A side-note about corsets

When Tom Paine was 13, he was apprenticed to his dad’s corset business; he made corsets. I guess I should explain what a corset is. It’s an undergarment for ladies, it’s underwear. A corset is rigid. It’s built out of sewn-together layers of starched linen with laces in the back and long skinny pockets or channels in rows for whalebone struts to slide into. A corset’s purpose is to flatten the stomach, tighten the waist, straighten the back and make a lady’s form more appealing. After you squeeze yourself into one, you get somebody nearby to haul on the laces to make the whole apparatus even tighter. In the 17- and 1800s, upper-class ladies wouldn’t dream of being seen in public without wearing a corset.

Here’s the epic movie Gone With The Wind (it takes place in the American South just before, during, and following the Civil War)—this is the scene with Scarlett O’Hara getting trussed into a corset by her slave, Mammy.

https://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2011/08/politics-staymaker-thomas-paine-1793.html

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Tom Paine

As I was saying a few posts back, the pamphleteers of 200 years-or-so ago did well for themselves. They wrote essays, then printed and published them. These essays were opinion pieces—sometimes about culture and fashion, sometimes about how the government should be run. The successful pamphleteers had big followings, large audiences who were eager to buy and read their pamphlets.
Thomas Paine was one of those pamphleteers. When he was a young guy in England, you would never guess that he’d turn out to be so influential. He’d gotten hardly any education (he could read, write and do math, that’s it). From 13 years old, he worked at a bunch of different jobs but without much success. Tom sewed ladies’ corsets at his father’s shop. Later, he had a job chasing liquor and tobacco smugglers and making them pay taxes on their contraband—his paycheck was so lousy he published a pamphlet about how the British government should pay their tax collectors a better wage. They fired him!

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.