Corsets

I went to my first Romance Writers of America meeting last night. The program was given by a professor of costume design (and an expert in historical clothing), who brought in a colleague dressed in 19th-century underwear and proceeded to dress her up in a typical outfit for an upper-class Englishwoman of the time.

The skirt weighed thirty pounds. It was like holding one of those lead aprons they use when they x-ray your teeth.

As a concession to the health of the model, the corset gave her a 27-inch waist, rather than the more historically accurate measurement of 13 to 16 inches.

Which leads me to the Cool Fact of the Day: Apparently, in those days, the experts believed that if you laced a woman tightly enough into a corset, she would be incapable of feeling sexual desire. (They considered this a good thing.)

Hence the term "straitlaced."

("Strait," of course, means "tight," and now none of you will ever spell the word "straightlaced" again, right?)

They might not have been entirely wrong about that, actually. If a woman, even quite a thin one, was laced down to a 13-inch waist, then anything that made her breathe fast would quickly cause unconsciousness.

Corsets, in one form or another, were common right into the twentieth century, guys, and came back again in the 1950s. We had a narrow escape.