Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at
St. Saviour's Hospital, that "she had heard of instances where
ladies were so determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement
that they had actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids
fastened the fifteen-inch corset," has excited a good deal of
incredulity, but there is nothing really improbable in it. From
the sixteenth century to our own day there is hardly any form of
torture that has not been inflicted on girls, and endured by women,
in obedience to the dictates of an unreasonable and monstrous
Fashion. "In order to obtain a real Spanish figure," says
Montaigne, "what a Gehenna of suffering will not women endure,
drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh; nay,
sometimes they even die thereof!" "A few days after my arrival at
school," Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, "although
perfectly straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays,
with a steel busk in front; while above my frock, bands drew my
shoulders back till the shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod with
a semi-circle, which went under my chin, was clasped to the steel
busk in my stays. In this constrained state I and most of the
younger girls had to prepare our lessons"; and in the life of Miss
Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a certain fashionable
establishment, "she underwent all the usual tortures of back-
boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a very
tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw out
the muscles and increase the growth," a signal failure in her case.
Indeed, instances of absolute mutilation and misery are so common
in the past that it is unnecessary to multiply them; but it is
really sad to think that in our own day a civilized woman can hang
on to a cross-bar while her maid laces her waist into a fifteen-