An article which shows the remote antiquity of this almost exclusively feminine aid to beauty.
The custom of wearing corsets is much older than civilisation. In proof of this statement it may be mentioned that in old settlements of Neolithic man, now Brandon in Norfolk, where chipped flint arrow and spear heads, and beautifully polished stone hammers, axe-heads, and other tools were traded with the nomad tribes of Europe in days so remote that the sea had not eaten away the soft chalk between England and France, the women of our early ancestors wore corsets! This was at least 20,000 years ago. Some archaeologists are inclined to believe that the Channel has separated England from Europe for more than 100,000 years. Remote as the period is, stone dolls have been found in the flint mines and caves, with which the little mothers of our race played thousands of years ago, wearing coarse leather, or rather dried animal skin corsets, tightly laced round the waist with sinews of birds and small animals.
The first corset wearers
From drawings scratched on bone handles and implements with sharp pointed flints, we know that the costume of a Neolithic belle, who was probably a cheiftainess or priestess of her tribe, consisted of a wolf’s or bear’s skin thrown round her shoulders like a modern cloak or wrap, and a corset of hide moulded to her form when raw, laced down the front with sinews and fastened round the waist with skins of serpents, which imparted a semblance of the modern hour glass appearance. True as Solomon said thousands of years later, “there is nothing new under the sun,” not even the fashions in corsets that are worn to-day.
Corsets and Serpent Worship
That there was some definite connection between corset wearing and sun and serpent worship there can be no doubt. In the very early civilisations, when the coiled serpent was emblematic in the sun and snakes were in popular imagination, credited with all sorts of magical powers, traces of which we find even in the Old Testament, numerous representations of corseted ladies appeared in Cretan, Assyrian, and Egyptian carvings and pottery. There is still in existence a Cretan urn that is between five and six thousand years old, that gives a remarkable illustration of a snake priestess, who officiated in the terrible rites of that remote period. The young lady wears a light bronze hour glass shaped corset, over a costume that bears a striking resemblance to those that were fashionable in this country in 1880, when girls dressed a la Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Alexandra. It was fastened at the tightly drawn waist by two serpents with their heads and tails meeting with jewelled eyes. Her headdress looks surprisingly like the latest fashions, as it consists of a hat composed of twisted serpents! One wonders whether the tightly laced flapper of to-day ever realises that she is perpetuating in her restricted waist the homage that her old time ancestresses paid to snakes?
The Greeks Banned Corset
The ancient Greeks who were the first people of antiquity to develop the love of natural beauty, and who invested their gods and goddesses with exaggerated human attributes, emancipated their women from the corset. The graceful curves of the Venus de Medici, or Milo, or the numerous statues of Diana and the Graces that have been preserved to us, were never compressed between bronze or steel casings.
Christianity and the Corset
In Byzantium, however, which eventually became Constantinople, the corset asserted itself again, influenced by religious reasons. The early days of Christianity were marked in the East by extravagant monks and hermits of both sexes, who, to quote Byron, “sought to merit heaven by making life a hell.” The women fanatics used to bind their waists with ropes until they cut into the flesh and as they were regarded as holy persona and saints, the gay and dissolute, but superstitious ladies of Alexandria and Constantinople used to imitate these wild women of the desert by wearing elaborate and tightly fitting corsets of bronze, silver, and even gold, beautifully jewelled and worn as a mockery of a penance The fall of Constantinople in 1452 brought Greek learning to emancipate the men, and Byzantine corsets to enslave the fair. At once the corset reasserted itself in the West, amalgamated with the masculine chain and plate armour of the period. For some centuries the delicate female form was cruelly compressed in wrought iron and steel corsets.
Cruel Corsets
Under the Medici regime, both ladies and their maids had their waists reduced to the minimum by these cruel contrivances, until the limit was reached when Catherine de Medici imposed a thirteen inch waist upon her Court ladies and their attendants. On this page we show an illustration of one of the cruel corsets that were worn by the great ladies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The rise of whale fisheries, due to attempts to discover the North West Passage, caused the steel bars to be modified with whalebone. What the great whaling industry, which transformed Dundee from a fishing village into a great industrial town, owes to our corset wearing ancestresses cannot be over estimated. To accentuate the tightly laced waists, the farthingdale and the later crinoline became worn.
Boarding School Methods
Then came the craze to make girls look like laced-in, upright dolls, a ridiculous and unhealthy fashion that has survived almost until the present generation. The late Lady Haldane, the mother of the present Lord Haldane, relates in her reminiscences that she used to be strapped to a backboard for hours daily when a schoolgirl, to make her tightly laced figure erect. In the early Victorian period, all schools for young ladies used to teach deportment by strapping and tight-lacing. No wonder the poor things suffered from vapours and fainting fits. The attacks of medical men in the eighties, after violent opposition, had the affect of making the corset an instrument of support instead of confinement for the figure. The tendency of the present day girl is to entirely discard it.