The letters, descriptions and images that describe this practice may have represented sexual fantasies rather than descriptions of authentic experience. Steele also argues that examples of tight lacing, or the practice of lacing corsets to create the smallest possible waist, cannot be taken at face value. Fashion historians Valerie Steele and Colleen Gau have argued that while corseted women may indeed have suffered from depleted lung volume and changes in breathing patterns, this would not necessarily have led to respiratory diseases, but may have caused fainting and lowered vitality. The Corset: A Cultural History Paperback 8 February 2003 by Valerie Steele (Author) 50 ratings See all formats and editions Hardcover 432.49 4 Used from 137.25 1 New from 432.

Some doctors blamed the corset for respiratory diseases, deformity to the ribs, damage to internal organs, birth defects and miscarriages, while others approved of “moderate” or “health” corsets that were less rigid and helped support the body. Available in a wide variety of price points, corsets were worn by upper- and middle-class women and, increasingly, by working-class women as well. It was.Discussions about the corset being detrimental to women’s health came to a head in the 19th century, when corset use was at its highest. It does not and did not possess just one meaning. For her, the corset is not just one thing. THE CORSET A Cultural History by Valerie Steele Yale University Press, 39.95 THIRD-WAVE FEMINISTS WAVing copies of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth once proclaimed that men had hatched an ominous conspiracy to trick women into pursuing an impossible beauty ideal rather than real social progress. And so, one might assume, Mrs Liddell Hart was simply perpetuating Victorian values-and being repressed as a result.

Most recently, in Bound to Please (2001), Leigh Summers argued that corsetry was 'a powerful coercive apparatus in the control of Victorian women, and that it was subsequently instrumental, indeed crucial, in the maintenance of Victorian hetero-patriarchal dominance' (p. Womens addiction to the corset habit was a mystery that no man can understand, except by reference to the proverbial feminine. Previous studies have tended to take Jessie's side of the argument. He was also a fetishist-or, as Valerie Steele would have it-a 'corset enthusiast', whose substantial collection of cuttings on corsetry is now an ornament of the library at Liverpool John Moores University. For Basil Liddell Hart was not just a great military strategist.

corsets because I am uncomfortable and they make me feel sick.' No wonder: Jessie Liddell Hart was squeezed into a 19-inch corset, which her husband insisted should be as 'strongly boned as possible'. By Valerie Steele (New Haven/London: Yale U.P., 2003 pp.

The Corset by Valerie Steele