Some things for writing western historical women:
Hoop skirts are made of flexible wire. They squish. That is how you get through doorways wearing one: pretty easily. You sit down in them by perching on the end of the chair and letting them spread out to either side- and sometimes they can spread pretty far.
It takes 15 minutes, max, to lace one’s own corset if one is inexperienced. A woman who knows what she’s doing can get it laced in 5 minutes or less. You do not have to have a lady’s maid to do it and women from all walks of life wore corsets (and earlier, stays) to provide breast support, posture correction, and a solid base for the many waistbands of their petticoats so they didn’t dig into the woman’s waist. Yes, even maids. Yes, even farmer’s wives. Factory workers, too. They were as ubiquitous as bras are today.
Those elaborate Georgian or 1830s or 1870s updos are mostly not the woman’s own hair in like 99% of cases. Hairpieces and wigs are not new at all.
Women (though of course not all women all the time) have pretty much always worn makeup. During the 19th century there was a vast conspiracy where we all pretended respectable women didn’t wear makeup. Respectable women definitely wore makeup.
The exception to the pulling out one pin rule is a hair comb/fork/stick, if the woman in question is really good at putting her hair up with it. And even then, it might not cascade so much as uncurl slowly from whatever twist configuration it was in.
Speaking of pins, we are almost always wearing more of them in our hair than you’d expect. Hairpins before the 1920s were longer, thinner, flatter, wider spaced, and generally 200% more effective at holding up long hair than bobby pins. Also better for picking locks, which is where the “picking a lock with a hairpin” trope comes from and why it doesn’t work as well nowadays- the pin has to be flat and bobby pins have those little plastic things on the ends.
The first mascara was a powder you mixed with water and put on your eyelashes with a little toothbrush thing. It was invented in the early 1900s and I’m sure for a while we all pretended respectable women didn’t wear it. Before that, women darkened their eyelashes with oil and sometimes used an open safety pin to separate them. Statistics on eye injuries from the latter practice are not known.
Most women did not shave their armpits and legs, much less their pubic areas, until the early 1900s. I don’t give a flying fuck if that makes you uncomfortable.
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