Construction. When Cristina Nelson uses that word, she's not talking about steel beams and hard hats, but about corsets and girdles. Nelson, a doctoral student in history, studies how underwear has been used to "construct" the female body—to take an imaginary ideal of beauty and make it real. In the 1800s and early 1900s, corsets did the job—stays were laced and tightened, and suddenly a 26-inch waist became 17 inches. 

Nelson is studying changes in women's undergarments from 1880 to 1950 because, she says, these changes correspond to changes in our culture's view of women themselves. "Since the beginning of Western civilization, women have been considered biological entities, and their bodies have been shaped according to various views of them as biological beings," Nelson says. 

For example, as late as the year 1900, upper-class women cinched their middles—the upper hips to the bust—with corsets and encased their breasts in metal bust enhancers. But by the 1920s women were binding their breasts and wearing straight dresses to appear androgynous. Nelson wants to know why. The boyish look of the twenties could have been one way women "snubbed the idea of themselves as solely child-bearing vessels," she says. Around this time, education for women and the idea of women working in professions such as teaching had become pretty well accepted. 

Nelson has just begun this research. There are rolls of microfilmed advertisements and catalogs to go through, magazine articles and fashion and advice columns to study. Nelson plans to compare ads and articles from mainstream magazines such as Ladies Home Journal to those from magazines geared toward black women and working-class women—if she can find them. Copies of the less mainstream magazines are missing, though they are known to have existed. Much of the current information about women's undergarments comes from studies of upper- and middle-class white women, Nelson says. "I want to find out if black women and lower-class women followed the same fashions as upper class whites," Nelson says. "And if they didn't, why? There are a lot of people out there that history has passed over." 

Nelson calls her research a "reality check." She hopes that it will spur people to reconsider their ideas about women's bodies. "I'm not trying to get rid of high heels or say that women should stop shaving their legs," she says. "But I would like for people to think every now and then about why they're doing these things."