Whale by Joe Roman

Author:Joe Roman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Preparing whale-bone, or baleen, in Yorkshire, 1813.

In the 19th century there were whalebone corsets for summer, corsets for winter, corsets for every shape and size. The corset on the lower left was designed for a child between 1 and 2 years old.

So restrictive were these bodices that the eighteenth-century French physician Nicholas Andry recommended their use to cure scoliosis, the curvature of the spine. Women paid the price of keeping waists as thin as a supermodel’s thigh: rib cages became deformed and some women had to have their floating ribs removed. Yet corsets were more than a fashionable assault on the body: they restored a youthful figure to the middle aged and gave an air of aristocracy to the middle classes. The practice of wearing corsets continued for centuries. In 1853, at the peak of Yankee whaling, 5,652,300 lb of baleen were landed at US ports, with a value of $1,950,000.14

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