Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Our Laura Ingalls Wilder Forum

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Date Posted: 04:58:39 06/07/02 Fri
Author: Laura
Subject: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!??

As part of my research for my dissertation, I've been looking at the 1897 Sears Roebuck catalogue. I was shocked to see corsets for eight to twelve years olds in there. However, my guess is that it probably wasn't very restrictive, and was most likely to let the girl get used to wearing a corset. The nineteenth-century equivalent of the training bra or crop-top maybe?

Also, I was wondering what pregnant women did - did they loosen their corsets appropriately, or leave them off altogether? As pioneer women rarely talked about pregnancy in their diaries, it's difficult to deduce what they did.

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[> Re: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Jennifer, 10:28:02 06/07/02 Fri

Ack!!! I bet you are right - they were meant to get the girls use to it. That is just terrible. As for pregnant women - one would HOPE they took the darn things off all together, BUT, isn't it possible their figures were already distorted by that time and they would have loosened them??? Of course, most women were quite young when they had their children so maybe they could have taken them off. Boy - I am just rambling here, huh??? LOL!!!

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[> Re: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Ann, 11:33:58 06/07/02 Fri

They probably didn't tighten them as much as when they got older and had something that needed to be held in and/or pushed up. As for pregnant women, good question. I'd guess they either didn't wear them, they wore them but didn't pull them too tight, or there was some special kind for pregnant women. Ma was not so young when she had Carrie and Grace (at least by old west standards) but of course Laura didn't even tell us about Ma's pregnancies really.

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[> Re: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Shell, 16:13:26 06/07/02 Fri

I think the reason there isn't much written about pioneer womens prefnancies is because they weren't talked about (even in families. In Gone with the Wind it was scandoulas that Scarlett was out in public once she was showing). Alot of the times older siblings would be out for the day or go visit someone for few days and when they got back a baby was there. Laura said that when the Carrie was born they had been collecting the beads and when they got back Carrie was there. She didn't mention it before that.They may have loosened the corsets a little not taken them of because wouldn't others children wonder why their mother was getting bigger?

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[> [> Re: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Laura, 05:11:52 06/08/02 Sat

Pregnancies were definitely taboo as the subject of polite conversation (and even in women's diaries). In many pioneer women's diaries, they refer to getting sick, but not mentioning the nature of the sickness, when actually it meant they were about nine months pregnant. Sometimes they would talk about friends becoming sick, and then all we know of the pregnancy is when a baby arrives.

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Re: Corsets for EIGHT year-olds!!?? -- Lillian, 00:07:27 08/23/04 Mon

I would have never thought that they would have corsets for pregnant women. Also I read on a book that some women that were pregnant and not pregnant get stomach muscle diseases.

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