Bohemian style was not really until the First World War that "many working women ... embarked on a revolution in fashion that greatly reduced the weight and restrictions imposed on them by their clothing". Some women working in factories wore trousers and the brassiere (invented in 1889 by the feminist Herminie Cadolle and patented in America by Mary Phelps Jacob in 1914) began gradually to supersede the corset. In shipyards "trouser suits" (the term, "pantsuit" was adopted in America in the 1920s) were virtually essential to enable women to shin up and down ladders. Music hall artists also helped to push the
Daphne Phelps Daphne Phelps Daphne Phelps (23 June 191130 November 2005) was a British writer who spent most of her life in Taormina, Sicily. She lived in Casa Cuseni, an elegant villa designed and built by her uncle, the industrialist Robert Hawthorn Kitson in 1905 and, over the years she entertained numerous writer and artist friends including Bertrand Russell, Henry Faulkner, Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams. She was the author of "A House in Sicily" (1999), published by Virago. Phelps attended St Felix School, Southwold, Suffolk, and subsequently trained in psychiatric social work at St Anne's College, Oxford, and at the London