A Second Look at the Big Squeeze
Title:
A Second Look at the Big Squeeze. By: Ruark, Jennifer, Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 11/23/2001, Vol. 48, Issue 13
Were corsets--or even foot-binding--really so bad?
LONG BEFORE the sexual revolution led women to shed their bras and girdles for physical freedom, early feminists campaigned against a far more restrictive garment. "Burn the corsets!" wrote Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in 1874. "Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomen for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun." Doctors, too, inveighed against the popular waist-cinching, bust-lifting contraption that put up to 80 pounds of pressure on every square inch of a woman's torso, squeezing her rib cage in and up and pressing mercilessly on her internal organs. They blamed illnesses and even deaths on it, and at least one 19th-century doctor compared corsetry to Chinese foot-binding.
Ever since then, historians and other scholars interested in the ways that beauty standards oppress women have referred knowingly to the corset as the example par excellence. But new research suggests that they've been wrong -- and not just about corsets.
"'Fashion' can not logically be reified as a magic power that causes women to behave in ways contrary to their own best interests," writes Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in her forthcoming book The Corset: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, December). It is one of several new studies that revise the history of fashion, insisting that women have had good reasons for squeezing themselves into corsets, bras, and girdles, and even for binding their feet.
THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND
Worn off and on by members of the upper classes -- both men and women -- since the early 16th century, corsets exploded in popularity in the 19th century. Many people considered the corset to be an essential part of proper, modest dress for women, and some women "tight-laced," squeezing their waists down to 15 inches or smaller. Doctors opposed to corsetry said it interfered with women's natural role as child bearers, while doctors who favored the practice said women needed corsets to support their weak bodies. No one questioned that the female sex was weak, but feminist dress-reformers blamed corsets for sapping women's strength and keeping them from achieving equality with men.
"Niggardly waists and niggardly brains go together" wrote Frances Willard, a suffragist and dress reformer. "A ligature around the vital organs at the smallest diameter of the womanly figure means an impoverished blood supply to the brain, and may explain why women scream when they see a mouse."
Dress reformers didn't make much headway, though, in part because their movement was associated not just with women's suffrage but with other dangerous ideas like atheism and free love. (In fact, Ms. Steele points out, some feminists were quite prudish, and opposed corsets on the grounds that they turned women into sex objects.) Even feminists were not unanimous in their opposition; to many, the rigidity of corsets implied self-control and respectability. The editor of Woman's Suffrage Journal urged her readers to "stick to your stays."
Contemporary scholars who rail against the corset, Ms. Steele says, have been too willing to believe 19th-century medical reports that attributed diseases as varied as tuberculosis, breast cancer, scoliosis, and prolapsed uterus -- not to mention hysteria, insanity, and "impure desires" -- to tight-lacing. "Historians who would never accept medical accounts of the dangers of masturbation (causes blindness and insanity) or female education (sucks the blood from the uterus to the brain with appalling results) become perversely credulous whenever fashion is the subject of medical anathema," she writes.
Ms. Steele read medical and autopsy reports with a cardiologist to pin down corsetry's actual effects. "When you start investigating all of these claims, they don't stand up," she says. Citing a 1998 re-enactment experiment by Colleen Gau, an independent scholar, Ms. Steele says there is no question that corsets reduced women's lung capacity, forcing them to breathe with their upper diaphragms (and creating the heaving bosoms of bodice-ripper fame). Their long-term use must certainly have weakened women's back and abdominal muscles, and may have aggravated uterine problems, she says. But the most serious illnesses caused by corset-wearing were probably indigestion and constipation.
Contemporary feminists, including Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Helene E. Roberts, who have argued that men found the corset sexy because it inflicted pain on women, have overstated the prevalence of tight-lacing, Ms. Steele says. Published accounts of it, including testimonies of enforced tight-lacing at boarding schools, were most likely the erotic fantasies of a minority of fetishists (who may have included women).
