The Corset Quotes

“But reformers' attempts to devise less restrictive forms of female clothing, like the Bloommer costume, which proposed trousers for women, conjured up in many people's minds lurid images of unrestrained female sexuality and social liberty, including a veritable world turned upside down, were trousered women smoked cigarettes and hen-pecked men washed the laundry and took care of the children.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“As we shall see, the hardcore anticorset contingent included many (but by no means all) doctors and many (but by no means all) feminists. Medical ambivalence about corsetry may well have been "related, at least, in part, to the profession's general opposition to feminist claims". But feminists and female doctors were themselves ambivalent about corsetry”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“Doctors tended to blame mothers for encouraging their daughters to tight-lace in order to win a rich husband, while mothers often argued that their daughters persisted in the practice despite pleas to stop. Both doctors and members of the general public tended to believe that women's bodies were, by nature, weaker than men's.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“Yet she admitted that the majority of ordinary women had declined to throw away their corsets. According to Phelps, "the average woman" was tolerably content with her style of dress. Another reason for the failure of dress reform was its association with controversial ideas, such as "atheism and... free love", female suffrage, "an opium-fed baby, and a dinnerless and buttonless husband. Some dress reformers, of course, were associated with radical political movements for women's rights, temperance, and abolitionism.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“Tight corsets were accused of causing birth defects and weak, unhealthy children. It is difficult to interpret these historical accounts, however, since physical and moral injuries are often conflated. The mother becomes a scapegoat for anything bad that happens to her child”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“It is certainly possible that some women might have felt ambivalent or embarassed about pregnancy, which could have led them to try to conceal the condition under tight corsets. It is also possible that some women deliberately used tight-lacing in an attempt to abort the fetus.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“By characterizing "women as vessels of reproduction", physicians contributed to a discourse that interpreted the individual body as a sing of the health (or illness) of the social body.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“Tight-lacers were frequently compared to suicides and infaticides, torturers and murderers. They were bad wome, who solicited the lecherous gaze of "vulgar" men. Specifically, they were bad mothers - at a time in the late nineteenth century when motherhood was seen as women's sacred duty.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History

“Medical journals like "The Lancet" not only attacked specific fashions, such as corsets or tight-lacing, but also criticized "the sex which worships the idol of fashion". Indeed, virtually, any criticism of "Fashion" rapidly moved into a diatribe on women's vanity and stupidity. "Tight-lacing" was so ill-defined and the practice apparently so ubiquitous that it seemed to prove all women's mental - and moral - inferiority. Tight-lacing came to stand for everything that was wrong about women.”
― Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History