I thought that was a myth. Cite?
Paired with arsenic-based make-up and bleach douches, they had to be pretty uneven.
I’d like a cite too. It seems hard to believe it happened in an age of primitive anesthesia and antisepsis and massive postoperative mortality.
Thanks to all. So now I’m getting a handle on people fainting in real life.
Sweating has only been lightly touched on though. I’ve read so many otherwide-good stories where it seems so unnecessary. People lying to their bosses or the police or whomever and starting to noticeably sweat. Maybe the writer wants to portray the likelihood of the sweat-er being found out, but it seems a bit over the top to me. If I were ever to tell a lie, which I’ve not done to date, I could probably keep dry while doing so. Hey, I’m feeling a bit damp now, what gives?
This is a big fat myth. 19th-century women didn’t go around having elective surgery out of vanity. The mortality rate from surgeries for medical problems was incredibly high – approaching 90-percent in some cases, if I’m recalling correctly. Surgery in the 19th-century was pretty much a death sentence, and it was only considered as the last resort generally.
I’ve been making and wearing historical corsets for a few years now and am friends with lots of other historical costumers, and when you’re wearing a corset, you have to work at it to get dizzy. Like run up and down stairs for a long time while carrying heavy things. I’ve done ballroom dancing in a corset, and I really think that if wearing a corset was a straight pass to fainting, that would be it. Three hours of skipping and twirling in circles? But, no, I survived unscathed.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most 19th-century women didn’t lace tightly enough to be faint as a daily thing. Most of them were too active to do that or pregnant most of the time or too poor to afford fashion corsets. I’ve been working on a project sizing up 1850s and 1860s sewing patterns from period fashion magazines, and the waist sizes seem to be consistently falling between 25 and 30 inches, which isn’t extreme at all. This matches up with what I’ve observed in extant garments from that period and from later in the 19th century as well. Even in the later part of the 19th century, waist sizes on extant garments don’t seem to go much below 22 inches, and that would fit someone who had a natural, uncorseted waist of anywhere between 25 and 28 inches. Really no need to remove ribs to get that!
Also, for most of the 19th century, technology wasn’t developed enough to lace corsets tight enough to make you short of breath. Before the 1850s, most corsets were soft, corded deals, kind of like sports bras, with a straight wooden busk down the front. Separating steel busks don’t come into play until the 1850s, and steel boning wasn’t really used until after the American Civil War. Sewing machines aren’t used until the 1850s, either. You can’t get really extreme reduction without machine-sewn seams, steel boning, and a steel busk. The corsets just don’t hold up otherwise. (Though whalebone was also an option for boning, so I guess steel boning isn’t quite necessary.) Additionally, the shapes of corsets don’t become curvy and developed enough until the 1880s and 1890s to get the sort of waist reduction that will make someone faint from corseting alone. And it should be noted that the women who did get extreme reduction from corseting were the exception, not the norm.
If you want to read more on this topic, I recommend The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steel.
Well, when did fainting become a staple in literature? It seems to me that even if corset-caused fainting existed only for a very limited group of affluent women who adopted a dangerously narrow-waisted style of corset, so long as this group was in the right place at the right time for a certain group of writers to pick it up and create a literary cliche, then that might have been enough. After all, it seems to me that the idea that women were constantly fainting under stress was a literary conceit and not a feature of real life. Sure, maybe it happened occasionally like it does now, but not routinely.
Interesting. Ignorance fought, etc.
But technically, I’d think it would be a more of a skinny myth.
As a WAG, in the same period which considered it fashionable for heroines to die of consumption. These were women who didn’t just happen to belong to the weaker sex and thus need a man’s help with their tale’s equivalent of moving the sofa: the heroine was also weaker, more ethereal and in more need of rescuing than the majority of women (who could and did move their own sofas, being of a lower class).