Many women simply liked wearing corsets, Ms. Steele argues. "Certainly, some women perceived the corset as a physical assault, but it's an exaggeration to say that all or even most women perceived it that way. We tend to regard comfort as a very high priority, and they didn't, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there were so many uncomfortable things going on in your life anyway." She says the corset may have been attractive to many women because it allowed them to express their sexuality in a socially acceptable way: While it controlled jiggly female flesh, the hourglass shape and heavy panting it induced were blatantly erotic.
CIVILIZING MISSION
Leigh Summers, a research associate at the University of New England, in Australia, is much more critical of the corset. In Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset, just out from Berg Publishers, she writes that, while extreme tight-lacing may not have been the norm, even the more common goal of a 21-inch waist was dangerously unrealistic. Yes, she concedes, Victorian medicine had a long way to go, but enormous pressure consistently placed on the pelvic area was undoubtedly harmful. Moreover, "it deadened women's lives by causing fits of depression, uneasy feelings, and a sense of general malaise."
But while Ms. Summers believes corsets were used to police Victorian women's bodies and their minds, she too discredits the notion that women were simply dupes of the patriarchy. Not only did the corset provide women with "culturally sanctioned eroticism," she writes, but (paradoxically) missionary women may have considered the corset an "ideological ally," helping them maintain their identity as "civilized" in remote parts of the world. Moreover, its spread during the Industrial Revolution to working-class women allowed them to challenge the status of their betters: If they could look like their mistresses, how different were they, really?
Certainly, enough women objected to corsets to create a market for alternatives, such as the brassiere, an early version of which was patented in 1863. About 100 years later, feminists rejected that item of clothing, too. But Ms. Gau and Jane Farrell-Beck, a professor of textiles and clothing at Iowa State University, argue in Uplift: The Bra in America, (University of Pennsylvania Press, December) that it is "time to shelve the stereotype of the brassiere as oppressive and to take a more balanced view of its development."
"The brassiere brought women 'uplift' in several facets of their lives, including health, fashion, and economic development," they write. Even as late as the early 1900s, a "bust girdle" meant a break from the corset: It was recommended for sportswomen, for pregnant and nursing women, and for singers and lecturers who needed full use of their lungs. As women moved into factory jobs in the 1940s, bra promoters argued that its physical support relieved fatigue. And it also provided business opportunities for women: They held almost half of the more than 1,230 patents for breast supporters between 1863 and 1969. While the emphasis in the 1960s on "natural" shapes coincided with a downturn in the industry, Ms. Gau and Ms. Farrell-Beck point with satisfaction to the bra's renewed popularity today.
The idea that women ever embraced foot-binding is harder to swallow. You don't have to be a feminist to cringe with sympathy at the hooflike appearance of bound feet in archival photos, and the idea that Chinese men were turned on by the broken bones and stench is repulsive to most contemporary observers. But Dorothy Ko, a history professor at Columbia University's Barnard College, says the practice was neither senseless nor perverted. It was "entirely reasonable" for women, given the time and place in which they lived, she argues in Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (University of California Press, December). Foot-binding "had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world."
WOMEN'S WORK
Her research dispels several myths about foot-binding, most importantly that it was practiced among the rich as a symbol of leisure. "Foot-binding did not cloister women, because it wasn't meant to cripple them," she says, and indeed, shoes caked with mud and tiny rain boots show that women with bound feet did venture out of their houses. In fact, she says, beginning in the 18th century, peasant daughters emulated the upper classes by binding, and although some Chinese people criticized the practice as frivolous, women with bound feet could and did work.
That work might mean collecting firewood or weeding, rather than standing knee-deep among the rice paddies, but even women who stayed inside were always productive, crafting beautiful "Lotus shoes" of satin, silk, and cotton at home or laboring in silk workshops.
Brides with bound feet were desirable not because potential grooms found them sexually alluring but because to potential in-laws their feet signaled modesty and morality, Ms. Ko argues. Women wore slippers even to bed, and until the 19th century their husbands were not likely to have seen their naked feet. Ms. Ko also demonstrates that women's feet were usually larger than their three-inch-long shoes suggested. Some shoes were constructed to allow the back of the foot to hang over the edge, where it was hidden by long leg coverings.
