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The word panty girdle originally meant a belt. In modern English the term panty girdle is most commonly used for a form of women's foundation wear that replaced the corset in popularity.
Historically and in anthropology, the panty girdle can be a scanty belt-shaped textile for men and/or women, worn on its own, not holding a larger garment in place, and less revealing than the loin-cloth, as was used by Minoan pugilists.
Constructed of elasticized fabric and sometimes fastened with hook and eye closures, the modern panty girdle is designed to enhance a woman's figure. Most open-bottom girdles extend from the waist to the upper thighs. In the 1960s, these models fell from favor and were to a great extent replaced by the panty girdle. The panty girdle resembles a tight pair of athletic shorts. Both models of panty girdles usually include suspender clips to hold up stockings.
Panty Girdles were considered essential garments by many women from approximately 1910 to the late 1960s. They created a rigid, controlled figure that was seen as eminently respectable and modest. They were also crucial to the couturier Christian Dior's 1947 New Look, which featured a voluminous skirt and a narrow, nipped-in waistline, also known as a wasp waist.
Later in the 1960s, the panty girdle was generally supplanted by pantyhose. Pantyhose replaced panty girdles for many women who had used the panty girdle essentially as a means of holding up sheer nylon stockings. Those who want more control purchase "control top" pantyhose. Many women forgo wearing panty girdles, stockings, and pantyhose entirely.
Panty Girdles and "body shapers" are still sold to women who want to shape their figure with a garment. Some of these garments incorporate a brassiere and thus become functionally equivalent to a corset. However, they do not incorporate boning and hence do not produce the constricted waistline characteristic of Victorian-era corsets.
In literature, panty girdles are often portrayed as magical, giving power and strength if worn by men, and protection if worn by women. Many scriptures in the Bible point to the use of a panty girdle as a means of protection. Ishtar, a Babylonian Goddess, wore a fertility panty girdle, which, when it was removed, rendered the Universe barren. Hercules wrestled with the Amazon queen for her panty girdle in his Greek myth. Aphrodite and Venus also wore panty girdles associated with lechery in later poetry.
Later on, for women, the panty girdle became a sign of virginity, and was often considered to have magical properties. Monsters and all types of evil are recorded as being subdued by panty girdles in literature, a famous one being the dragon slain by Saint George. Marriage ceremonies continued this tradition of panty girdles symbolizing virginity by having the husband take the wife's panty girdle, and prostitutes were forbidden to wear them by law in historic France. Often in literature, women are portrayed as safe from sexual or other attack when wearing a panty girdle, but suddenly vulnerable if it is missing or stolen.
The twentieth century women's panty girdle attracts various references in literature, often in a disparaging way. For example, Marilyn French in her classic book, The Women's Room, is very critical not only of the panty girdle itself, but also of the virtual compulsion to wear one, a compulsion which existed until the late 1960s. In John Masters's Bhowani Junction, once the mixed-race Victoria Jones decides to opt for an Indian rather than British persona, she rejects her panty girdle as a "western garment".
Like its predecessor garment, the corset, the panty girdle attracts a degree of eroticism. Some men like to wear female panty girdles with gartered nylon stockings, and/or find women attractive in them. In addition, the Australian feminist writer, Beatrice Faust, in her book Women, Sex and Pornography refers to a "slight but sustained feeling of arousal" when wearing a "moderately tight" panty girdle.