In 1977, Hinda Miller and Lisa Lindahl, working at the University of Vermont in Burlington, invented the first athletic bra — constructed initially by sewing two jockstraps together — to enable women to run without the discomfort and physical damage caused by inadequate breast support. The garment, first manufactured under the name 'Jogbra' and later as the sports bra, became essential to the explosion of women's participation in running, aerobics, and team sports that followed Title IX. It is now one of the most commercially significant garments in women's clothing.

The sports bra's invention materially enabled the bodily freedom that feminist poets had been describing in verse since the 1960s, translating literary liberation into physical reality. The garment features in later feminist poetry as a symbol of practical, functional bodily autonomy as opposed to the decorative constraints of the corset and fashion bra. Women poets of the 1980s and 1990s increasingly wrote about the athletic and physically active body as a site of female power rather than male display.