Corset warriors: organisations promoting dress reform
In our previous post ( Stay the Corset! workers in the factories, 1890-1930 ) Sarah Villiers described conditions for women workers in Charles Bayer's corset factories. In this post, she explains how campaigners for dress reform opposed the wearing of corsets and its impact on their manufacture. All was not rosy in the world of corsetry. As early as 1860, the Dress Reform movement was gathering strength. It vehemently opposed corsets and the fashion to achieve ever-smaller waistlines. Supporters of corsets asserted that they maintained an upright figure as a “necessary physical structure for moral and well-ordered society”. Dress reformists, however, claimed that women’s fashions were not only physically detrimental but “the results of a male conspiracy to make women subservient by cultivating them in slave psychology” (Riberio, 1986). They argued that a change in dress could not only allow better physical movement and comfort but also increase the opportunities to ob...
