And to make their middles as small as possible has been ever since an unfortunate mania with the generality of the fair sex, to the detriment of their health and the distortion of their forms.”
Ever since 1602, when Felix Plater raised his voice against the corset, physicians have written against tight lacing. But not only has it been found impossible to cure this mania, even its causes have remained a mystery to the present day. Certainly no man can understand the problem. Is it simply the average woman’s lack of taste that urges her thus to mutilate her Personal Beauty? Is it the admiration of a few vulgar “mashers” and barber’s pets—since educated men detest wasp-waists? Or is it simply the proverbial feminine craze for emulating one another and arousing envy by excelling in some extravagance of dress, no matter at what cost? This last suggestion is probably the true solution of the problem. The only satisfaction a woman can get from having a wasp-waist is the envy of other silly women. What a glorious recompense for her æsthetic suicide, her invalidism, and her humiliating confession that she considers the natural shape of God’s masterwork—the female body—inferior in beauty to the contours of the lowly wasp!
With this ignoble pleasure derived from the envy of silly women and the admiration of vulgar men, compare a few of the disadvantages resulting from tight lacing. They are of two kinds—hygienic and æsthetic.
Hygienic Disadvantages.—Surely no woman can look without a shudder at a fashionable Parisian figure placed side by side with the Venus of Milo in Professor Flower’s Fashion in Deformity, in Mrs. Haweis’s Art of Beauty, or in Behnke and Brown’s Voice, Song, and Speech; or look without horror at the skeletons showing the excessive compression of the lower ribs brought about by fashionable lacing, and the injurious displacement, in consequence, of some of the most important vital organs. Nor can any young man who does not desire to marry a foredoomed invalid, and raise sickly children, fail to be cured for ever of his love for any wasp-waisted girl if he will take the trouble to read the account of the terrible female maladies resulting from lacing, given in Dr. Gaillard Thomas’s famous treatise on the Diseases of Women, in the chapter on “Improprieties in Dress.” To cite only one sentence: Women, he says, subject their waist to a “constriction which, in autopsy, will sometimes be found to have left the impress of the ribs upon the liver, producing depressions corresponding to them.”
Says Dr. J. J. Pope: “The German physiologist, Sömmering, has enumerated no fewer than ninety-two diseases resulting from tight lacing.... ‘But I do not lace tightly,’ every lady is ready to answer. No woman ever did, if we accept her own statement. Yet stay. Why does your corset unclasp with a snap? And why do you involuntarily take a deep breath directly it is loosened?” Young ladies who imagine they do not wear too tight stays, inasmuch as they can still insert their hand, will find the fallacy and danger of this reasoning exposed in Mr. B. Roth’s Dress: its Sanitary Aspect.
The last line which I have italicised is of extreme significance. Perhaps the greatest of all evils resulting from tight lacing is that it discourages or prevents deep breathing, which is so absolutely essential to the maintenance of health and beauty. The “heaving bosom” of a maiden may be a fine poetic expression, but it indicates that the maiden wears stays and breathes at the wrong (upper) end of her lungs. “The fact of a patient breathing in this manner is noted by a physician as a grave symptom, because it indicates mischief of a vital nature in lungs, heart, or other important organ.” Healthy breathing should be chiefly costal or abdominal; but this is made impossible by the corset, which compresses the lower ribs, till, instead of being widely apart below, they meet in the middle, and thus prevent the lungs from expanding and receiving the normal share of oxygen, the only true elixir of life, youth, and beauty.
This wrong breathing, due to tight lacing, also causes “congestion of the vessels of the neck and throat ... gasping, jerking, and fatigue in inspiration, and unevenness, trembling, and undue vibration in the production and emission of vocal tone.”
Further, as the Lancet points out, “tight stays are a common cause of so-called ‘weak’ spine, due to weakness of muscles of the back.” Lacing prevents the abdominal muscles from exercising their natural functions—alternate relaxation and contraction: “A tight-laced pair of stays acts precisely as a splint to the trunk, and prevents or greatly impedes the action of the chief back muscles, which therefore become weakened. The unfortunate wearer feels her spine weaken, thinks she wants more support, so laces herself still tighter; she no doubt does get some support in this way, but at what a terrible cost!”
In regard to tight corsets, as another physician has aptly remarked, women are like the victims of the opium habit, who also daily feel the need of a larger dose of their stimulant, every increment of which adds a year to their age, and brings them a few steps nearer disease and ugly decrepitude.
Æsthetic Disadvantages.—Among the æsthetic disadvantages resulting from the Wasp-waist Mania, the following may be mentioned, besides the loss of a clear, mellow, musical voice already referred to:—