“Corset health issues date back to the 1800s when women willingly abused their bodies in the name of fashion. For some time in the nineteenth century, in America a definition of beauty included corsets, making women’s waists as small as possible. This process was not only painful for women but also resulted in broken ribs and damaged internal organs. In the name of fashion, tightlacing became commonplace. The goal was to reshape a female’s body to conform to standards of fashion.” The porn industry and the body dysmorphic young women the industry exploits have been quite active on the internet – a search on “corset” yields so much revisionist propaganda it’s difficult to wade through it all. Even Wikipedia did not escape these unfortunate attempts to rewrite the history of the corset. Like the corset industry when women rejected the corset in the 1910’s (the industry formed a powerful lobby at the time that disseminated disinformation), today’s revisionists seek to minimize the dangers by portraying corsets as harmless or even beneficial.

Let’s take a look at corsets – many pictures are here on Wikipedia commons – and see if the revisions stack up with reality.

Revision #1: The revisionists say corsets were only worn for “support”. They conveniently don’t specify what is being supported. The healthy human back requires no external means of support. And the wearing of a corset would weaken rather than strengthen a healthy back. If the goal was to support the breasts, why then the extremely cinched waists observed in every corset? Why have any steel or whalebone at all on the waist? Why have lacing? Why not a normally proportioned waist?

Revision #2: The revisionists say only a tiny minority of women tightened the laces. Corsets were designed and worn for the sole purpose of cinching in the waist – this is obvious. For a corset to be anything but a garment adding significant bulk to one’s figure (and preventing one from fitting into one’s clothing), one must tighten the laces. It’s obvious that corsets are and were worn for compressing the body into an hourglass shape and to do that, the laces must be tightened considerably. Tight lacing was, in fact, common.

Revision #3: The revisionists say corsets do not harm the body. What happens to the human body when it is compressed in a corset? The human skeletomuscular system is in perfect symphony with a vast network of internal and external organs. Throw a wrench in the system, however, and this wonderful machine that was designed to serve reliably for many years begins to break down. Breathing, eating, digesting, waste processing, and other bodily functions are restricted and become dysfunctional when the internal organs are constricted and displaced. The muscles are weakened and the ligaments stretched, so posture is not improved but deteriorates as the body becomes dependent upon an external support mechanism. A full range of motion is not possible, so energy levels and fitness decrease.

All that women throughout history have endured and achieved so that other women who follow in their footsteps may be free, and these young women willingly don a steel cage. Which is their choice, however sources of historical record must not be corrupted by self-serving commercial revisionists and their self-destructive customers.

As Susan Faludi remarked on “the consumerizing of the American female public”:

We are steeped in a consumer culture where emotional manipulation is the name of the game and political analysis interferes with the Big Sell and so is discouraged…

The personal without political armor inevitably will be taken over by commercial manipulation, self-absorption, and enervative materialism, especially in this era of consumerism run amok.

Real personal independence flourishes only when fortified by political action and analysis. Without political thought, we have no personal freedom.

So let’s look at what history says about of the delightful “feminine” effects of the corset. First, from Bloom:

Corset health issues date back to the 1800s when women willingly abused their bodies in the name of fashion. But how did this all come about? What sort of health issues did ladies endure by wearing corsets? For some time in the nineteenth century, in America a definition of beauty included corsets, making women?s waists as small as possible. This process was not only painful for women but also resulted in broken ribs and damaged internal organs. Though commonly associated with Victorian upper-class matrons, corsets originated much earlier, in the 16th century, and by the 19th had become a hallmark of fashion for women of nearly all classes. Practically compulsory for women of aristocratic birth, corsets were also adopted by working women who aspired toward similar ideals of fashion. One popular line of mass-produced corsets in the 1880s was the ‘Pretty Housemaid’ model. In the name of fashion, tightlacing became commonplace. The goal was to reshape a female’s body to conform to standards of fashion. For many ladies, a 16- to 17-inch waist was desirable and was accomplished by lacing their corsets tighter and tighter until their rib cages became deformed. Health problems naturally followed. One such problem was reduction of lung volume which led to breathing problems. Because the corsets were so tight, women were only able to fill the tops of their lungs with air. This shallow breathing resulted in the bottom part of the lungs being filled with mucus. This was characterized by a persistent cough, the body’s way of ridding the lungs of foreign matter. This may have been why doctors believed corsets were a cause of tuberculosis. Women were also known to faint because of the reduced lung function. This made smelling salts a typical household item. Another corset health issue was the compression of the internal organs, including: Liver, Stomach, Bladder, and Intestines.

From Reflections on Health and Society in Culture:

In the early 1800s, after the French Revolution, fashionable women temporarily gave up their corsets (along with the other symbols of the aristocracy) for looser clothing that seemed to parallel new ideas of freedom in political life.

