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Peter N. Stearns 'Fighting the Corsetless Evil': Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930 Author(s): Jill Fields Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter, 1999), pp. 355-384 Published by: Peter N. Stearns Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3789627 Accessed: 02/02/2010 08:00 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pns. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Peter N. Stearns is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Social History. http://www.jstor.org 'FIGHTING THE CORSETLESS EVIL': SHAPING CORSETS AND CULTURE, 1900-1930 By Jill Fields California State University, Fresno 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 generatedheated debate among physicians, ministers, couturiers, feminist dress reformers,health and hygiene activists, and advocates of tight- lacing. Their lengthy argumentsuggests that keeping women in corsets was an ongoing project. 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 symbolicallyand literallyrestricted 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 suffrageand 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 defendersgained a powerfulnew ally. The most vigorous supporterof corsetry became the well-organizedand well-funded Corset ManufacturersAssociation, founded in 1907. Arguments supportingcorset use changed as a result. Yet, though most women continued to wear corsets, demandsfor more comfort in clothing and the rising appeal of "modernity"as a sales tool changed their shape. G.B. Pulfer,treasurer and generalmanager of the KalamazooCorset Company, explained in the trade journal Corsets& Lingeriewhy women wore corsets in 1921: Fear!Fear of ill health,fear of saggingbodies, fear of lost figure,fear of shiftless appearancein the nicestof clothing,fear of sallowcomplexion. Fear sends them to the corsetiere,trembling; the samecorsetiere from whom they fled mockingly a coupleof yearsback, at the beckof a madstyle authority who decreed "zat ze body mustbe freeof ze restrictions,in orderzat ze newstyles shall hang so freely."' Pulfer addressedthese comments to the journal'snational readershipof corset manufacturers,retailers, department store buyers,and saleswomen. His article was one of a series addressingindustry concerns about women'scontinued con- sent to wearingcorsets, and part of an intensive coordinatedeffort by manufac- turersto revitalize and revamppro-corset argumentation. Thus, Pulfer'sarticle also addressedthe fear of corset manufacturers.Their fear, which exploded on the panickedpages of Corsets& Lingeriethroughout 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 356 journalof social history winter 1999 Figure 1 1921 Kalamazoocorset. Women's & Infants' Furnisher (January 1921), p. 34. subordinatestatus. Studies by Helene Roberts,David Kunzle,Lois Banner and Valerie Steele demonstratethe well-establishedand 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 wearersas well as for corset defenders and opponents of both sexes, their studies also make abundantlyclear that the corset became a locus for a numberof competingsignifications. To move beyond previouscorset controversieswe thus need to asknot only how dressingpractices function as structuresof domination or as resourcesof resistance,but also how these functions are instituted and why these practicesgenerate both contested and contradictory meanings. These questions addressnot only the history of FIGHTING THE CORSETLESSEVIL 357 the corset as a pervasiveand persistentarticle of women'sclothing, but also the history of how the corset'smeanings affected women's lives as they struggledto alter the shape of femininity and gender relations.3 Building upon earlier studies, this article picks up the chronology with the turn-of-the-centuryperiod when use of the rigid nineteenth-century corset de- clined, and continues through the firstdecades of the twentieth century when challenges to the corset intensified. Significantly,this time frame also encom- passes 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 backlashesin succeedingdecades. Analysis of how the commercialized practice and ideology of corsetryworked in significant ways to form the way women viewed, imagined,and experiencedtheir own bodies can help us under- stand both the persistence and reshapingof problematicgender structuresand identities. Fashionsin dressare particularlyuseful for analyzingculture as contested ter- rain 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 perpetualdependence upon innovation but also because of the simple fact that everyone wearsclothes. As a result,the apparatuswhich monitorsdressing prac- tices, evident in written and unwritten dress codes and their enforcement by myriadsof "fashionpolice," is widely dispersed.The accepted power of clothing to express identity, in such categoriesas 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 arenaof social struggleover meaning.4 Corset manufacturers'coordinated response to women'snew widespreadde- fiance of older fashion standards,which enlisted corset saleswomen to deploy their merchandisingcampaign against the "corsetlessevil," emphasizedyouthful standardsof beauty,developed scientific discoursethat viewed the female body as inherently flawed,and connected ideologiesof racialpurity, national security, and heterosexualprivilege to corset use. Examiningthe marketingstrategies de- veloped and disseminatedto keep women in corsets, as well as the oppositional practices which these strategies sought to corral, reveals how the corset's in- strumentalitychanged in the twentieth century.Nineteenth-century efforts to keep women corseteddrew upon, legitimatedand constructedparticular notions about femininity,propriety, and the femalebody. In the twentieth century,corset discoursesalso incorporatedideas about race, nation, and the importanceof sci- ence and modernity to everyday life. The meanings corsetry impressedupon women's bodies thus shifted with industrialization,as women's fears of aging, imperfect,inferior, unfashionable, and unscientific bodies replacedearlier fears of moral turpitudeand questionablerespectability. And most significantly,in- dustrialists'fear of diminishingprofits played and preyedupon the long-standing fear of unrestrainedwomen. After 1900 corsets got progressivelylonger on the hips, and the top of the corset moved down the torso toward the waistline. The popularityof the un- 358 journalof social history winter 1999 comfortable S-curve corsets favored by Gibson Girls of this era, which threw the bust forwardand the buttocks back, declined after 1905 with wider use of straight-frontcorsets. The S-curve blunted the athleticism and mobility of the Gibson Girl, and the obvious manipulationof the body necessaryto create the S-curve silhouette was an easy target for anti-corset agitation which defended the "natural"body. However, the necessityof wearinga corsetwas also vigorously defended throughoutthis period, and, once the straightfront corsetssucceeded the S-curve corsets, anatomicalreasons were stressedas the basisfor the corset's necessity.5 Havelock Ellis was among the expertscited in the popularpress who claimed that female humansrequired corseting because the evolution from"horizontality to verticality"was more difficultfor females than for males. "Womanmight be physiologicallytruer

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