page_title: Corset controversy
section_title: School
hierarchical_section_title: Corset controversy / School
caption_attribution_description: English: Lady Southampton wearing a ball gown.
context_page_description: The corset controversy concerns supporters' and detractors' arguments for and against wearing a corset. The controversy was contemporary with the time that corsets were popular in society. Corsets, variously called a pair of bodys or stays, were worn by European women from the late 16th century onward, changing their form as fashions changed. In spite of radical change to fashion geographically and temporally, the corset or some derivative beneath an outer gown would shape the body or provide structure.
  There were brief periods in which corsetry was not part of mainstream fashion. In the 1790s, there was an abrupt change to fashion as the Empire silhouette became fashionable. During the following Regency era the highly supportive corsets of the early Georgian era were dismissed in favor of short garments worn primarily to support the breast and leave the waist and hips in their natural shape.
  Beginning in the mid-1820s, women's fashion returned to the full skirts of the prior century. In a repudiation of the Empire silhouette, the waist became the central focus of female dress. The corset assumed the dominant role it would hold for the rest of the 19th century.
context_section_description: In fashionable society, a girl was expected to have a suitably small waist. Girls' schools were preparation for society and some headmistresses treated that attainment as part of the girls' schooling. As the girl was not yet an adult, her opinion was not considered. A reader wrote to the editors of The Science of Health describing her experience.
  At the age of thirteen I was sent to a fashionable boarding school in the neighborhood of Montreal, and was quickly given to understand that the system embraced not only special mental accomplishments and attainments, but also figure-training; that I might, in a word, be made a fashionable young lady. Need I say that the first article of dress attended to was my stays; those that I wore upon entering were removed, and another pair, smaller in the waist, more strongly made and heavily boned, were substituted. These were not removed night or day, except twice a week for a few moments, for the purpose of bathing, and each morning they were drawn a little closer, so that a regular system of reduction of about one-half an inch a week, and later one-half an inch a month, was enforced; until the degree of tenuity, consonant with beauty in the principal's eyes, was attained. [...]  After six months my waist, having been reduced from twenty-two to sixteen inches, was considered small enough and no further attempt was made at reduction.
  I found that this enforced wearing of the corsets at this period of the girl's growth begets an unwholesome appetite for tightlacing. Before leaving I found myself as anxious as the others to have my stays drawn in.
  The West Australian printed excerpts from the diary of a school girl describing how figure training was accomplished.
  January 17th, 1864.– Returned to school today.  Miss T— is pleased that mother is satisfied with my figure.
  January 29th.– This morning Madame L— came and fitted all the girls in our class with new corsets. I have been horribly uncomfortable in mine all day. Katie A- cried all last night at having to sleep in her stays. Fancy a girl of sixteen not having been made to do so long ago; .... Miss T— showed me mother’s letter, saying that she had seen Lady de W—’s daughter at a house ball, who danced beautifully, and created a great amount of admiration with her 14in waist. So Miss T— says that I am to be made the same size.
  How I shall be able to eat and move about I can’t think; but Madge O—, who left last term, and who was that size, said you feel awfully smart, and, in fact rather a pleasant sensation when you get used to the pulling in.
  February 2nd.– The new Fräulein has come. She has a splendid figure; I wish mine were only as good. She told Agnes V— that she hardly had any need to lace at all, now; she was tightened when only twelve.
  February 4th.– We were all given our “tapes” this morning; Fräulein seeing that they were put on properly, and explaining the marks to us. The 'tapes' are merely bands of stout webbing about 2in. wide, at one end of which is a stout buckle. In marking ink Fräulein has indicated inches, half-inches and quarter-inches; each of the latter representing, so she explained to us, a month’s reduction by her system. As I am already 17in., and expect to leave school in rather less than a year, I shall have, she says, to follow her directions implicitly if I intend to gratify mother with the size of waist she wishes me to have upon coming out. The new corset I am now wearing fits me beautifully, and although I cannot stoop much in it, or sit very comfortably, on account of the extra stiff whalebones, my figure is immensely improved, Miss T— tells me.
  'This morning Fräulein and two of the girls laced me in fairly easily to 14½ in... After an hour or two, I got quite used to the sensation, which, as Fräulein told me it would be, is not very unpleasant, the pain which I scarcely knew how to bear for an hour or so having quite gone. My hips and waist feel  rather numb, but that, Fräulein tells me, will pass off. At all events, I shall have the two dresses mother promised me at Christmas if I came back with a re
caption: Ball Gown circa 1896
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