The historical costuming community is overwhelmingly pro-corset. While I love that we’ve gotten away from the discourse that corsets were torture devices only worn at the request of men, I believe it is important to explore the grey area that lies between pro-corset and anti-corset arguments. The beginnings of structural foundations like kirtles, bodies, stays, jumps and corsets, were born out of an innocuous need for support which they have always provided, however as the decades progressed the corset began to symbolize flawed female bodies, racial hierarchies, nationalist imperatives, homophobia, and suspicious political standpoints.
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Sources:
Davies, M. (1982). Corsets and Conception: Fashion and Demographic Trends in the Nineteenth Century. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24(4), 611-641. www.jstor.org/stable/178431
Fields, J. (1999). “Fighting the Corsetless Evil”: Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930. Journal of Social History, 33(2), 355-384. www.jstor.org/stable/3789627
Gau, C. (1998). Historic medical perspectives of corseting and two physiologic studies with reenactors lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewco...
Murphy, M. J. (2003). Book Reviews [Review of Uplift: The Bra in America; The Corset: A Cultural History, by J. Farrell‐Beck, C. Gau, & V. Steele]. Winterthur Portfolio, 38(2/3), 151-159. www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/...
Smith, B. (1991). Market Development, Industrial Development: The Case of the American Corset Trade, 1860-1920. The Business History Review, 65(1), 91-129. doi.org/10.2307/3116905
Steele, V. (2001). The Corset : A Cultural History. Yale University Press