But when the corset returned a few years later, it took forms that eventually led to concerns for women’s health. Two things changed. First, the corset accentuated rather than hid the woman’s natural form, producing the corset shape that most of us recognize – an hourglass figure, with tight compression of the waist. Throughout the 1800s, corset forms became more and more exaggerated, women’s clothing increasingly hugged the torso, and the corset squeezed in more and more of the body to create an ‘ideal’ female shape from shoulder to thigh. (See an example in the exhibit.) Second, more and more women wore them, and mothers used them for young children…

Women wore special maternity corsets while pregnant. Women who had worn corsets since childhood or adolescence probably had weaker abdominal muscles and might have benefited from proper support, but maternity corsets were not specially designed for support. Instead, the corsets were designed to mask, even minimize, the size of the pregnant body.

Leigh Summers writes in Bound to Please:

The corset had been the subject of intense medical and scientific scrutiny since the 1860s. By 1880 both the medical profession and of course the women who wore the garments understood that the corset exerted tremendous pressure on the abdomen as well as the chest. Using a manometer on more than fifty women, Dr. Latou Dickinson had shown that ‘regular’ stays produced between 21 lb. and 80 lb. of pressure per square inch on the body. Dickinson’s work had been replicated and further publicized by Dr. D.A. Sergeant, who had shown that the corset reduced lung capacity by at least one-fifth. Their work was further supported by hideous animal experiments on dogs and monkeys. The animals were corseted and the pressure on their abdomens and chests were systematically increased until they expired. These experiments, argued defenders, attempted to replicate the conditions imposed by the corset on the human frame and were discussed at some length in Lancet. The experiments showed that heart damage, syncope, and death were related to tightly laced corsetry. Critics of vivisection by corset described these experiments as ‘horrifying and wanton cruelty’. This charge was disputed by doctors who claimed that the [anaesthitized] animals did not suffer, and that similar “compression of the abdomen and chest… [was] self inflicted daily by thousands of women in Great Britain without anaesthetic’.

Summers also discusses how the corset was used as a abortion device:

Lionel Rose has briefly discussed several case histories of working- and middle-class women whose illegitimate babies were successfully concealed from families and employees in nineteenth-century Britain. Rose noted that these pregnancies were completely undetected until the accidental discovery of the infants’ bodies. In almost all cases these unfortunate women insisted the infants were born dead or died very quickly after birth… It would seem extremely likely, given that Dr. Latou Dickinson’s experiments showed that the standard corset exerted up to 80 lb per square inch of pressure on the torso, that corsetry was probably integral in the maternal deception and contributed significantly to the ‘concealed’ infant’s death… The tightly laced corset offered an expedient method of family limitation that was instrumental in avoiding the outrage of husband, family, employers, clergy, state, and even personal ‘conscience’. The extreme pressure of a tightly laced corset may have inhibited quickening and would certainly have obscured it from public notice… In reducing the effects of quickening, or forestalling the completion of pregnancy altogether, the corset allowed the pregnant nineteenth-century woman to convince herself, consciously or unconsciously that no pregnancy had occurred and that bleeding after months of ‘failed’ menstruation was simply a case of cleared ‘obstruction’. Moreover, if the corset failed to procure an early miscarriage, the likelihood of an infant’s survival after it had been corseted throughout its term in utero were markedly reduced…

[Dr.] Alice Stockman noted that many girls gave birth to ‘frail scrofulous children’ because of ‘obstruction in the respiratory system’. These obstructions, she maintained firmly, were the direct result of the corset. The corset allowed ‘mother’ to ‘breathe enough to sustain her own organism in fair condition’ but it meant she did ‘not inhale enough oxygen to sustain an inter-uterine being.’ Stockham stated that ‘many still births were explainable to this principle’…. When asked by a patient how far advanced a woman should be in pregnancy before she laid aside her corset, she replied that ‘the corset should not be worn for two hundred years before pregnancy takes place’. (Stockham insisted that ‘it would take that time at least to overcome the ill effects of the garment which [women] thought so essential…

Even young girls were corseted, and it’s telling how a child, as yet unbowed by societal pressure to be “feminine”, would outright reject the corset. Gwen Raverat, a child during the Victorian era, recalls enforced juvenile corset wearing in her memoirs Period Piece. She recalls that her sister Margaret, when put into corset at thirteen, “ran round and round the nursery screaming with rage.” Raverat herself reacted this way:

I ran away somewhere and took them off… [then] endured sullenly the row that ensued when my soft-shelled condition was discovered; was forcibly re-corseted; and as soon as possible went away and took them off again. One of my governesses used to weep over my wickedness in this respect. I had a bad figure and to me they were instruments of torture; they prevented me from breathing, and dug deep holes into my softer parts on every side. I am sure no hair shirt could have been worse to me.

So is wearing the corset “feminine” as one young woman who tells us an advantage of the corset is that one cannot eat begs us to believe? The natural female body is feminine: just look at the strong healthy natural woman in Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (there’s not much profit to be made in encouraging women to look natural, however):