Controlling Corsets: Commerce, Dress Reform, Medicine, and Misogyny in Nineteenth-Century Women's Dress

In the nineteenth century, women's dress depended on the usage of the corset. Without it, a woman's outfit was uncomfortable to wear and largely impractical. Because of how necessary the garment was to women's clothing, it became the focus of criticism from many different angels, including but not limited to the medical field, dress reform, and businesses which manufactured and sold corsets to consumers. These criticisms, although directed at the corset, were often thinly veiled insults to the female sex, and reflected larger societal fears about women's places in society as women's liberation movements began to gain more traction. It is also for this reason that the critical ideas people were sharing of the corset were mostly unoriginal, as this era of women's clothing was merely a new avenue for relevant pre-existing misogynistic rhetoric to be expressed. This thesis examines these ideas and the different perspectives which they came from by considering primary sources such as medical journals, scientific articles, and business advertisements. Despite usually being either written about or written for women, these sources were almost exclusively authored by men. This examination considers how male voices dominated conversations about women's bodies and appropriated the corset to position it as either necessary to keeping women's dress unchanged and "traditional," or as dangerous and anti-woman, as decided by men's standards. In either argument, the garment was weaponized by those who did not wear it with the intention to control women's bodies.