TO add to the corset post
Women wore them daily, from a young age, they mould and fit to the body. So sick of tired of the ugly anti-corset propaganda making them sound dangerous, the reason so man specially man complain over corsets was being of the Anti Tight lacing movement (I argue one of the few things Victorian men did right)
Tight lacing was small fashion trend engaged in by middle class women, that resulted in most of the bad things associated with corsets, Faintness, abdominal organ compression, bone malformation, permeant spine damage, reduced breathing, Lung damage, liver damage.
Note you'd never see the local fishwife wearing a tight-laced corset, but an upper class, hat sporting, fancy skirt waring lady.
I could write formal Essay about the blatant "I can't breath" bullshit shoved down everyone's throats about corsets. No that woman from Pirates of the Caribbean, shouldn't have fainted, She'd not have been struggling to breath, in her everyday wear corset she'd have been used to wearing.
Also stop wearing underwear over your clothes and then bitching about not being able to style your wrongly worn underwear.
Right? Like I could really go on about this for ages, and I probably will one day, but for now I’m gonna a small pet peeve of mine when people shit on corsets: that doctors at the time consider them bad so they must’ve been bad!
Now, I’m not gonna deny that there were doctors at the time who were critical of corset, but almost definitely was, but what gets me about this argument is that we, with our wealth of modern day medical knowledge, know that 19th century doctors are far from a reliable source, we recognise that prescribing opium and cocaine for minor ailments is ridiculous and frankly more harmful than not, we recognise this and openly joke about and mock them
Because suddenly, these 19th century doctors— who, I’d like to mention, often believed that the womb was floating freely and therefore could fly out of a woman’s body if a train went fast enough, as well as believing that hysteria was an actual thing— are an undeniable source of fact, suddenly these crude drawings of the supposed effect of corset on a woman’s body, drawings like this from 1884 (which, side note, I seriously question the validity of because, and maybe I’m missing something, but how would a 19th century doctor know this?) are reputable sources in the argument as to why corsets are clearly a horrible torture device used to oppress women!
Like, lets ignore the lack of evidence of women complaining about something as severe as pictured above, lets just blindly believe some 19th century doctors instead because clearly, the women were too oppressed to ever complain about something detrimental to their own health!
