Is Bernadette Banner right about corsets?
There's this attitude I see pop up periodically on this website that Bernadette Banner is a total sham who dupes people into believing that corsets were okay, speaking from her own personal and limited experience while not saying anything a real historian would stand by. A lot of the time, they kind of vaguely allude to what her points on the topic are, spreading ideas that they're completely out there to people who haven't bothered to watch.
After seeing one too many of these posts, I decided that the productive thing to do would be to look at her video specifically on corsetry myths, pull out her claims, and analyze them from a historian's perspective. I don't tend to watch costubers because a) I know more than them and so get nothing out of their content and b) I have a lot of bitterness about people who know less than me being more successful as #brands because they're comfortable on camera (which is a failing of mine, I recognize). That being said, what little I've seen of Bernadette Banner has actually been pretty good.
But tightlacing and corsetry are not synonymous: simply because a woman is wearing a corset does not mean that she is — or has to — lace down to such extremes.
This is correct, and a very important point to start with. Corsets can be worn that are the same circumference as the wearer's natural waist, and still serve the same purpose of bust support and figure-adjustment (they make the waist into a circle and so look narrower from the front or back - see experimental archaeology here).
Although, granted, indeed not all women today — nor indeed 130 years ago — could be classified under this single and perhaps idealized measurement range. But this just goes to show that this very prevalent 24" Victorian measurement is not at all extraordinary by today's standards, and is still seen naturally in 21st century bodies today.
Banner is looking at mainstream clothing size charts in comparison to historical clothing measurements, something I've done myself. She is correct that extant Victorian clothing shows dimensions that exist uncorseted today.
But it's easy to put these tightlaced measurements in print, to illustrate the dainty, tightlaced figure on fashion plates, to even manipulate photographs with a bit of prehistoric photoshop wizardry to make the waist appear smaller ...
This isn't really the focus of the video, just an off-handed mention, but it is absolutely true that a) drawings can be done however the person holding the pencil likes and do not necessarily reflect how women literally walking around in the world look (still very much the case that advertising graphics and porny drawings don't look like real women!) and b) photo editing did exist in the 19th century and we do have evidence of photos well or badly edited to make a waistline smaller.
Almost consistently, on the occasion that provenance was recorded, the smaller-waisted gowns were labelled as having belonged to a 'miss' — a young woman — or is said to have been worn specifically 'before her marriage', whereas the gowns featuring slightly larger measurements were said to have belonged to a 'Mrs' or 'the mother of' — or presumably a woman of a few more years.
I haven't done a ton of research on this myself as the garments I'm used to seeing in institutions where I've worked or visited for research have had very little provenance (at the Fenimore, a LOT of pieces just have the donor known), but I can verify that I've seen very small waists overwhelmingly on wedding dresses.
[not bothering to transcribe her explanation of why nobody had their ribs removed for corsetry because I think even the doubters are already on board with this one being total bs]
... there is a huge difference between the way Victorians drafted their corsets versus the way that modern costumey corsets are drafted today.
This is very true. Here is a basic off-the-rack corset, which looks like what you'll see in a lot of movies and plays. Here is a similar extant corset at the Boston MFA. The latter is cut with much more flare to the pieces to give more ease in the hips, which means more space for body fat to move into; there are also gores inserted into the bust, creating cups for the breasts to sit in rather that having a narrow chest circumference to push them up for maximum cleavage. Here's another from the Victoria & Albert which features bust gores as well as separate, unboned panels below the waist that allow for a kind of hinge at the waist which again allows body fat to have space to expand. Something else both of the latter corsets (as well as countless others in museums) have in common is that they tend to be shorter than modern costume corsets, once again allowing more room for the hips and, incidentally, holding the breasts at a lower bustline and therefore not constraining the chest as much.
Because costume corsets tend to be made longer and with less hip spring (that is, they're narrower in the hips compared to the waist measurement), it is more painful to try to lace them tightly to shrink the waist. As a result, people who wear them get a very bad impression of corsetry as a whole, without realizing that their experience is not historically accurate. "Embodied experience" (per Dr. Hilary Davidson) is an important tool in the study of historical fashion, but it requires a significant amount of work in the leadup to ensure that the experience you're embodying is actually relevant to the past.
The negative perceptions of corsetry that we have today I think are stemmed mainly from the Rational Dress and anti-tightlacing tirades presented in magazines, newspapers, and journals. Because, here's the thing: as with any fashion, there are always going to be opponents of a certain trend, and there are always going to be people who can't bear the feeling of tight clothing. So of course they're going to be the ones to speak out about it, and of course to try to convince others to drop the fashion as well. That doesn't necessarily mean that the opinion was ubiquitous throughout Victorian society, or that people agreed with it.
This bit I think could have been worded better, and I expect that it's part of what's incensed people. On the one hand: yes, there are people who have sensory issues and are never going to be comfortable in garments someone else finds completely so, which is a valuable point. It doesn't make those garments morally suspect. On the other hand: Rational Dress/Dress Reform was a movement with political and philosophical underpinnings, and it does the subject a disservice to refer to it as people who were just "opponents of a certain trend". That being said, the nuances of the feminist origins of the movement vs. their misogynist takes on women who dressed fashionably would be kind of a lot to deal with in this specific video.
[After realizing that she essentially grew up in a corset] Granted, the obvious flaw in my retroactive and entirely unintentional experiment is that my corset was not at all constructed in the way as a 19th century corset would have been, and in fact was built asymmetrically with the intent of treating my spine, not with creating a fashionable figure. Nevertheless, since the worst of my curves sit right at the waist area, significant waist reduction was necessary to stop the progression of the curves, which means that I was corseted down to a 24" waist. I wore this for about five years [...] It was extraordinarily comfortable.
