The corset draws in the beautiful outline of the feminine body in the most disagreeable manner; the wasp waist which it produces is an ugly exaggeration of the natural condition. The lady editor of the Documents of Women instituted an inquiry amongst a number of artists in regard to the corset. One of these, the architect Leopold Bauer, replied as follows:
“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline. It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and perverse impulses. That the corset does not really make the body appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111]
Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset. The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach); it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs, especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys, the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly” is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered completely impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims: “Away with the corset!”[115]
The dorsal and abdominal muscles also undergo partial atrophy in consequence of the habitual wearing of the corset, because this garment to some extent relieves these muscles of their natural function. Anæmia, gastric and hepatic disorders, and intercostal neuralgia are also dependent upon this “most disastrous error of woman’s dress,” as von Krafft-Ebing calls the corset. Menge has very thoroughly studied the hurtful influence of the corset on the feminine reproductive organs. He enumerates, as a result of wearing it, among many evil results, inflammatory states and enlargement of the ovaries, relaxation of the uterine muscles, atrophy and excessive proliferation of the uterine mucous membrane, the onset of the extremely disagreeable fluor albus, premature termination of pregnancy, displacements of the uterus (retroflexion, anteversion, prolapse), abnormal stretching of the entire pelvic floor, retention of urine, constipation, and nervous troubles of the most varied character. Very often, also, sterility in woman is causally dependent upon the constriction and pressure exercised by the corset.
Rightly, therefore, the abandonment of the corset plays a principal part in the “reformed dress” of woman—a subject to which we shall later return.
In addition to the accentuation of the breast by the corset and by other apparatus,[116] another aim of feminine fashion has been most persistent in very various forms, namely, the exaggeration of the hips, or the buttocks, or both—in fact, of all the visible parts of the clothed body which are directly related to the sexual functions of woman; that is to say, there has been a persistent endeavour to indicate in the most prominent manner, in a way to stimulate the male, the secondary sexual characters of the female in this region of the body.
“The thoroughly modern women,” says Heinrich Pudor, “coquet at the present day less with their breasts than with their hind-quarters—for this reason, because for the most part they have a masculine type (?). It began with the cul de Paris. Nowadays, clothes are cut in such a way that in the view from the back the gluteal region is especially prominent. This is how the fashionable wife of a German officer strikes us at present.
“‘Tailor-made’ is the phrase that has for some time been in use in England. The tailor has made it—not the milliner. No, the tailor, who perhaps is at the same time bath-master and masseur.... Certain species of baboons are distinguished by their brightly coloured and prominent hind-quarters—there seems to be no doubt that our modern ladies in high life have taken these for their example. Or can it be that they wish to avail themselves of the homosexual inclinations of their male acquaintances? Beyond question this is so. Here we find the fundamental ground of the type of clothing of our own day by which so much attention is drawn to the region of the buttocks. What is repulsive here is not the homosexuality, but the misuse that is made of clothing. In fact, that which is most repulsive to a refined sentiment is this—that women have their clothes cut as tightly as possible round the hips, in order that the broad pelvis, which is especially characteristic of women as a sexual being, shall be as far as possible visibly isolated.”[117]
Similarly Fr. Th. Vischer has castigated the immorality of the gross accentuation of kallipygian charms,[118] which in the eighteenth century was inaugurated by the invention of the so-called tournure (cul de Paris), against which Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed so severely. By the tension of the clothing, not only the buttocks, but also the hips and the thighs, were rendered grossly apparent. In certain epochs, also, the feminine abdomen was very markedly indicated by the mode of dress; for instance, in the middle ages, down to the sixteenth century, fashion provided women and girls with the insignia of pregnancy, as is apparent in the pictures of Jan van Eyck (“The Lamb,” “Eva”), Hans Memling (“Eva”), and Titian (“The Beauty of Urbino”). The fashion of the “thick abdomen” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only another variation of the same theme.
In close relation to the variations of fashion we have just described is the farthingale (montgolfière) or crinoline. It was first adopted in the sixteenth century by courtesans and prostitutes, who thus exhibited rounded and provocative forms, wishing to allure men by these vertugales, which, according to the bon mot of a Franciscan, expelled vertu, leaving behind only the gale (syphilis). The aptest remarks regarding the repulsive and dirty fashion of the crinoline were made by Schopenhauer.[119] It seems as if the crinoline, which is well known to have celebrated its greatest triumph during the period of the Second Empire in France—who is not familiar with the characteristic daguerrotypes of that period?—has recently endeavoured to come to life once more, for it appears that attempts have actually been made towards the rehabilitation of this monstrosity of clothing.