Binding Femininity

The corset in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe was a complex andoften contradictory social and cultural symbol. It symbolized both the sensualfemale body and the chaste virgin; the female control over male desires andthe male's control over the female body. Reports of women who have died asa result of the tightness of their corsets abound in the literature. Medical casestudies provide information on the changes corsets wrought in the softtissues of the women who wore them. However to date no systematicstudies have been conducted which detail the changes in the bony pelvis.Thisstudy examines the effect of corseting upon the female pelves of theSpitalfields skeletal collection in order to determine the changes in pelvic sizeand shape that may result from such practices and the resulting change infecundity for the individuals in question. Many historical and present daysources offer up the corset as the source of infertility deformation and evenabortion.This book adds quantitative data on the bony changes wrought by corsetingand is adrdressed to any scholar of osteo-archaeology women's studies orhistory.