Victorian Dress Torture

Imagine walking around every day with anywhere from 20 to 88 pounds of constant pressure around your abdomen. That’s what the corset provided as it cinched women’s waists to as little as 17 or 18 inches. “It also restricted oxygen intake, crushed the internal organs, caused chronic fatigue and headaches, and created serious long-term medical complications,” explains Joshua Zeitz in his fascinating book, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and Women Who Made America Modern. A girl at boarding school related how the merciless tight-lacing was painfully intolerable, but that it was an inflexible rule, and the cruel laces not relaxed except during illness. One critic of the day said, “The effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree… for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste, and to die.”

“The loudest defenders of the corset routinely used words like ‘discipline’, ‘confinement’, submission’, and ‘bondage’ and spoke favorably of ‘training the figure’ with a degree of pain ‘rigidly inflicted and unflinchingly imposed’.” One man said, “The corset is an ever present monitor indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint: it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feelings.”

If they couldn’t move or breathe easily because of corsets, women were further hampered by crinolines. ”Built of flexible steel, whalebone, or wood, these contraptions were little more than hooped cages…. sometimes as much as 5 yards in circumference.” Wooden crinolines commonly caught on fire when women stepped too close to a fireplace or candle (i.e. within a couple of yards). One Victorian woman wrote, “Take what precautions we may against fire, so long as the hoop is worn, life is never safe… all are living under a sentence of death which may occur unexpectedly in the most appalling form.”

Appalling indeed! Is it any wonder that Victorian feminists felt that the fashions reinforced women’s subordination to men, keeping them quite literally imprisoned? “How can you ever compete with man… for equal place and pay with garments… so cumbersomely fashioned, and how can you ever hope to enjoy the same health and vigor as men, so long as the waist is pressed into the smallest compass, pounds of clothing hung on the hips, the limbs cramped with skirts?” asked Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wore comfortable “bloomers” in protest.

The Victorians - not as prudish as we think?

“Victorian morality” summons thoughts of sexually repressed people (solidified by later Freudian theories) who covered piano legs with bloomers because they were too erotic. Bathing costumes for women of that era were enveloping, heavy, dark, wool garments over black stockings and even slippers, and many used bathing machines so that no one saw even them in these concealing clothes. So I was astonished to discover that there was a nudist beach - popularly known as "Bare-assed Beach" - at Hanlon’s Point on the Toronto Islands from 1894 to 1930, when morally upright citizens finally succeeded in shutting it down. 

Skinny-dipping (swimming naked) was something that many people did - and still do - in lakes and rivers, but usually in same-sex groups or as couples. One Muskoka cottager related how his Victorian grandmother always had her morning bathe in the lake, and was almost caught in the buff by an unexpected visitor. My British grandfather-in-law states in his memoir that when he and his wife honeymooned in Normandy, France, they found a deserted beach, stripped off their clothes, and bathed “au naturel” in the sea. What a delightful picture that conjured up of these young Victorians being spontaneous and uninhibited. Had I known this when I met him at the age of 96, just a couple of years before his death, I would have been even more impressed by this “Victorian” gentleman.

(Mis)adventures in moving

The first evening in our new house didn’t turn out as we had expected - we spent it in a hotel! After a long, arduous, and chilly day moving, we were all looking forward to hot showers, but discovered that we had neither heat nor hot water. The gas supply had been disconnected! On a Friday night you can only reach the gas company’s emergency line. This was no emergency, they assured us. It was only going down to the freezing point that night. Have to wash in cold water? Think of it as camping. Nothing could be done until the business office opened on Monday morning. So by snuggling under warm duvets and showering at the gym, we did camp out in our house after that first night.

Our lawyer - my oldest friend - had done everything required to arrange for the transfer of services, but the gas company denied receiving the instructions. On Monday they told us we might have gas by Friday! After a heated discussion and a talk with the manager, we were finally told we might be reconnected on Tuesday. And were by late afternoon - a job that took only a matter of minutes.

None of the service providers, except for hydro, delivered on time. The phone company made a mistake - which they at least acknowledged - so, although we were supposed to have been connected on Friday, we finally had phone service on Sunday, but no Internet until Thursday. The cable company was also 2 days late, not that we had time to watch TV in any case.

Ironically, we had a card delivered this week from hydro stating that we would be disconnected if we didn’t call their office to set up an account! When I spoke with them, they said that they could no longer take instructions from lawyers because of the Privacy Act, so clients had to call directly to transfer their services. Someone could have informed us of that new policy.

My lawyer and I had a laugh when she told me that the utility providers in her jurisdiction (my old home town, only 2 hours away) refused to take direction from one of her clients, saying that the lawyer had to do it! Surely there should be some consistency in these services, even across municipalities.

Of course none of this has diminished our delight in our new house. But it did make us realize how easy and comfortable our lives usually are, with light, heat (or air conditioning) available with the flick of a switch, and hot running water with the turn of a tap.

My first novel, A Place To Call Home, was set in pioneer Ontario. I marvelled at how those intrepid people had survived harsh Canadian winters in draughty log cabins, so cold that water froze in pitchers set next to the fireplace. One “gentlewoman” wrote in her letters home to England that the temperature in her bedroom was only 3 degrees Fahrenheit (-16 C), and she had frost on her blankets in the mornings. (Is it any wonder people didn’t bathe often in those days?) Blistering summers, especially for women imprisoned in corsets and those encompassing Victorian gowns, could be just as challenging.

But we don’t need history to tell us how lucky we are. We need only look at other, less “developed” parts of the world to realize that.