on.
By the 1950s, teenage girls were urged to buy and use training bras to hold their breasts firmly in a desirable way and prevent sagging. But even the brassier industry admits that the only time bras prevent sagging is while wearing them.
Ken Smith suggests that using artificial breast support long enough will cause the breasts’ cup-shaped suspensory Cooper’s ligaments to atrophy, allowing the breasts to sag over time anyway. Exercises that strengthen pectoral muscles can be helpful.
It’s recommended to use a one-piece sports bra for exercising. Some women use one-piece sports bras as a healthier alternative to regular bras when not exercising.
Bras and breast health
The connection between wearing bras and painful and bothersome non-malignant breast fibrocystic disease as well as malignant breast cancer was hardly mentioned until the book Dressed to Kill by researchers Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer came out in 1995.
They surveyed 5,000 women and discovered that women who wore bras for 12 hours or more greatly increased breast cancer risk compared to women who wore bras less.
Dr. Gregory Heigh of Florida has found that over 90% of women with fibrocystic breast disease find improvement when they stop wearing their brassieres. There are case testimonies (source below) from breast fibrocystic disorder patients who realized this when they stopped or at least lessened brassiere use.
The connection between breast tumors, non-malignant or malignant, and bras has merit when considering the lymph drainage issues from wearing bras too often. The lymph system, which includes lymph nodes in the breasts, requires body movement to pump out the lymph nodes’ accumulation of toxic waste materials. That’s what bouncing on a rebounder is about.
Not only are breasts’ movements inhibited by bras, thus restricting proper lymph node draining, but the tight enclosures of bras constrict the breasts and constrict lymph material flow.
If a Florida doctor has observed 90% healing from fibrocystic breast disorders upon not wearing bras, with many other women offering testimonies with positive results on their bra abstinence, it follows that wearing bras less or not at all helps prevent breast cancer.
By Paul Fassa
