by Hazel Houlihingle [Gloria Kaufman], from pg. 76 of In Stitches
Of course I'm against war, but when we're in it, all kinds of good things happen to women. Like with no men around, all of a sudden women can do any job and up goes our pay. And in World War I, off came our corsets! I'm not kidding. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said we should sacrifice our steel-boned corsets to the war effort. So with a huge sigh of relief and a huge welling forth of female flesh, millions of women released tons of steel (28,000 tons, to be precise) to the munitions factories -- and no one called us corset-burners either.