Feature

Forced Femininity: Corsets and the Cultural Body

Nineteenth-century dress reformers who worked to liberate women from the oppressive nature of the corset, with its rigid bodice, tightlacing, and vertical-diagonal boning, would be surprised to see that it has made its way back into women’s closets in 2020, showing that despite its conflicted past and reputation as being a garment that punished, oppressed, regulated, and sculpted the female body, women’s relationship to the corset is complicated and conflicted. Historically, the corset has idealized, hyper-feminized, and sexualized the female body. At present, middle- and upperclass women are spending substantial sums of money on custom-made corsets, influenced by the hyper-sexualized bodies of pop stars, models, and media influencers embellishing them on social media. Melis Mulazimoglu Erkal writes that the conflict between the historically subversive nature of the corset and its contemporary approval can be demystified by feminist critic Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 2002). Quoting Wolf, Erkal explains that corsets, plastic surgery, diet, and extreme physical exercise show “that Western patriarchal culture still has a lot to shape and correct, [in] deciding what is beautiful, proper, and accepted and what is not.”1

The corset as an object of material culture has endured the passage of time. From the sixteenth-century French courts to the catwalks of Milan in the twenty-first century, its resurgence today is indicative of a lingering and pervasive western patriarchal ideology that continues to culture, control, and shape the female body. While women who enjoy wearing a corset today claim that it empowers them (they feel elegant, sexy, or beautiful), the social consequences of corsetry in the past effectively disempowered women both symbolically and physically, rendering them helpless, weak, and vulnerable. Although women today enjoy the freedom of fashion, and there are no obvious powers forcing them to wear corsets, many choose to wear them, thereby supporting an unnatural and unobtainable standard of beauty inherited from the past, a hyper-feminized and hyper-sexualized body with an hourglass shape, heaving bosom, and tiny waist.

While its origins are debatable, most historians agree that the ancient Greek Minoans wore belts and vests with leather straps to constrict and shape their waist, often exposing the woman’s breasts. These appeared to be the first corsets, which where tightly laced and worn by men, women, and children, to bind their waists.2 Erkal writes that as centuries evolved, the construction of femininity through dress “varied from one decade to another And [sic] so did the corset.”3

Corsets were a mainstream garment in the west from the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century, when they were replaced by girdles and bras. It was the sixteenth-century Queen Consort of France, Catherine de’ Medici, who first imposed corsetry on women. This is arguably the beginning of the divide where the western female body became fashioned and sensualized by the corset. Depending on the century, the corset accentuated or restricted various parts of a woman’s upper body.4 Catherine de’ Medici’s sixteenth-century corsets, like Queen Elizabeth I’s, were initially designed for better posture and to slim the waist, but the corset took off in popularity and became a mainstay through the next three centuries. Tudor Elizabethan corsets formed the idealized sixteenth-century conical or V-shaped ideal feminine image with a flat-front bodice and breasts peeking out over the top of the corset: “In England, the “Tudor Corset” utilized iron corset covers for both men and women, while France, Germany, and Italy preferred a less stiff style to eventuate a wider hip. Queen Elizabeth I created the “Elizabethan Corset,” inspired by the Tudors, but with a less rigid (using whalebone) and emphasized waist.”5

The seventeenth-century corset was made mostly from linen and bones and was known for featuring a prominent bust and décolletage: “Exposing the breasts was regarded amongst the aristocracy and upper classes as a status symbol and a sign of beauty.”6 Period paintings reveal Queen Mary II of England with almost bare breasts.

Corset styles shifted to a long and naturally shaped, high-waisted stay in the late eighteenth century, reminiscent of the costumes worn by actresses in Jane Austen films. Dresses were loose with long waists, narrow backs, wide fronts, and shoulders straps that pulled the shoulders back so that the shoulder blades almost touched. Erkal explains, “The resulting silhouette, with shoulders thrown back, very erect posture and a high, full bosom, is characteristic of this period. The corsets often included tabs, formed by making cuts from the lower edge to the waistband that spread when on the body, giving hips more room and comfort.”7

Lady wearing a corseted dress, Edwardian Period, blog.sfgate.com. African American woman models a typical corset fashioned dress of late 19th-Century United States. Courtesy Alvan S. Harper Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida Collection.

