When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, the War Industries Board in Washington, D.C., appealed to American women to stop buying corsets in order to conserve steel for the war effort. The campaign successfully redirected an estimated 28,000 tons of metal — enough, it was claimed, to build two full battleships. This patriotic appeal accelerated the already-progressing cultural shift away from the boned corset in American women's dress, making the First World War a decisive moment in the garment's decline in the United States.

The war's commandeering of corset steel for battleships produced a striking juxtaposition — bodily freedom enabled by military violence — that feminist poets later explored. The image of the corset's steel transformed into the hardware of war appeared in several anti-war and feminist poems of the interwar period. This historical moment was revisited by poets of the Second World War and Cold War who connected the militarized female body to broader questions of women's patriotic sacrifice.