A SOURCE OF PRIDE
There's no getting around the fact that the bound foot was deformed, of course. Though Ms. Ko has found no evidence that binding actually broke bones, it did redistribute them. But she says the emphasis for both women and men was on the shoes, not the bound feet, and that is her focus, too. Lotus shoes were a source of pride for the women who made and wore them, she says. "The reason I did not talk about the smell or the pain is we know it all too well. It's time for us to gain a more balanced and accurate historical understanding of the women who were motivated to do it."
Shoes were given as gifts, and the embroidery on them evoked folk tales and puns. In that way, illiterate women used them as a substitute for writing. "A good woman worked with her hands and used her body to display her craft," writes Ms. Ko. "In the end, isn't [foot-binding] also an expression of female labor, diligence, and skills?"
The arrival of Westerners in the mid-19th century, and the shift of shoemaking soon after from the home to the factory, led to the demise of foot-binding. Under the scrutiny of Western missionaries, "foot-binding became a stand-in for everything that was wrong about 'tradition,' " Ms. Ko writes.
But even when the Chinese government waged anti-foot-binding campaigns in the first half of the 20th century, many women with bound feet refused to be "liberated." They threw inspectors from their bedrooms or fled to the mountains to hide. "Why would they submit to a campaign that derided them as wasted and wasteful, crippled and lazy?" she asks.
On the other side of the world, women were more willing to give up their corsets. But the corset's gradual disappearance in the 20th century is less a result of feminist reform than of women's "internalization" of the corset through exercise, Ms. Steele argues. It began to be undesirable to need a corset or a girdle: Everything underneath was supposed to be hard and tight. An evening dress with corset designed by Christian Lacroix in 1997 (Photograph by Roxanne Lowit)
The corset has made a recent comeback, thanks largely to designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and the pop star Madonna, but it has been redefined: Now it's worn on the outside, an overt, parodic expression of sexuality.
EXPRESS YOURSELF
The new work on female fashion reflects a broader shift among feminist scholars, many of whom -- like Kathy Peiss in her study of makeup, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (Metropolitan Books, 1998) or Debra L. Gimlin in Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (just out from the University of California Press) -- are giving credit to women for knowing their own minds.
The new work may be an inevitable result of the turn in scholarship toward material culture and the body as a historical subject. "Once we turn our attention to something as private and perhaps ultimately unknowable as how did someone live in his or her body in a different time and culture," says Ms. Ko, "we are bound to ask new questions that burst the previous frameworks of analysis."
But not all feminists have signed on. Scholars like Ms. Steele and Ms. Peiss "are not skeptical enough about the role of consumerism and merchandising in the experience of American women," says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor of history, human development, and women's studies at Cornell University, who has written about female body image. She appreciates the nuances that the new research brings to earlier feminist accounts, but says "some of this is related to a larger interpretation that ... self-expression is the ultimate value, as opposed to a collective activity. But the corset and makeup are not impulses that come from an individual psyche."
THEY MAY HAVE LIKED IT
The divide seems to come down to differences over whether truly independent thought is really possible. The notion that anyone is simply a passive recipient of cultural messages -- an idea established in academe thanks to theorists of power like Michel Foucault -- is itself losing power.
"You can't possibly argue that for 1,000 years Chinese women were morons and Chinese men were sexual perverts. You have to ask, what stakes did women have?" says Ms. Ko. Her students who pierce, tattoo, and brand their bodies "have no problems dealing with the fact that women might actually have liked their bound feet," she says, "because not only did it alter their gait but it altered the way they perceived the world. They see their navel ring or tongue ring in the same light: No pain, no gain."
PHOTO (COLOR): These Chinese "lotus" shoes made the wearer's bound feet appear even smaller than they were. Pant legs hid heels that projected well beyond the shoe's sole.
PHOTO (COLOR): An evening dress with corset designed by Christian Lacroix in 1997.
