The Fashion Historian

Myth: Did some Victorian women really have their lower ribs removed in order to have a smaller waist?

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer:

The idea of using surgery to fix some unsatisfactory part of the physical appearance is extremely new. Unnecessary surgery is only possible with highly developed, modern surgical practices.

In the early 19th century, surgery was mainly confined to amputations and the removal of external problems. Anesthesia of any kind was first used around the 1840s, which allowed surgeons to start fixing internal problems. The risk of infection was also extremely high, with the germ theory of disease first being applied to surgery by Joseph Lister around the 1870s. However, it would take quite some time for surgery to become as sterile as we know it today. Instruments were beginning to be sterilized, but there were still plenty of ways for bacteria to enter the body. Antibiotics were only just starting to be discovered around the same time, but the science wouldn't really take off until the 20th century.


The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, 1875
In the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eakins' famous picture, The Gross Clinic, shows a typical Victorian surgical scene. The surgery is performed in an open auditorium with several spectators, and the doctors themselves are wearing street clothes and working with their bare hands. Even if the instruments were sterilized, it would still be extremely easy for an infection to take hold and the poor man being operated on to die.

If you survived all of that, there is still the pain that comes post surgery. Painkillers as we know them didn't really exist in the Victorian period, so for pain control a person had to turn to some sort of drug that was probably not very safe. For a point of comparison, remember when you had your wisdom teeth out? I recently had mine taken out, and even with my sophisticated, modern pain medication I was still pretty miserable for a few days afterwords. Now imagine an operation that didn't use modern surgical practices, and didn't involve modern painkillers to control post-operative pain.

No one in their right mind in the 19th century would voluntarily go under the knife unless it was absolutely necessary for their survival.



On the next episode of MythBusters: Fashion History Edition, underwear myths! Is it true that only lewd women wore underwear before the 20th century? Did Joan of Arc wear anything under all that armor? Find out soon! As always, if you have a myth you'd like to see busted, leave a comment and I'll research it!

As a sort of followup to my last head-to-toe post, where the cage crinoline was mentioned, I thought I'd write a bit about the social symbolism of the crinoline.



The cage crinoline first appeared in the mid 1850s and would continue to be popular until the 1870s, when it transformed into a bustle. At this time in history, women had very few rights and were generally second class citizens. They were seen as delicate, frivolous, submissive, and intellectually inferior to men. A woman was an ornament. They dressed in more colorful and decorative clothing (as opposed to men who wore dark, plain suits) to show off the wealth of either their fathers or their husbands. This stifling atmosphere did its best to confine a woman to the role of dutiful daughter and then dutiful wife, leaving little room for any other aspirations. You probably see where I'm going with this. Women were, metaphorically, caged by their society, just as their bodies were literally caged by a cage crinoline.


Modern fashion historians aren't the only ones who picked up on the idea of the cage crinoline as a literal cage. Here a cartoonist from the period shows how useful this cage can be for men.

Just as this was a period of female intellectual and social repression, it was also a period of sexual repression (although sexual repression was a hallmark of Victorian society as a whole, not just the women of the period). With the crinoline covering the lower half of the body, a woman's sexuality was literally in a cage, inaccessible to anyone except a husband. Interestingly, historically men weren't seen as the more sexual beings. Women were the sexually rapacious gender, and men were simply poor victims lured in by those pesky horny females. Thus the crinoline can be seen as a cage confining a woman's sexuality for the protection of men, just as one would put a ravenous animal in a cage for the protection of the people around it.

Interestingly, with all of it's symbols of female repression, many men thought the crinoline was incredibly stupid. It was way too big, taking up all of the room in carriages and making it that much harder to get close to a woman. Which leads to the other side of the social symbolism. In an increasingly industrialized society, cities were overcrowded and with any large city comes a large crime rate. Wearing a giant cage can be seen as a form of protection against the hundreds and thousands of suspicious strangers a woman might come into contact with walking down the street. Furthermore, caging a woman's sexuality can be seen from another angle. By putting her genitals behind a cage, a woman is at least symbolically protecting herself from sexual predators.

In addition to this social protection, the cage crinoline offered health benefits as well. Before it's invention, women achieved the fashionable wide-skirted silhouette by wearing many layers of heavy petticoats. This was not only uncomfortable but unhealthy. The cage crinoline offered a much better alternative. It was much lighter, wasn't nearly as hot as wearing multiple layers of cloth, and allowed for a greater range of movement. So on the one hand it symbolized female repression, but on the other it provided a sort of female liberation.



I'm no expert on gender studies, but these are just some of my thoughts on the possible symbolism of the cage crinoline. What do you all think? Is it a greater symbol of repression? Of liberation? A combination of both? Let me hear your thoughts!