Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (review)

The meanings and purpose of the corset generated heated debates among dress reformers, doctors, and educators in the nineteenth century and among scholars in the twentieth. Leigh Summers enters these debates with Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset, in which she condemns corsetry and the society that sponsored it as oppressive to women and violently misogynist. Summers builds upon similar analysis offered by Helene Roberts in 1977 by considering a broader range of topics and evidence, much of which is fascinating and thickens corsetry’s description. She also skillfully builds upon feminist scholarship since the 1970s by recognizing instances of women’s agency, and the presence of multiple, if not contradictory cultural meanings. Chapters investigating maternity and children’s corsets, two rarely addressed topics, allow fuller analysis of corsetry’s role in the construction and policing of femininity and gender difference. The chapter on maternity corsets is the book’s strongest. Summers makes excellent use of a variety of sources, including costume artefacts, women’s magazines, patterns, advice books, corset tracts, and advertisements to describe their design and use. Summers suggests that many women who wore maternity corsets, as with corsets generally, were simply conforming to prevailing standards of beauty and femininity linked to respectability, reputation, and thus class status and security. Corsets’ discomfort and potential for damage provides evidence that the directive to do so was extremely powerful. Furthermore, Summers contends that maternity corsets shielded the pregnant body from view and thus provided Victorian society a means of denying women’s sexual activity in conformity with prevailing ideologies. Yet she also points out that this effect allowed pregnant women greater opportunities to remain actively engaged in public longer, rather than hidden in confinement. Similarly, while some commentators advocated maternity corsets for health reasons, others condemned their ill effects upon the foetus. These critics expressed no concern for the corseted mother’s comfort or well-being, as they assumed she was indulging her vanity. However, some women implemented warnings about the harmful consequences of tightly binding the body during pregnancy by deliberately wearing corsets to induce miscarriage.

Subsequent chapters on children, illness, romantic “morbidity,” gymnastics, and advertising, do not maintain the analytic clarity with which Summers begins. It is not evident, for example, whether most girls began to wear adult corsets in their teens or earlier because Summers relies upon anecdotes that illustrate the horrors of children’s corsetry, but do not explicate the wider contours of its use. Specificity, if not accuracy, is lost in Summers’ frequent identification of nineteenth-century individuals and ideas as “feminist,” particularly when she merges that term with “dress reformer.” As a result, anti-suffragist Catharine Beecher is represented as both. Dates of some sources, and many illustrations, are missing from the text and in some cases also from citations. And, while Summers states her study is primarily “set in a British context” (5), focus diffuses, not in her use of much US material, but in withholding textual identification of sources’ national origins. Most problematic, Summers does not take fully into account literature on the history of sexuality. She thus fails at times to distinguish between prescriptive texts and actual practices. In addition, there are instances where broader contextualization would strengthen her argument. Her understandable dismay in corsetry’s sexualization of girls would benefit from considering, for example, age-of-consent laws. Summers is also curiously inattentive, despite her background in museum studies, to distinctive transformations in corsetry over her period, 1850–1900, and thus does not explore possible changes in significations. Instead these years are largely presented as an era of unremitting discomfort and disease for most women. This view becomes problematic even within her book, as she includes, rightly, a chapter discussing the effect upon corset wear of increasing opportunities for female athleticism. That Summers does not integrate this chapter’s findings in her conclusion indicates the difficulties of reckoning with the interplay of women’s agency and shifting...