Science: why ancient European women were prone to fainting spells

What would a woman choose if she had to decide between a 40-centimeter waist and healthy lungs? Victorian women would choose the former, and for this reason, they would rather endure the resulting uterine prolapse and gastrointestinal discomfort, as for breathing problems, obviously not more than a "bucket waist" to more terrible, social scene, a woman because of breathing difficulties and temporary fainting is sometimes a pleasing thing, a bit like the Chinese Xishi angina. China's Xishi suffering from angina or Lin Daiyu suffering from vertigo, which made smelling salts one of the must-have carry-ons for women of the time.

The corset was first popularized in Spain. It was around the first half of the 16th century, when a sleeveless corset was made from whale baleen as a skeleton. The corset was inverted triangular in shape, and was very tight from the shoulders to the waist, with adjustable straps to strangle a woman's waist to an ideal degree. The matching undergarment was very voluminous, a kind of ring made of whalebone, rattan or metal wire will be hanging bell-shaped train layer up, covered with long to the ground of the gorgeous fabric, will form the noblewomen wandering in the court of the voluminous scene. Princess Catherine of Spain married King Henry VIII of England, wearing this kind of clothes, so the second half of the 16th century corset and skirt quickly popularized in Europe, the history of mankind one of the most peculiar "slimming movement" has also opened.

The first to push "slimming" to the extreme is the Princess of France, Catherine de Medici, because her waist in the rumor reached 40 centimeters, women in Europe immediately changed the standard of corset, the original in order to wear a comfortable design of the elasticity of the function is now redundant, whale baleen corset is no longer applicable, replaced by iron corsets and skirts. Instead, the corset was made of iron, a metal component consisting of four pieces of iron, front, back, left and right, was designed, with hinges connecting the pieces to each other, and the width and tightness adjusted by hinges or pins. You can imagine the "clack, clack, clack" sound when you wear this garment, like closing a window or locking a tiny combination box, so some people describe the corset as a "prison garment of pain.

Clicking through some of today's SM websites, we can still see similar "instruments of torture" on their shopping pages, and while the sadists may have been able to articulate the pleasure of touching flesh to iron, the women of 300 years ago couldn't take it any longer, and in the midst of ongoing back injuries, rib deformities, and other ailments, they were finally forced to take their place in the corset. deformities and other ailments, they finally chose the latter between slimming their backs and staying alive, and iron corsets were discarded in favor of Buna corsets.

The early 18th century was characterized by a love of the petite, slender figure, and women often used hidden splints to control their shape, with a distaste for naturally occurring muscles. They preferred rounded necks, full arms, plunging necklines that emphasized high breasts, exaggerated hips held up by rings, and fake leg bellies that made calves look fuller. The women indulging in the social scene conveyed their love for their lovers with melancholy eyes, small smiles, long and chubby hands, small feet squeezed into pointy shoes, the constraints of these attire, the flesh held up by metal frames, the sticky rouge that produced the extravagance and lechery of the dinner party, but also dizziness, anemia and exhaustion, so that the doctor's prescriptions always included. The doctor's prescription was always accompanied by the words, "Walks in the air and abstinence from carnal appetites". The corset tended to loosen up for quite a while after that, but then went to extremes again in the 19th century.

The aristocratic women of the 1850s spent more time dressing than any of us do now. A popular style was the crinoline, a skirt made of light metal with a ring-shaped support, which was then stuffed or covered with materials such as horsehair and hemp. Wearing this kind of skirt alone is almost impossible to realize, usually by more than two assistants to help complete. First, they have to wear a corset to help her put on the corset, fasten the drawstring from the back section by section, then put on the underwear and close-fitting long underpants, then a facecloth petticoat, then a lined skirt, then a skirt support that swells like a wheel, then a white petticoat that has been basted, then a petticoat of two layers of gauze, and, finally, a skirt made of a lightweight fabric, such as taffeta or a perforated fabric. The wearing of such dresses required not only sufficient hands, but also sufficient space, otherwise, when the maidservants spread the parasol-like train with a spreader bar and brought it down over their mistresses' heads, there was a great risk of taking in the coffee table, the dressing table, or any other small thing beside them as well. In fact some women have noticed this, but they parade around in huge spreader skirts not to show off their bodies, but to tuck their favorite things into the skirt when no one is looking. Since the success rate of stealing in such skirts was always high, the krinoline fell out of favor after 1868.

Pérès wrote in his 1868 "Parisian Women" that "bourgeois women do not wear make-up and are clean", referring to the make-up fashion of the time, when women had just broken away from Italian-style make-up but were going to the other extreme in their quest for morbid beauty. In the dressing room, women applied white pomade or cold cream on their faces, thick face powder, pink blush on the cheeks if their hair was blonde, then lengthened their eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil, drew black eyeliner, and brushed their eyelashes black and shiny. Such makeup with the image portrayed by the corset enabled Victorian women to find a point of articulation between indulgence and modesty. On the surface, they were dignified and elegant, never crossing their legs and leaning on the back of a chair when sitting down, and speaking with a steady, well-mannered demeanor. But on the other hand, their breasts, which are held up by tight corsets, reveal an unquenchable lust. Kunzle writes in Dress reform as antifeminism: "The phenomenon of the girdle and its attendant low-necked garments, which first appeared as a fashion in the middle of the 14th century and lasted until World War I, is not an accident of history, and the girdle (i.e., the corset, author's note) and low-necked garments were the mainstay of Western dress to increase sensuality. Corsets (i.e., corsets, author's note) and low necklines are the primary means by which Western clothing has been made sexier. They coincided with people's sexual awareness and overt sexual guilt, and were mutually reinforcing with Christian sexual repression, which reached its zenith in the Victorian period."

The debate over the corset has never ceased, with some saying it maximizes female beauty, while others say it is an unnatural and morbid flower that damages women's health as the number one killer. Betty Ryan, a tennis star before the First World War, recalls witnessing spots of blood on the railings of the women's locker room at the British Tennis Club - left by women players after hitching their sweaty corsets to them.

Despite the suspicion that corsets destroy many of a woman's organs: stomach, uterus, lungs ......, Victorian women, like modern women, were fearless in the face of the word beauty. It's like today's artificial beauties, who allow those great doctors to cut open their noses, eyelids, lips, breasts, thighs ...... with a scalpel because they believe it does make them more beautiful.