costumehistory:

missdarkgarden:

Autumn’s Daily Corset Post:

One of my favorite corset myths is that Victorian women regularly had their lower ribs removed. I won’t go into how incredibly absurd this idea is, but instead will talk about where the myth may have begun.

Corsets need to be supported by vertical stays, which eventually were called ‘bones,’ because many were made with whalebone, a misnomer for baleen.In fact, boning is simply called “baleine” in France, even today’s steel boning.

While baleen molded to curves well with steam, it was also quite brittle, therefore the “bones” broke easily and needed to be removed and replaced.
I believe that it is these bones that women removed and in the game of “historical telephone” it became “rib bones.”

THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE

YES

ALSO, there’s a period x-ray photo of a woman wearing a corset that occasionally turns up on the internet. I’m not sure if the photo’s original intent was anti-corsetry or merely to demonstrate x-ray technology, but in its current circulation it usually comes with a lot of “omg look how deformed her skeleton was” comments. I think, though, that some viewers were mistaking the corset stays (clearly visible in the image) for the woman’s ribs, and thought the corset had actually twisted them into nearly vertical positions.