~~~~~~~~
By Jennifer Ruark
A Second Look at the Big Squeeze. By: Ruark, Jennifer, Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 11/23/2001, Vol. 48, Issue 13
Were corsets--or even foot-binding--really so bad?
LONG BEFORE the sexual revolution led women to shed their bras and girdles for physical freedom, early feminists campaigned against a far more restrictive garment. "Burn the corsets!" wrote Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in 1874. "Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomen for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun." Doctors, too, inveighed against the popular waist-cinching, bust-lifting contraption that put up to 80 pounds of pressure on every square inch of a woman's torso, squeezing her rib cage in and up and pressing mercilessly on her internal organs. They blamed illnesses and even deaths on it, and at least one 19th-century doctor compared corsetry to Chinese foot-binding.
Ever since then, historians and other scholars interested in the ways that beauty standards oppress women have referred knowingly to the corset as the example par excellence. But new research suggests that they've been wrong -- and not just about corsets.
"'Fashion' can not logically be reified as a magic power that causes women to behave in ways contrary to their own best interests," writes Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in her forthcoming book The Corset: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, December). It is one of several new studies that revise the history of fashion, insisting that women have had good reasons for squeezing themselves into corsets, bras, and girdles, and even for binding their feet.
THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND
Worn off and on by members of the upper classes -- both men and women -- since the early 16th century, corsets exploded in popularity in the 19th century. Many people considered the corset to be an essential part of proper, modest dress for women, and some women "tight-laced," squeezing their waists down to 15 inches or smaller. Doctors opposed to corsetry said it interfered with women's natural role as child bearers, while doctors who favored the practice said women needed corsets to support their weak bodies. No one questioned that the female sex was weak, but feminist dress-reformers blamed corsets for sapping women's strength and keeping them from achieving equality with men.
"Niggardly waists and niggardly brains go together" wrote Frances Willard, a suffragist and dress reformer. "A ligature around the vital organs at the smallest diameter of the womanly figure means an impoverished blood supply to the brain, and may explain why women scream when they see a mouse."
Dress reformers didn't make much headway, though, in part because their movement was associated not just with women's suffrage but with other dangerous ideas like atheism and free love. (In fact, Ms. Steele points out, some feminists were quite prudish, and opposed corsets on the grounds that they turned women into sex objects.) Even feminists were not unanimous in their opposition; to many, the rigidity of corsets implied self-control and respectability. The editor of Woman's Suffrage Journal urged her readers to "stick to your stays."
Contemporary scholars who rail against the corset, Ms. Steele says, have been too willing to believe 19th-century medical reports that attributed diseases as varied as tuberculosis, breast cancer, scoliosis, and prolapsed uterus -- not to mention hysteria, insanity, and "impure desires" -- to tight-lacing. "Historians who would never accept medical accounts of the dangers of masturbation (causes blindness and insanity) or female education (sucks the blood from the uterus to the brain with appalling results) become perversely credulous whenever fashion is the subject of medical anathema," she writes.
Ms. Steele read medical and autopsy reports with a cardiologist to pin down corsetry's actual effects. "When you start investigating all of these claims, they don't stand up," she says. Citing a 1998 re-enactment experiment by Colleen Gau, an independent scholar, Ms. Steele says there is no question that corsets reduced women's lung capacity, forcing them to breathe with their upper diaphragms (and creating the heaving bosoms of bodice-ripper fame). Their long-term use must certainly have weakened women's back and abdominal muscles, and may have aggravated uterine problems, she says. But the most serious illnesses caused by corset-wearing were probably indigestion and constipation.
Contemporary feminists, including Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Helene E. Roberts, who have argued that men found the corset sexy because it inflicted pain on women, have overstated the prevalence of tight-lacing, Ms. Steele says. Published accounts of it, including testimonies of enforced tight-lacing at boarding schools, were most likely the erotic fantasies of a minority of fetishists (who may have included women).
