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'Fighting The Corsetless Evil': Shaping Corsets And Culture, 1900-1930

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Jill Fields

During the nineteenth century virtually all free-born women in the United States wore corsets. Yet from mid-century onward the purpose and meaning of the corset generated heated debate among physicians, ministers, couturiers, feminist dress reformers, health and hygiene activists, and advocates of tight-lacing. Their lengthy argument suggests that keeping women in corsets was an ongoing project.

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In the early twentieth century these corset debates intensified. Turn-of-the-century corset styles became even more constricting and thus protests against their use gained ground. In addition, young women in the 1910s began to reject the Victorian moral sensibilities--and the fashions inspired by them--which symbolically and literally restricted women's mobility in both private and public spheres. Women's claims to wage work, to academic and physical education, to public protest over access to suffrage and birth control, and to pleasurable leisure activities such as dancing at tango parties all brought daily corset wear into question. However, in this period, corset defenders gained a powerful new ally. The most vigorous supporter of corsetry became the well-organized and well-funded Corset Manufacturers Association, founded in 1907. Arguments supporting corset use changed as a result. Yet, though most women continued to wear corsets, demands for more comfort in clothing and the rising appeal of "modernity" as a sales tool changed their shape.

G.B. Pulfer, treasurer and general manager of the Kalamazoo Corset Company, explained in the trade journal Corsets & Lingerie why women wore corsets in 1921:

Fear! Fear of ill health, fear of sagging bodies, fear of lost figure, fear of shiftless appearance in the nicest of clothing, fear of sallow complexion. Fear sends them to the corsetiere, trembling; the same corsetiere from whom they fled mockingly a couple of years back, at the beck of a mad style authority who decreed "zat ze body must be free of ze restrictions, in order zat ze new styles shall hang so freely." [1]

Pulfer addressed these comments to the journal's national readership of corset manufacturers, retailers, department store buyers, and saleswomen. His article was one of a series addressing industry concerns about women's continued consent to wearing corsets, and part of an intensive coordinated effort by manufacturers to revitalize and revamp pro-corset argumentation. Thus, Pulfer's article also addressed the fear of corset manufacturers. Their fear, which exploded on the panicked pages of Corsets & Lingerie throughout the early 1920s, was of losing control over how and when women changed the way they dressed. [2]

Scholarship on nineteenth-century women's history and dress explores the power of corsets to regulate women's behavior as well as to signify women's subordinate status. Studies by Helene Roberts, David Kunzle, Lois Banner and Valerie Steele demonstrate the well-established and lasting iconic power of the corset as a conveyor of social meaning. As these scholars disagree about just what that meaning was for female corset wearers as well as for corset defenders and opponents of both sexes, their studies also make abundantly clear that the corset became a locus for a number of competing significations. To move beyond previous corset controversies we thus need to ask not only how dressing practices function as structures of domination or as resources of resistance, but also how these functions are instituted and why these practices generate both contested and contradictory meanings. These questions address not only the history of the corset as a pervasive and persistent article of women's clothing, but also the history of how the corset's meanings affected women's lives as they struggled to alter the shape of femininity and gender relations. [3]

Building upon earlier studies, this article picks up the chronology with the turn-of-the-century period when use of the rigid nineteenth-century corset declined, and continues through the first decades of the twentieth century when challenges to the corset intensified. Significantly, this time frame also encompasses an era of heightened agitation for women's political, sexual, economic and social equality. Yet we also know that achievements in one period do not prevent backlashes in succeeding decades. Analysis of how the commercialized practice and ideology of corsetry worked in significant ways to form the way women viewed, imagined, and experienced their own bodies can help us understand both the persistence and reshaping of problematic gender structures and identities.

Fashions in dress are particularly useful for analyzing culture as contested terrain because a central defining element of fashion is change. Controlling the direction of this change is difficult, not only because of the fashion industry's perpetual dependence upon innovation but also because of the simple fact that everyone wears clothes. As a result, the apparatus which monitors dressing practices, evident in written and unwritten dress codes and their enforcement by myriads of "fashion police," is widely dispersed. The accepted power of clothing to express identity, in such categories as gender, personality, sexual preference, class, and social status, heightens the stakes for how fashion changes take place and take shape. Fashion, both a system of signification and a set of regulatory practices, is thus an arena of social struggle over meaning. [4]

'Fighting The Corsetless Evil': Shaping Corsets And Culture, 1900-1930

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Jill Fields

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