But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, too vulgar to appreciate the
exquisite beauty of slight and subtle curvature, makes woman’s waist the
most maltreated and deformed part of her body. There is not one woman in
a hundred who does not deliberately destroy twenty per cent of her
Personal Beauty by the way in which she reduces the natural dimensions
of her waist. There is, indeed, ground to believe that the main reason
why the bustle, and even the crinoline, are not looked on with
abhorrence by all women is because they aid the corset in making the
waist look smaller by contrast. The Wasp-waist Mania is therefore the
disease which most imperatively calls for cure. But the task seems
almost hopeless; for, as a female writer remarks, it is almost as
difficult to cure a woman of the corset habit as a man of intemperance
in drink.
“The injurious custom of tight lacing,” says Planché in his _Cyclopædia
of Costumes_, “‘a custom fertile in disease and death,’ appears to have
been introduced by the Normans as early as the twelfth century; and the
romances of the Middle Ages teem with allusions to and laudations of the
wasplike waists of the dames and demoiselles of the period.... Chaucer,
describing the carpenter’s wife, says her body was ‘gentyll and small as
a weasel’; and the depraved taste extended to Scotland. Dunbar, in _The
Thistle and the Rose_, describing some beautiful women, observes—
“‘Their middles were as small as wands.’
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:—
(1) A stiff, inflexible waist, with a coarsely exaggerated contour, in
place of the slight and subtle curvature so becoming to woman. In other
words, a violation of the first law of personal æsthetics—imposing the
shape of a vulgar garment on the human form, instead of making the dress
follow the outlines of the body.
(2) A sickly, sallow complexion, pale lips, a red nose, lack of
buoyancy, general feebleness, lassitude, apathy, and stupidity,
resulting from the fact that the compression of the waist induces an
oxygen-famine. The eyes lose their sparkle and love-inspiring magic, the
features are perceptibly distorted, the brow is prematurely wrinkled,
and the expression and temper are soured by the constant discomfort that
has to be silently endured.
(3) Ugly shoulders. A woman’s shoulders should be sloping and well
rounded, like every other part of her body. Regarding the common
feminine deformity of square shoulders, Drs. Brinton and Napheys remark,
in their work on _Personal Beauty_, that “in four cases out of five it
has been brought about by too close-fitting corsets, which press the
shoulder-blades behind, and collar-bones in front, too far upwards, and
thus ruin the appearance of the shoulders.”
(4) An ugly bust. Tight lacing “flattens and displaces the breasts.”
(5) Clumsiness. The corset is ruinous to grace. “Almost daily,” says Dr.
Alice B. Stockham (_Tokology_), “women come to my office [in Chicago]
burdened with bands and heavy clothing, every vital organ restricted by
dress. It is not unusual to count from _sixteen to eighteen thicknesses
of cloth_ worn tightly about the pliable structure of the waist.” And
Dr. Lennox Browne advances the following crushing _argumentum ad
feminam_:—
“It is impossible for the stiffly-corseted girl to be other than
inelegant and ungraceful in her movements. Her imprisoned waist, with
its flabby muscles, has no chance of performing beautiful undulatory
movements. In the ballroom the ungraceful motions of our stiff-figured
ladies are bad enough; there is no possibility for poetry of motion; but
nowhere is this more ludicrously and, to the thoughtful, painfully
manifest than in the tennis court. Let any one watch the movements of
ladies as compared with those of male players, and the absolute ugliness
of the female figure, with its stiff, unyielding, deformed, round waist,
will at once be seen. Ladies can only bend the body from the hip-joint.
All that wonderfully contrived set of hinges, with their connected
muscles, in the elastic column of the spine, is unable to act from the
shoulders downwards; and their figures remind one of the old-fashioned
modern Dutch doll.”