1 - Waisted women: reading Victorian slenderness

Summary

The extraordinary variety that is woman's body is systematically ignored in our culture. The richness of our different shapes is reduced to the overriding image of slimness.

Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue

It has always appeared to me to be one of the greatest existing absurdities, that a whole community of people, differing in complexion, form, and feature, as widely as the same species can differ, should … desire to wear precisely the same kind of dress.

Sarah Stickney Ellis, Daughters of England

The remarkable similarity between Orbach's and Ellis's observations indicates that the wish to adapt to one predominant standard of beauty bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's experiences, and that contemporary complaints about the tyranny of slenderness have antecedents in the Victorian era. Nineteenth-century writers were well aware of the importance of beauty, including slenderness, in women's lives, so discussions of the existence of a Victorian “beauty myth” do not merely impose a twenty-first-century concept upon the nineteenth century. Beauty has, of course, concerned both men and women throughout history, but Ellis's statement alludes to a specific body type that many women cultivated in order to conform to a fashionable Victorian silhouette, “to wear precisely the same kind of dress” as their neighbors. Ellis's interpretation of women's behavior, therefore, requires an investigation into the body types that most appealed to fashionable Victorian women.