Corsets

From the Illustrated London News, 27^th July 1918.

LADIES’ PAGE.

Corsets are a necessity!  Yes, the fact is proclaimed by the Ministry of Munitions!  They have decided to release no less than fifteen hundred tons of steel to make busks, as it has been proved to the satisfaction of the august authorities that women cannot work properly at munitions unless they may have corsets. 

As far as the girls are concerned who have been brought up to encircle their bodies with a stiff support, this is probably quite true.  If a little girl be put into corsets, and brought up continuously so confined, the muscles that should support her upright form will actually never be developed.  I know a girl who was brought up without ever wearing any sort of stays; she has a beautiful figure, and remarkable health; she has often set out from the family home in Surrey and walked twenty-five miles to breakfast with her father at his London chambers; she holds the N.S.A. official certificate of having swum a mile without one stop, and so on.  This young woman simply cannot now wear corsets, even occasionally, because her naturally developed muscles, like those of the Venus of Milo with her twenty-seven-inch waist, fight with the steel and whalebone, and finally, after a painful contest, make bulges here and there in the stiff, straight garment! 

If the women of the future are—as there is reason to expect—to work hard for a living, they had better be brought up to rely on their own natural perfect development rather than on steel-and-whalebone-stiffened garments.  The present fashion in costume, hanging chiefly from the shoulders and made all in one piece--coat-frocks, one-piece robes, jumpers—does not in the least need corsets; and if this fashion could be maintained, and the next generation of girls brought up without artificial support—as surely Nature intended—they would never need any such thing, and would be enormously the stronger in physique and the healthier in function therefore.  But the women of the present day, for the most part, were not so brought up— hence fifteen hundred tons of good steel have to be spared from making shells to brace up their undeveloped forms.