Leigh+Summers+(boundtoplease)

> that spike in veiled terms of cultural anxieties surrounding female sexuality. pg.17 p.1
 * 1) One of the strongest reasons for the adoption of the corset, though it is not commonly avowed, is the belief that it conduces beauty and symmetry of figure. Slepder forms are usually praised and cheifly because they are associated with the litheness and undeveloped graces of youth.
 * 2) Middle-class women were osracized by virture of their biology. They were routinely advised that they must retire early to rest, avoid paries, balls, concerts, and long trips on public transport.
 * 3) Corsetry of both maternity and standard design was commonly worn by working and middle-class women to avoid this type of censure. Maternity corsetry was sold as early as the 1830's and, as the century closed, patters for maternity corsets wich could be made at home, and which were almost indistinguishable from standrd corsets in design, were dicreetly advertised in respectable magazines
 * 4) For pregnant Victorian women, rightly laced corsetry whether of maternity of standard design, afforded a few extra weeks or even months of freedom in the face of taboos which demanded their invisibility.
 * 5) Susan Brownmiller noted that 'no discussion of the feminine body in the western world can make real sense without getting a grip on the corse' for it has played a 'starring role in the [female] body's history.'
 * 6) Despite the cruel reality of fierce red lines and deep furrows carved into womens bodies by 'strings and bones that lashed them in', the contemporary corset discourse continues to reflect the public face of corsetry drawn from quaint advertisements and pornography.
 * 7) The object of the corset was, as British sexologist Havelock Ellis observed, to 'furnish woman wish a method of heightening at once her two cheif secondary sexual characteristics, the bosom above and the hips and buttocks below.
 * 8) The accenntuation of the secondary sexual characteristics necessitated the obliteration of any evidence of the ribcage, which, by the prevailing aesthetic standards of Victorian femininity, spoiled the illusion of a perfectly tapering torso. The corset was also commissioned to reduce the waist's 'clumsy' somewhat kidney-shaped form and constrict it (ideally) to a tiny symmetrical circle.
 * 9) Most corsets consisted of either a metal or a whalebone and metal framework, encased in sturdy cloth.
 * 10) Strong laces, threaded through metal eyelets, were used to tighten the corset over the ribcage and waist. Busks added to the torment, busks were removable panels of steel or bone, usually found in front-fastening corsets. Busks were originally made of wood. They say directly begind the opening of the corset and ran its whole length. Occaisonally two busks were worn to effect real 'firmness and stability'.
 * 11) The corset the corset attracted considerable attention from the medical profession, but it was also the site of heated public debates
 * 1) The corset operated as a multi-functional discursive device, simultaneously offering masuline critics a safe platform to discuss dangerous sexual issues, while ingentiously providing a vehicle to shape and control female sexuality.
 * 2) Nineteenth-century medical discourses, as well as feminist and popular writings, have been used to establish the corsets relationship to a plethora of ailments, labelled loosely by the medican profession and women themselves as 'female complaints'.
 * 3) Women from working and middle classes wore corsetry, both classes were implicated in its production and both groups resisted and manipulated the societal compulsion to corset.
 * 4) Corsetry was essential, not just in constucting feminity, but in constructing a class based identity and subjectivity.
 * 5) Corsetry was prized by fashion-concious, middle-class women because it crafted the flesh into class appropriate contours.
 * 6) Corsetry operated to hide and 'coarse' absominal bulges from view, while it smoothed the hips and created the small circular (rather than oval shaped) waisline that supposedly denoted good breeding.
 * 7) The well-corseted body, in tandem with suitable clothing, gave an immediate first impression of gentility.
 * 8) Working-class women who could not afford even the cheapest of professionally made corsets did not necessarily have to go without them. They could make their own. The plethora of dressmaking and millinery texts published in the 1830's and 1840's, which provided detailed dvice on how to make stays, can be seen to indicate the importance the garment held for working-class women.
 * 9) Institutional corsets worn by female inmates of prisons, asylums and poorhouses were, even in comparison with the cheapest ready-made garments, uncompromisingly ugly.
 * 10) Instututional corsets were devoid of any trims whatsoever, and were laved at the back and buckled down the front, closing much like an old-fashioned school satchel. While as heavily boned as standard corsets, they do not appear to have been designed to allow tight lacing. This would have allowed the occupant enough mobility to work.
 * 11) Paradocically, while this design was intrinsically better from a health standpoint, it meant that incarcerated women would have found it impossible to lave their bodies into a shape that enhanced their self-esteem.
 * 12) Middle class women, especially those in 'foreign' lands, may have either conciously or unconsciously considered corsetry to be an ideological ally. Corsetry is a significant, if under-researched, aspect of the )respecable working and and middle-class colonial project.
 * 13) Women who left England and America, either to settle or temporarily evangelize in India, Africa, Japan, Austalia and the Pacific, took corsetry with them.
 * 14) In some cases this corsetry was specially designed to lessen the effect of tropical heat on the body.
 * 15) The Perforated Gossamer Corset was specifically designed for those women who, for whatever reasons, were in tropical climates at mid-century.