Class
Article
College
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department
English Department
Faculty Mentor
Maria Angela Diaz
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract
Lasting narratives surrounding the role of corsets in the lives of nineteenth-century women tend toward opposing extremes; few dress reformers who completely denounced corsets and a minority of upper-class women who used corsets to achieve the smallest possible waist even if detrimental to their health. The spectrum of nineteenth-century corset opinions was wide. Valerie Steele’s monumental work on the history of corsetry explains that most people at the time fell somewhere in the middle. (Steele 2001) Women of all social classes wore corsets daily and most worked labor-intensive jobs, enjoyed recreational activities outdoors, and sports increasingly so towards the late nineteenth century.(Summers 2002, 66) From the upper classes to asylum patients, prison inmates, and some enslaved Africans in the Antebellum South, women were seldom without corsets.(Goodman 2013) Nevertheless, the dominant voices in corset history, most of whom were male, painted corsets in strict terms.
Location
Logan, UT
Start Date
4-8-2022 12:00 AM
Included in
Living in Killer Corsets: The Body's Response to Victorian Era Corsets
Logan, UT
Lasting narratives surrounding the role of corsets in the lives of nineteenth-century women tend toward opposing extremes; few dress reformers who completely denounced corsets and a minority of upper-class women who used corsets to achieve the smallest possible waist even if detrimental to their health. The spectrum of nineteenth-century corset opinions was wide. Valerie Steele’s monumental work on the history of corsetry explains that most people at the time fell somewhere in the middle. (Steele 2001) Women of all social classes wore corsets daily and most worked labor-intensive jobs, enjoyed recreational activities outdoors, and sports increasingly so towards the late nineteenth century.(Summers 2002, 66) From the upper classes to asylum patients, prison inmates, and some enslaved Africans in the Antebellum South, women were seldom without corsets.(Goodman 2013) Nevertheless, the dominant voices in corset history, most of whom were male, painted corsets in strict terms.