(Haaretz) — January 9, 1886, is the birthdate of Ida Cohen Rosenthal
Ida Kaganovich was born 130 years ago in Belarus. Her father, Abraham Kaganovich, was a Torah scholar; her mother, the former Sarah Shapiro, ran a grocery. After some time studying in Warsaw, as a teenager Ida returned to Rakaw, where she met William Rosenthal, an artist. Fearing conscription after the start of the Russo-Japanese War, in 1904 the couple emigrated to the U.S., to which Ida soon followed him. She changes her name twice, first to Cohen and then to Rosenthal after they married in 1907.
The couple opened a dress shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, which they moved to Manhattan in 1918. Three years later, they joined forces with Enid Bisset (who later dropped out because of poor health) and began experimenting with brassiere design.
The fashion of the day emphasized flat chests (Flapper style), but Ida thought this was a mistake. Many years later, she would explain to the New York Times: “Do you know that during World War I, women in this country were told to look like their brothers? Well, that’s not possible. Nature made woman with a bosom, so why fight nature?”
William, a trained sculptor, designed a bandeau, a supportive band with cups that separated and supported breasts. These bras, which they called Maiden Form, initially came only as an accessory sewed into their dresses, until they started selling them separately.
Bras pick up fast. By 1925, they had opened a plant in New Jersey for bra production, and by 1928, that’s all they were selling – 500,000 of them that year.
William Rosenthal died in 1958, Ida Cohen Rosenthal died on March 29, 1973.
When asked about women going bra less, Ida replied “… a person has the right to be dressed or undressed, but after 35, a woman hasn’t got the figure to wear nothing.”
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/190636/the-jewish-inventor-of-the-bra/#ixzz2qAgR0vGw