By mid-century the heavily boned, rigid corsets popularly associated with the historical corset became fashionable. Skirts were also full, embellishing the illusion of a smaller waist. Some of these corsets had over one hundred bones. With the invention of the front fastening busk in 1848 women were able to fasten their own corsets.8 The more constrictive nature of these nineteenth-century corsets represented the Victorian hourglass figure, with a tiny, synched in waistline achieved by tightlacing, which allegedly caused severe health problems because of compression on the stomach, liver, and ribs. Doctors claimed that women were at risk for organ failure, spinal deformity, cancer, liver disease, and even tuberculosis.9 Ross Pomeroy, a writer for Real Clear Science, says that the severe health effects of corsets were often exaggerated. He cites anthropologist Rebecca Gibson from the University of Notre Dame, who studied this period of corset wearing and claims that the most predominant health issues stemming from corset wearing included breathing issues, which prevented women from exercising, and atrophy of the mid and lower back muscles.10 Gibson analyzed the skeletons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women and said: “The average corseted waist size was 22 inches, which is positively tiny compared to the average female waist size in England or America today—roughly 32 to 35 inches. But consider that just fifty years ago, the average female waist size in the U.S. was a mere 24 to 25 inches. For women living in the Victorian era, squeezing into a corset would have been uncomfortable, but probably not torturous, suffocating, or debilitating”11 While this may be the case, the practice of extreme tightlacing is arguably ridiculous and unimaginable, especially from a twenty-first-century perspective. Émilie Marie Bouchau, a French singer and actress who was known for her extremely tight corset, reportedly had a waist that measured only 15 inches. Watch images of Bouchau’s extreme corseting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byz0IAPxvS0.

African American woman models a typical corset fashioned dress of late 19th-Century United States. Courtesy Alvan S. Harper Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida Collection. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, an American advocate for 19th Century dress reform wears a Bloomers outfit. Courtesy Edward Manning Ruttenber & L.H. Clark, History of Orange County.

Historian Ruth Goodman wanted to experience life as a Victorian, which meant living in a corset every day for one year. Her experience is presented in a documentary television series first shown on BBC in January 2009. The series recreated everyday life on a farm in Shropshire, England, in the 1880s, using authentic replica equipment and clothing. It was filmed at a preserved Victorian living museum and historic working farm. Goodman was joined by two archaeologists. Goodman’s book, How to be a Victorian, relates her experiences, saying that corsets weren’t restricted to middle- or upper-class women’s fashion. Whether you lived in an asylum, a prison, a workhouse, provisions for a corset were granted.12 Leigh Summers, a Victorian dress and costume historian, writes that “working-class women bought, were given, or made corsets, believing, as their middle-class sisters did, that corsetry supported the body and made the figure trim.”13 She adds that, although workingclass women wore corsets, they wore them differently than middle-class women. Workingclass women wore a looser fitting corset called a jump: “Jumps were designed to fit more loosely than standard corsets, which allowed the occupant enough mobility to work.”14

Goodman writes that Victorians held the sexist belief that women were the weaker of the two sexes and so their “womb and other reproductive organs made female midriffs more delicate and problematic.”15 While the corset was meant to support the midriff, Goodman says it actually caused women to lose muscle tone and therefore precipitated the need for support: “If such a woman left her corsets off for a day or so, she would probably find the lack of them disconcerting and tiring and would struggle with the floppiness of her middle regions.”16 She adds that the effects of wearing corsets every day weakened a woman’s abdominal area to such a degree that “they cannot sit upright without them” and “are compelled to wear night stays when in bed.”17

X-Ray showing damage to the last ribs, 1908. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Image showing impact of the corset on a woman’s organs. Surprisingly, Goodman says that the corsets of the 1840s and 1850s were comfortable because they were often homemade. Having worn them, she says, “A lightly boned, corded corset like this is a very easy thing to wear, more comfortable, in my opinion, than the underwired bras of the twenty-first century.”18 Discomfort and problems with the corset arose in the late 1850s when fashionable society popularized the small waist, so women turned to professionally and factory-made corsets that were more rigid. “This was the age of the corset horror story,” Goodman writes. A diary from a fifteen-year-old girl at a boarding school details the painstaking process of shrinking her waist until it was only thirteen inches. Goodman puts things into perspective for the reader, saying that a toddler’s waist measures somewhere around twenty inches. To achieve such minute waist sizes, some women replaced regular meals with tiny meals throughout the day. Still, this was the extreme: “The vast majority of surviving Victorian corsets and outer clothes of this period are nothing like so small in the waist. Nineteen to 24 inches is the common range for fashionable young women’s clothing with clothing for older women usually rising by several inches.”19

