Tightlacing

Due to a combination of evolving fashion trends, social change regarding the roles of women, and material shortages brought on by World War I and II, tightlacing, and corsets in general, fell out of favor entirely by the early 20th century.

[1] Dress historian David Kunzle maintains that tightlacing was largely the domain of middle to lower middle class women hoping to increase their station in life; he estimates that the average corseted waist size of the 1880s was approximately 21 inches (53 cm), with an uncorseted waist size of about 27 inches (69 cm).

Dress reformers exhorted women to abandon the tyranny of stays and free their waists for work and healthy exercise, with an emphasis on the negative consequences to one's reproductive system.

Achieving extremely small waist sizes requires a long period of training with ever-smaller corsets, ideally during one's pre-teen or teen years.

A number of accounts of the corset training process take place under the regime of a finishing school, as achieving a very small waist was thought to make a woman appear refined and fashionable and thus increase the wearer's ability to attract a suitable husband.

[6] Each of my own daughters – I have four – on her seventh birthday was provided with a snugly-fitting pair of corsets, which she wore from that time out, by night as well as by day, unless in case of decided illness.

As the child grew, more bones were added, and the chest and hip measure was increased, but no alteration was made in the waist, and no expansion being allowed during the hours of sleep, its tenuity was retained and there was no necessity of resorting to tight-lacing, which becomes requisite where corsets are not worn until the figure has grown large.

[...] Generally all the blame is laid by parents on the principal of the school, but it is often a subject of the greatest rivalry among the girls to see which can get the smallest waist, and often while servant was drawing in the waist of my friend to the utmost of her strength, the young lady, though being tightened till she had hardly breath to speak, would urge the maid to pull the stays yet closer, and tell her not to let the lace slip in the least.Although most of these accounts describe adolescent girls, there are some sources which confirm that this process can take place at older ages, albeit with more difficulty.

[3] The majority of people taking part in tightlacing were likely teenagers or young adults; the smallest waist sizes on record should be contextualized as such.

[15] While supporters of fashionable dress contended that corsets maintained an upright, "good figure", and were a necessary physical structure for a moral and well-ordered society, dress reformers maintained that women's fashions were not only physically detrimental, but "the results of male conspiracy to make women subservient by cultivating them in slave psychology".

One Doctor Lewis writes in an 1882 edition of The North American Review:[19] A girl who has indulged in tight lacing should not marry.

Physicians of experience know what is meant, while thousands of husbands will not only know, but deeply feel the meaning of this hint.This likely alluded to problems with the reproductive organs experienced by women who wore corsets, and demonstrates the difficulties of explaining this issue due to sexual taboos.