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Introduction
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men their minds.
—William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona
“One of the highest entertainments in Turkey is having you go to their baths,” aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in an 1850s edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book. “When I was first introduced to one, the lady of the house came to undress me—another high compliment they pay to strangers. After she slipped off my gown and my stays, she was very much struck by the sight of them and cried out to the ladies in the bath, ‘Come hither, and see how cruelly the poor English ladies are used by their husbands. You need not boast, indeed, of the superior liberties allowed to you when they lock you up in a box.’”
The “box,” which every American woman from colonial days through the 1950s came gift wrapped in, was the corset. To modern women, the idea of keeping house, shopping, rearing children, dancing, and even swimming and playing sports— all while barely able to bend over in a corset— seems impossible and even ridiculous. Why did women do that to themselves? we wonder.
The answer heard most often is vanity. Then, as now, few women were satisfied with their natural figure. Corsets were the only means of obtaining the currently-popular shape, whether it was the rigidly flat torso and raised bosom of the seventeenth century, the flat-stomached, high-busted, shoulders-back look of the eighteenth century, or the hourglass figure of the nineteenth century. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, corsets worked something like a rigid diet and hours in the gym do today, flattening the stomach and hips, and often trimming the waistline, too.
While many women did wear corsets for vanity, there were other reasons for putting on a corset. Bras didn’t become popular until the 1930s, so corsets acted as a bosom support. Also, during many eras, women’s clothes were skin tight; without a corset, bodices would have constantly wrinkled and ridden up.
Corsets also affected a woman’s demeanor. As one Victorian mother wrote to a fashion magazine, at first her daughter rejected “the discipline of the corset” but now “her only objection is that the corsets are uncomfortable and prevent her from romping about...” Which was exactly the point. Corsets altered more than the figure; they also affected the behavior and, it was believed, the character of the women who wore them.
Dress reformer Helen Gilbert Ecob, in her 1892 book The Well Dressed Woman, mentions this argument. She wrote: “Those who uphold the corset argue its morality because ‘the only period in which its general use appears to have been discontinued are the few years which immediately followed the French Revolution, when the general licentiousness of manners and morals was accompanied by a corresponding indecency in dress.’“
And to a great many women, not wearing a corset did seem indecent. Corsets in one form or another had been around since biblical times, and were adopted by nearly all women by the sixteenth century. Ecob claimed that by 1892 American women bought 60,000,000 corsets each year. After generations of dedicated corset wearing, many women were uncomfortable going without—as if they were walking around naked.
Corsets always had their detractors. In the early days of corset wearing, man...