Many women simply liked wearing corsets, Ms. Steele argues. "Certainly, some women perceived the corset as a physical assault, but it's an exaggeration to say that all or even most women perceived it that way. We tend to regard comfort as a very high priority, and they didn't, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there were so many uncomfortable things going on in your life anyway." She says the corset may have been attractive to many women because it allowed them to express their sexuality in a socially acceptable way: While it controlled jiggly female flesh, the hourglass shape and heavy panting it induced were blatantly erotic.
CIVILIZING MISSION
Leigh Summers, a research associate at the University of New England, in Australia, is much more critical of the corset. In Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset, just out from Berg Publishers, she writes that, while extreme tight-lacing may not have been the norm, even the more common goal of a 21-inch waist was dangerously unrealistic. Yes, she concedes, Victorian medicine had a long way to go, but enormous pressure consistently placed on the pelvic area was undoubtedly harmful. Moreover, "it deadened women's lives by causing fits of depression, uneasy feelings, and a sense of general malaise."
But while Ms. Summers believes corsets were used to police Victorian women's bodies and their minds, she too discredits the notion that women were simply dupes of the patriarchy. Not only did the corset provide women with "culturally sanctioned eroticism," she writes, but (paradoxically) missionary women may have considered the corset an "ideological ally," helping them maintain their identity as "civilized" in remote parts of the world. Moreover, its spread during the Industrial Revolution to working-class women allowed them to challenge the status of their betters: If they could look like their mistresses, how different were they, really?
Certainly, enough women objected to corsets to create a market for alternatives, such as the brassiere, an early version of which was patented in 1863. About 100 years later, feminists rejected that item of clothing, too. But Ms. Gau and Jane Farrell-Beck, a professor of textiles and clothing at Iowa State University, argue in Uplift: The Bra in America, (University of Pennsylvania Press, December) that it is "time to shelve the stereotype of the brassiere as oppressive and to take a more balanced view of its development."
"The brassiere brought women 'uplift' in several facets of their lives, including health, fashion, and economic development," they write. Even as late as the early 1900s, a "bust girdle" meant a break from the corset: It was recommended for sportswomen, for pregnant and nursing women, and for singers and lecturers who needed full use of their lungs. As women moved into factory jobs in the 1940s, bra promoters argued that its physical support relieved fatigue. And it also provided business opportunities for women: They held almost half of the more than 1,230 patents for breast supporters between 1863 and 1969. While the emphasis in the 1960s on "natural" shapes coincided with a downturn in the industry, Ms. Gau and Ms. Farrell-Beck point with satisfaction to the bra's renewed popularity today.
The idea that women ever embraced foot-binding is harder to swallow. You don't have to be a feminist to cringe with sympathy at the hooflike appearance of bound feet in archival photos, and the idea that Chinese men were turned on by the broken bones and stench is repulsive to most contemporary observers. But Dorothy Ko, a history professor at Columbia University's Barnard College, says the practice was neither senseless nor perverted. It was "entirely reasonable" for women, given the time and place in which they lived, she argues in Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (University of California Press, December). Foot-binding "had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world."
WOMEN'S WORK
Her research dispels several myths about foot-binding, most importantly that it was practiced among the rich as a symbol of leisure. "Foot-binding did not cloister women, because it wasn't meant to cripple them," she says, and indeed, shoes caked with mud and tiny rain boots show that women with bound feet did venture out of their houses. In fact, she says, beginning in the 18th century, peasant daughters emulated the upper classes by binding, and although some Chinese people criticized the practice as frivolous, women with bound feet could and did work.
That work might mean collecting firewood or weeding, rather than standing knee-deep among the rice paddies, but even women who stayed inside were always productive, crafting beautiful "Lotus shoes" of satin, silk, and cotton at home or laboring in silk workshops.
Brides with bound feet were desirable not because potential grooms found them sexually alluring but because to potential in-laws their feet signaled modesty and morality, Ms. Ko argues. Women wore slippers even to bed, and until the 19th century their husbands were not likely to have seen their naked feet. Ms. Ko also demonstrates that women's feet were usually larger than their three-inch-long shoes suggested. Some shoes were constructed to allow the back of the foot to hang over the edge, where it was hidden by long leg coverings.
