The female Victorian corset: a garment made up of stays, laced at the back to emphasise the small waist and accentuate the ample bosoms and large hips of a woman. This forced women’s bodies into the ideal feminine shape of an hourglass figure. Throughout the mid-late Victorian period (1860s – 1890s), the corset was quintessential to a Victorian woman’s dressing. To understand this significance, we must look at how women interacted with the corset. This essay aims to illustrate the social conventions associated with the corset as well as examine the controversies of the corset in the late Victorian period. I believe that women played a huge role in perpetuating the wearing of corsets in the mid-late Victorian period through their support of the corset.
The corset reflected society’s expectations for women. It played into the Victorian archetype of the ideal woman, the “Angel in the House.” Women were expected to embody the characteristics of the Angel by being beautiful, submissive to their husbands, and morally pure. Wearing a corset was equivalent to being moral, such that not wearing one would indicate that the woman had “loose morals”.
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Radical corset challengers created the Anti-Corset League consisting “sixty ladies and many other gentlemen”. These men pledged never to marry “corset wrecks” and the women swore off corsets altogether. Such dismissal of traditional female dressing induced tension “about all the differences maintained by the sexual norm.” Several men staunchly supported corset-wearing because they were threatened by women pushing social boundaries. They criticized the Anti-Corset League, arguing that it was impractical to shun women in corsets as non-corseted women were few and interfered in men’s business. “For our part, we approve of the corset. In face of the new woman movement, it is well to know of one thing that can keep the sex within