It is now known that under
natural and healthy conditions there is no such difference, but that men
and women breathe in a precisely identical manner. The corset may thus be
regarded as the chief instrument of sexual allurement which the armory of
costume supplies to a woman, for it furnishes her with a method of
heightening at once her two chief sexual secondary characters, the bosom
above, the hips and buttocks below. We cannot be surprised that all the
scientific evidence in the world of the evil of the corset is powerless
not merely to cause its abolition, but even to secure the general adoption
of its comparatively harmless modifications.
Several books have been written on the history of the corset.
Leoty (_Le Corset a travers les Ages_, 1893) accepts Bouvier's
division of the phases through which the corset has passed: (1)
the bands, or fasciae, of Greek and Roman ladies; (2) period of
transition during greater part of middle ages, classic traditions
still subsisting; (3) end of middle ages and beginning of
Renaissance, when tight bodices were worn; (4) the period of
whalebone bodices, from middle of sixteenth to end of eighteenth
centuries; (5) the period of the modern corset.
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