| Chapter 1: | The Uncorseted Bostonian: Health, Physical Culture, and Dress Reform for Women in Nineteenth-Century Boston |
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considered the entire nineteenth-century women's movement an aberrant hysterical behavior driven by psychological illness.12
In addition to being labeled less intelligent than men, women were commonly portrayed as the arbiters of moral standards and decency within the family and the community.13 The belief that men were naturally inferior to women in their moral makeup limited female participation in worldly affairs such as business and politics but allowed participation in issues related to community principles. It was commonly believed that higher education would corrupt women's natural moral superiority by introducing them to the predominantly male world of business and politics, thereby ruining them for matters of the family and home. This argument was frequently used to keep women from receiving a higher education.
Lastly, fashion for upper-class women was cumbersome and, in some cases, injurious. The dress reform movement recognized that women's health was compromised by fashion and that American women would be unable to fully participate in society unless nineteenth-century fashions were discarded and a new aesthetic for female beauty was adopted by mainstream society. No single item of clothing was more blatantly harmful than the corset. Although society seemed to agree that the “corseted woman was infinitely more attractive than an un-corseted one,” it was also apparent that the corset was causing considerable health problems:14
The dress reform movement unfolded in close relationship to developing systems of physical culture for women. Together, these reforms helped women recover their health and physically and symbolically shed restrictions on their participation in the world.