Addressing the comfort of the corset, Goodman says that because she is “corpulent” she believes it is easier for her to pinch her waist in, without discomfort, by about two inches. She notes this would be challenging for women who are slim. She adds that trying to pinch four inches is difficult.20 She writes that the problems she experienced from wearing a corset for an extended time surprised her: “The most immediate was trouble with my skin […]. It was worst when I had been hot and then cooled down, as the sweat left salt on my skin, which then rubbed. This could be agony.”21 The other issue Goodman said she faced was losing her voice on account of breathing entirely into her upper ribcage. The biggest problem with wearing a corset, however, was its deformation of her lower ribcage: “At the end of the day, when I took off my corset, there was always a strange moment—an odd sensation when everything tried to return to its natural shape. I felt my ribcage re-inflating, which took a rather disconcerting five or six seconds.”22

Ultimately, the corset was an uncomfortable, deforming, and restrictive garment. However, its oppressive nature extended far beyond its sculpting of and damage to the physical body. Criticism of it entered the political arena as well, when first-wave feminists began supporting the women’s dress reform movement closer to the end of the century. According to historian Robert E. Riegel, they attacked women’s dress in general, claiming it was

subservient to the sexual whims of men: “Traditional dress, they said, was that of the female slave who served and pampered her male master, and who catered to his sensual grossness by titillating his passions. Only with rational dress could pure womanhood free herself from thralldom, attain health and vigor and compete equally with men in all activities.”23

Nineteenth-century dress reformers were mostly middle-class women involved in the first wave of feminism in the west from the 1850s to the 1890s. They also advocated for women’s education, suffrage, and temperance. They believed in a more rational, or practical, way of dressing and were also influential in persuading women to adopt simplified garments for athletic activities such as bicycling or swimming.24

Not just criticizing traditional fashion, dress reformers proposed solutions, such as bloomers. Invented by Elizabeth Smith Miller and endorsed by Amelia Bloomer in her temperance magazine, The Lily, bloomers were considered rational and comfortable dress. The whole bloomer outfit consisted of a short jacket (which could be worn with or without a corset), a shorter skirt extending below the knee, and loose and puffy pants that gathered at the ankles. Public reaction to bloomers was mixed: “Conservatives wept at how women lost mystery and attractiveness as they discarded their flowing robes, and moaned that women were desexing themselves […].”25 Bloomers were also ridiculed by the public: “The spectacle of bifurcated garments for women also inspired almost universal craning of necks, surprised whistles and semi-humorous, audible comments which confused and embarrassed the fair reformers.”26

The dress reform movement saw its slow demise in the United States in the late 1890s. According to Riegel it seemed women were no longer in need of dress reform: “Many women were wearing shorter skirts, particularly for walking. Gymnasium bloomers were widely accepted for exercise, particularly indoors.”27 However, Riegel also points out, the popularized and corseted Gibson Girl suggests that existing reforms were being exaggerated. The Gibson Girl symbolized the new feminine ideal in the 1890s, as depicted by artist, Charles Gibson Dana. The Gibson Girl was educated, independent, married, and romantic—and she wore a corset.

Today, corsets are worn usually as a single piece on top of clothing instead of beneath it. Wearing a corset today is purportedly about fantasy and exoticism, a subculture of fashion that hyper-feminizes and sexualizes the female body. Social media influencer Kim Kardashian has fueled the corset craze with her constructed hourglass shape that young women are seen trying to emulate across social media. On Instagram, she promotes waist trainers that help achieve a smaller waist over time.

Melanie Talkington of Lace Embrace Atelier specializes in custom made corsetry in Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo Courtesy The Edmonton Journal.

Melanie Talkington of Lace Embrace Atelier in Vancouver, British Columbia, sees the corset today as an accessory of beauty with health benefits: “People have noticed weight loss, improved posture, less back pain, and improved self-esteem from a corset.” Notably, most women in the twenty-first century do not wear corsets every day, all day, as women in the nineteenth century did. Talkington warns that inexpensive or mass-produced corsets will be uncomfortable as they “sausage” the body and pinch the ribs and hips. She defends her industry by saying, “We don’t need to try to dress in a masculine manner to prove ourselves, and we can enjoy being feminine and powerful.”

Reflecting on the history of the corset and its return to fashion in the twenty-first century, why are women still artificially constructing their bodies to fit unnatural, celebrity endorsed, beauty industry ideals, and how does a flatter stomach and smaller waist make one more feminine and powerful? If anything, it makes a woman weaker because she can’t breathe, run, or move properly, rendering her helpless and weak and vulnerable to outside control. If the corset was historically designed and worn with the idea that women are the weaker vessel, then perhaps women are still being subverted into believing that the female body is inherently weak and needs support to correct its supposed flawed nature.

Dana Graham Lai (she/her)

MA English Literature MAIH program (general stream)