There are a fair amount of ‘jewish invention’ myths around modern female apparel – such as the false jewish claims to have invented the bra, (1) the bikini (2) and Spanx (3) among other things – and one of the more recent claims I have encounter is the assertion that jews ‘invented the sports bra’.
Marnie Winston-Macauley writing at ‘Aish’ for example claims that it was invented by two jewesses named Lisa Lindahl and Hinda Miller. (4) This claim requires a little unpicking which we can start to do my quoting the ‘National Inventors Hall of Fame’ article that covers the invention of the sports bra.
To wit:
‘In the summer of 1977, as Miller worked alongside her co-inventor Smith as an assistant costume designer for a Shakespeare festival in Burlington, Vermont, Lindahl requested Smith’s help in developing her idea for an undergarment that would minimize discomfort while running. At the time, five years after the passage of Title IX, more women and girls than ever before were participating in sports and fitness. Miller, who had enjoyed being physically active since childhood and had developed an enduring interest in yoga during her undergraduate years, joined the project to help create an athletic bra.
When Smith sewed two jockstraps together and both Lindahl and Miller tested it on a run, they had their first working sports bra prototype.’ (5)
Kelly Bastone further clarified the story in her 30th August 2017 article for ‘Runner’s World’ as follows:
‘This was the summer of 1977, during the height of both the women’s liberation movement and the first jogging craze. Yet for all the things women did in their Maidenform bras, running in comfort wasn’t one of them: Traditional lingerie let runners’ breasts bounce and whirl like Lotto balls. So Lindahl, a graduate student at the University of Vermont, was determined to create a bra that she and other women could actually run in. Lindahl’s friend Smith, who made costumes for the Champlain Shakespeare Festival, had agreed to help by stitching together a few mock-ups.
The next day, Smith sewed her own version with straps that crossed in the back (to keep them from sliding down) and a sturdy elastic band beneath the breasts for support. Lindahl tested it out while Smith’s assistant, Hinda Schreiber Miller, ran backward in front of her, watching for that dreaded bounce.’ (6)
The gist of this is is that Lindahl originally had the idea while Polly Smith did the bulk of the actual design work, while Miller was simply a glorified assistant and had little to do with the invention of the sports bra other than being lucky enough to be Smith’s assistant at the time that Lindahl involved Smith in the development of her idea.
Indeed, as the ‘National Inventors Hall of Fame’ article makes clear when it writes how:
‘As company president, Miller played a crucial role in securing investment funding, manufacturing, product design and marketing strategies. With the help of a $5,000 loan from Miller’s father, Miller and Lindahl had 600 Jogbras made and began pitching them to independent sporting goods stores.’ (7)
And Bastone supports this narrative by noting how:
‘Seeing little, the trio dispatched Smith to New York City, where she bought bolts of a new fangled poly/cotton/Lycra blend that designers hadn’t yet figured out how to use. Miller hit up her parents for a $5,000 startup fund. Lindahl drafted a business plan and started hauling sample cases full of Jogbras—as the women dubbed their creation—into sporting goods stores. Thus, the sports bra was born.’ (8)
We can see that Miller had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of the sports bra per se, but rather was the brains behind the invention being a commercial success. In other words: she has been given co-priority not because she invented anything, but rather because she was key in getting Lindahl and Smith’s invention onto shelves in shops.
That then disposes of Miller who – being born Hinda Schreiber – was indeed jewish, but what of Lindahl?
Well, Lindahl is claimed by Winston-Macauley as having been jewish on no evidence whatsoever that I can find and any reference to her being jewish refers back to Winston-Macauley’s article at ‘Aish’.
The reason that Winston-Macauley probably assumed that Lindahl was jewish is because her real name isn’t Lisa Lindahl at all – this she adopted for unknown reasons at some point in life – but rather Eugenie Zobian.
Since Zobian sounds somewhat exotic I can only surmise that Winston-Macauley thought it must be a jewish surname, but it is not rather it is a purely Armenian surname. (9)
This then means that neither of the two inventors of the sports bra – Lisa Lindahl (Eugenie Zobian) and Polly Smith – are jewish at all, while Miller is falsely credited as an ‘co-inventor’ of it because she launched the product commercially rather than invented it.
However, there is another claimant to be the original sports bra and that is the ‘free swing tennis bra’ developed and sold by the Glamorise company in 1975. (10)
Naturally the Glamorise company claim that they invented the original sports bra before Lindahl and Smith did in 1977, (11) but the problem with this claim is that if you look at the ‘free swing tennis bra’ that Glamorise developed and marketed in 1975 it is clearly something completely different from the sports bra and is basically an ordinary ladies bra of the era with less reinforcement and more coverage.
We can see this from the original ‘free swing tennis bra’s’ advert in 1975 which showcases what the product looked at the time: (12)
Then after the release of Lindahl and Smith’s ‘sports bra’ in 1997 Glamorise simply copied Lindahl and Smith’s design and produced their own sports bra variant under their brand name ‘The Tennis Bra’: (13)
If ‘The Tennis Bra’ were a true sports bra, then it is unlikely that Glamorise would have simply copied Lindahl and Smith’s sports bra design as soon as it was released in 1977 and they would have simply kept on with their own design. The fact that that they did not is solid evidence that their ‘free swing tennis bra’ was something different from the ‘sports bra’ albeit meant to be marketed to the same population demographic for a similar purpose.
This is important because Glamorise was until a recently a firm owned and run by the Pundyk family: who are jewish. (14)
So, in summary then the first sports bra was invented and development by Linda Lindahl and Polly Smith in 1977: neither of whom were jewish.
Thus, the sports bra is not a jewish invention.
References
(1) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-bra
(2) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-bikini
(3) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-spanx
(4) https://aish.com/91795029/
(5) https://www.invent.org/inductees/hinda-miller
(6) https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20860634/a-brief-history-of-the-sports-bra/
(7) https://www.invent.org/inductees/hinda-miller
(8) https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20860634/a-brief-history-of-the-sports-bra/
(9) https://lastnames.myheritage.com/last-name/zobian; https://www.names.org/n/zobian/about
(10) https://glamorise.com/en-gb/blogs/news/sports-bra-history-revolution-by-glamorise-1975
(11) Idem.
(12) Idem.
(13) Idem.
(14) New Jersey Jewish News, 13th June 1974, p. 45
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