Caged Birds

 

I've been completely obsessed with watching reruns of Downton Abbey. I love the fashion from that period, and am totally enchanted by both the exquisite dresses of the Crawley family upstairs and the starched uniforms of the servants downstairs. Watching the three elegant Crawley daughters walking to and from the dining room in their beaded gowns and gloves, corsets cinched tight and smooth is a fashion delight. Watching the housemaids try to clean a fire grate in a corset under heavy aprons just made me grateful I wasn't them!

Although the proper undergarments for women of that period and before did create a beautifully smooth, feminine silhouette (no muffin top! No visible panty line!) I simply cannot imagine living life, whether upstairs or down, wearing some of the bizarre architectural structures they made poor women wear! Over the centuries women have been confined within bone-crushing corsets, heavy, bouncing bustles, wide, whale-boned hoopskirts, layers and layers of heavy, hot crinolines, not to mention an assortment of other contraptions designed to contort the female shape into the "attractive" form of the day. Looking at them with a modern eye, they just seems cruel and barbaric, not to mention painful, awkward, and very bad for your longterm health. Some of these contraptions look more like torture devices than ladies "undergarments"! Of course getting around in these things was problematic. Doors were too narrow to pass through easily, carriages too small to contain the mountains of hoops and layers of fabric surrounding each occupant, and special chairs had to be designed that would allow ladies to sit down. No wonder women were referred to as "the weaker sex", who wouldn't be weaker after being forced to wear these every day of your life? I'd like to see men do it. 

If only we could time-travel and hand our ancestral sisters a pair of spanx!