First off, this does sound like a pretty reasonable comparison to historical corsetry to me. It would be useful to know what her uncorseted waist was at the time, but I can appreciate that not everybody knows their dimensions at all times. There's still some issues relating this directly to historical practices as embodied experience, but in comparison to the people saying she's an idiot because they wore an uncomfortable corset in a community theater production or at a reenactment (see previous point), I think she was probably getting closer to the real deal. At the same time, she's acknowledging that this is not exactly the same as the real deal, contra the claims that she actively obscures it.
She also acknowledges here that wearing corset full-time caused her to have no abdominal strength once she was out of it, and I think it's important to highlight this because so many of the takes on Banner claim that she won't say anything negative about corsetry. I don't know if they're deliberately obscuring this or if it's just representative of the fact that "Bernadette Banner says corsets are all wonderful" gets passed around by word of mouth without anyone actually watching the video.
But what I really clipped this line for was to point out that there's a disturbing ableism in the "stupid corset-heads parroting Banner" takes. People bring up her scoliosis in this derogatory way, as though it invalidates her experience ... I do not like it. People who have less experience with corsetry than her will explain that Banner's scoliosis means that her analysis of her body and her support aid cannot have any worth.
We see loads of references to this swooning and fainting in novels — in works of fiction —dating from this period, but do we actually see this prevalently in actual, non-fictional writing? Indeed, Doris Langley Moore points out that "in the diaries, letters, and other literal records of the time, there is surprisingly little of this swooning." It is entirely likely that this dramatic and conspicuous manner of reaction was simply a popular literary device used to communicate the shock value of a fictional situation. [...] In fact, in my own years of said 'restriction', enduring the same 24" waist that we see popping up so prevalently in our investigations, never once did I feel desperately short of breath, and never once did I actually faint.
This is an extremely good point, and one that I've addressed before at AskHistorians at length. (And as a moderator, I was unfortunately able to see exactly how many other people responded to the question with "they were fainting because of corsets!!" even after they were removed.) You will note several academic citations on the cultural use of passing out as a trope in fiction and in the courtroom, if that's your thing. Langley Moore's findings in primary sources also echo my own: women in the 19th century didn't record fainting as a regular occurrence. It was in large part a relic of 18th century sentimental fiction in which men AND women swooned to show how intensely they felt their emotions.
To compensate for the lack of expansion capacity, you learn to breathe with the tops of your lungs, rather than with the lower or middle part of your abdomen, taking smaller breaths more frequently as opposed to deeper breaths less frequently. [...] Valerie Steele goes into more detail on this in the chapter of her book devoted to the medical effects of corsetry, but her sources and conclusions find that there is no real harm in breathing in this different way.
Clarifying to start with that Dr. Valerie Steele is the director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, editor of the academic journal Fashion Theory, and has a PhD in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History from Yale. There is a strong unwillingness (from some of the same people who decry anti-intellectualism on this website!) to take her conclusions seriously because if she says things that Banner agrees with, she must just be a silly costumer and not a scholar. I've cited The Corset: A Cultural History is silly slapfights here and have had it completely dismissed many times.
Banner and Steele both note that this type of breathing is common in pregnant and overweight people. It's really not a big deal. Is it a negative effect? In a sense, in the way that bisexually sitting on one foot is technically bad for me because it can make my ankle ache if I do it for too long.
The final most obvious possible effect of all this corsetry business is my eating habits. I have always been an excruciatingly slow eater, that is my own problem, but that seems to have been something that's been slightly exacerbated by my years in the brace: this is perhaps an entirely personal psychological effect, and is by no means necessarily widespread amongst corset wearers past and present, but I found it extraordinarily unbearable to feel full whilst wearing it, and so preferred to eat smaller meals more frequently or normal portions very, very slowly to avoid this.
Again, Banner is noting a negative effect of corsetry, one that most people who regularly wear historically accurate corsets (especially ones with any reduction) will also admit to. And again, it's not really a big deal. I wouldn't say I find it "extraordinarily uncomfortable" to be full; for me it's more that I feel full faster. When people say she says corsets are all butterflies and rainbows and won't admit there are any negative physical effects from wearing corsets because her brace was comfortable, they are either lying or talking about her videos without having seen them.
I won't claim that there aren't any inevitable harmful effects as with any form of extreme bodily modifcation — as with tightlacing — but we must remember that tightlacing was not commonplace, and is not synonymous with corsetry in general.
This is an important point, and one that the scholarship (Steele) fully backs up. "Normal" corseting was not an extreme form of body modification.
It must also be pointed out that there's really no definitive evidence that many of these abundantly claimed effects were solely and specifically due to tightlacing — since these problems weren't ubiquitously common and particular only to women — and haven't miraculously disappeared in our uncorseted population today. Or, in the case of consumption, or tuberculosis, have since been firmly proven to have other and completely unrelated causes.
I would disagree a little with Banner here in that some of the things that were attributed to corsetry were because they were common and more frequently occurred in women! If you're a 19th century doctor and you're trying to explain why more women have gallbladder problems, you might look at the clear fact that the overwhelming majority of women wear corsets as a potential reason. However, yes, these issues still occur today despite the lack of corsets, which is a great argument against them. And yes, we do now know that tuberculosis is caused by bacteria. Steele's The Corset: A Cultural History (2003) is really THE source on this, she's done the work to actually correlate historical and modern medical records.
...
So yeah. I think Bernadette Banner's not that bad, actually.
Feel free to suggest other videos you'd like to see me look at via my ask box! Or, I guess, posts on Tumblr I should dissect. Anything like that.
