It’s a common stereotype in cartoons and such that high society ladies faint and have to be administered smelling salts when somebody says something impolite or inappropriate at some kind of swanky soiree. For examples: the All Fruit spread commercials from a few years back, when grande dames at the breakfast table would ask “Please pass the All Fruit,” then get all flustered when the backwoods yokel asks for jelly.
Did they really do that, and if so, was it more common 50 or so years ago?
(sigh). No. Nobody’s granny with white hair in a bun and a long calico dress fell over in a dead faint upon hearing “damnhellfart”. It’s shorthand, in cartoons and such, to depict an overprotected ninny from Victorian times. In those days, society women (that is rich, confined to their homes for the most part, sheltered from real life, living to very strict rules on all aspects of life) were treated as fragile creatures who mustn’t be upset by vulgarity or crudeness. As they were often pregnant most of their lives, it was doubly important they not be upset. (and if not, they were trussed up in tight corsets and could hardly breath, must endure discomfort without complaint - Scarlett O’Hara in the book could never remember ever seeing her mother’s back touching the back of the chair she was sitting in! -). To faint when confronted with a social blunder? Depends. By one of their own class, they wouldn’t. By some strange yahoo intruding into their social gathering, drunk, threatening, embarrassing, I could see someone young Victorian girl swooning (though her elders who might have lived through rough times in pioneer days probably had heard and seen it all). Perhaps this became a trope in romantic type literature, a stereotype, and this carried on into the years ahead as a symbol of a fragile sheltered woman who couldn’t handle any pressure or disturbance outside her own little placid world.
I wonder if if became a trope early enough so that faux-swooning became kind of a full-body gesture for “how rude!”. It could have been a useful thing in the right social circles.
The same thing, the monacle-popping. Egads, sir! Exaggeration. To show what pure, high-minded, proper sorts they were, confronted with bestial vulgarity or lewdness.
Back to our Bird In A Gilded Cage - the swooner also may well have faked a swoon as a way to manipulate her ‘captors’. It was good that the Victorian society girl reflect the expectations of society, and what better way to reinforce her frail image than to swoon and reinforce what a coddled little thing she appeared to be. If she and her man were strolling down the street and a flasher jumped out in front of them - laugh and point with glee? A ‘good’ woman couldn’t do that!!! She would be so ‘distraught’ she would collapse in the arms of her monacle-popping man. An exaggerated behavior, still remembered into the next century, and so you see it in cartoons and comedies ever after.
As I understand it, fainting can be a very real result of wearing corsets frequently and tightly. The body reacts to stress, starts ramping up the cardiovascular system, and discovers that it doesn’t really have much oxygen to work with. Down you go.
It didn’t happen all that often, of course, but seeing a startled woman faint is dramatic enough to make it stick in the mind. And then you can have her startled by all kinds of things like poor manners for comedic effect. It’s even better when the comic routine plays on an expectation that women are delicate both in a physical and emotional sense.
Also, it didn’t happen at all 50 years ago - you’d have to go back a few more generations.
It sill happens. My female students in China, where the cult of the frail women is still pretty strong, would often stage elaborate fainting episodes in class. It was common enough that the kids basically had a script for it, with each friend in knowing her part in the hubbub that followed.
Usually it was a sign that someone broke up with her boyfriend or something and felt like doing some attention whoring. It was also a bit of a “mean girls” gambit to publicly demonstrate how enviably advanced one’s anorexia is, meant to excite awe and admiration from the rest of the girls who eat lunch now and then. It’d solidify and test the pecking order of your followers as they “help” you through the “crisis.”
I’m sure Victorian fainting was pretty much the same thing- a handy tool for getting attention.
What the OP is refering to is hysteria, a term now applied to both sexes but originally used to refer to the fainting spells and other issues of sensitive women. Even the word ‘hysteria’ is Greek for ‘uterus’.
According to my previous thread on the subject, the answer is yes, at least some of the time, though probably not as frequently as some authors would have us believe. For the dates on that sort of thing you’d have to go back more than 50 years, though. Two points that were brought up is that in the 18th and 19th centuries, upper class women:
Were not supposed to eat and drink very much, because it lead to the unladylike result of having to use the bathroom. This could contribute to physical weakness.
Often used cosmetics with trace amounts of lead and other bad chemicals, which made things worse.
Actually, you did, since that article says nothing of the kind. A diagnosis of hysteria was based on observation of unmanageable physical and emotional symptoms that in modern practice would be diagnosed as dissociative or somatoform disorders, also known at various times as “neurosis,” “nerves,” or “madness.” While syncope (specifically, frequent unfeigned fainting spells) was one of the symptoms, what the OP describes, and the most common manifestation of it, is not hysteria.