A SOURCE OF PRIDE
There's no getting around the fact that the bound foot was deformed, of course. Though Ms. Ko has found no evidence that binding actually broke bones, it did redistribute them. But she says the emphasis for both women and men was on the shoes, not the bound feet, and that is her focus, too. Lotus shoes were a source of pride for the women who made and wore them, she says. "The reason I did not talk about the smell or the pain is we know it all too well. It's time for us to gain a more balanced and accurate historical understanding of the women who were motivated to do it."
Shoes were given as gifts, and the embroidery on them evoked folk tales and puns. In that way, illiterate women used them as a substitute for writing. "A good woman worked with her hands and used her body to display her craft," writes Ms. Ko. "In the end, isn't [foot-binding] also an expression of female labor, diligence, and skills?"
The arrival of Westerners in the mid-19th century, and the shift of shoemaking soon after from the home to the factory, led to the demise of foot-binding. Under the scrutiny of Western missionaries, "foot-binding became a stand-in for everything that was wrong about 'tradition,' " Ms. Ko writes.
But even when the Chinese government waged anti-foot-binding campaigns in the first half of the 20th century, many women with bound feet refused to be "liberated." They threw inspectors from their bedrooms or fled to the mountains to hide. "Why would they submit to a campaign that derided them as wasted and wasteful, crippled and lazy?" she asks.
On the other side of the world, women were more willing to give up their corsets. But the corset's gradual disappearance in the 20th century is less a result of feminist reform than of women's "internalization" of the corset through exercise, Ms. Steele argues. It began to be undesirable to need a corset or a girdle: Everything underneath was supposed to be hard and tight. An evening dress with corset designed by Christian Lacroix in 1997 (Photograph by Roxanne Lowit)
The corset has made a recent comeback, thanks largely to designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and the pop star Madonna, but it has been redefined: Now it's worn on the outside, an overt, parodic expression of sexuality.
EXPRESS YOURSELF
The new work on female fashion reflects a broader shift among feminist scholars, many of whom -- like Kathy Peiss in her study of makeup, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (Metropolitan Books, 1998) or Debra L. Gimlin in Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (just out from the University of California Press) -- are giving credit to women for knowing their own minds.
The new work may be an inevitable result of the turn in scholarship toward material culture and the body as a historical subject. "Once we turn our attention to something as private and perhaps ultimately unknowable as how did someone live in his or her body in a different time and culture," says Ms. Ko, "we are bound to ask new questions that burst the previous frameworks of analysis."
But not all feminists have signed on. Scholars like Ms. Steele and Ms. Peiss "are not skeptical enough about the role of consumerism and merchandising in the experience of American women," says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor of history, human development, and women's studies at Cornell University, who has written about female body image. She appreciates the nuances that the new research brings to earlier feminist accounts, but says "some of this is related to a larger interpretation that ... self-expression is the ultimate value, as opposed to a collective activity. But the corset and makeup are not impulses that come from an individual psyche."
THEY MAY HAVE LIKED IT
The divide seems to come down to differences over whether truly independent thought is really possible. The notion that anyone is simply a passive recipient of cultural messages -- an idea established in academe thanks to theorists of power like Michel Foucault -- is itself losing power.
"You can't possibly argue that for 1,000 years Chinese women were morons and Chinese men were sexual perverts. You have to ask, what stakes did women have?" says Ms. Ko. Her students who pierce, tattoo, and brand their bodies "have no problems dealing with the fact that women might actually have liked their bound feet," she says, "because not only did it alter their gait but it altered the way they perceived the world. They see their navel ring or tongue ring in the same light: No pain, no gain."
PHOTO (COLOR): These Chinese "lotus" shoes made the wearer's bound feet appear even smaller than they were. Pant legs hid heels that projected well beyond the shoe's sole.
PHOTO (COLOR): An evening dress with corset designed by Christian Lacroix in 1997.
~~~~~~~~
By Jennifer Ruark