ABSTRACT
A great many young women probably did lace rather tightly on occasion, such as to attend a party that required clothing that was both formal and fashionable. But the self-proclaimed “votaries of tight-lacing” emphasized dramatic reductions in waist size through rigorous “disciplinary” practices. The letters included firsthand testimony of enforced tight-lacing at fashionable boarding schools, as well as fervent defenses of tight-lacing. The “corset correspondence” published in the magazine was revived occasionally thereafter in other periodicals, and it radically altered the discourse about tight-lacing in two ways. Although physicians had denounced tight-lacing for centuries, they had failed to cure the “disease.” Women’s addiction to “the corset habit” was a “mystery” that “no man can understand,” except by reference to “the proverbial feminine craze for emulating one another and arousing envy by excelling in some extravagance of dress, no matter at what cost.”.
