Corsets were awful: only when you tight laced, and the majority of women didn’t. Corsets and stays were designed to support the boobs and smooth out clothing. That’s it.
No ankles: yes ankles. Skirts were usually above the ankles for practical reasons.
Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.
“The silhouette of the 19th century was achieved by squishing a woman’s organs to the point of death”
This was rare. Ladies were instead padding everything else. You’ll look like you have an impossibly thin waist if you’ve basically strapped a pillow to your arse and another to your tits.
Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.
There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.
Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.
It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.
Corsets were awful: only when you tight laced, and the majority of women didn’t. Corsets and stays were designed to support the boobs and smooth out clothing. That’s it.
Corsets were awful: only when you tight laced, and the majority of women didn’t. Corsets and stays were designed to support the boobs and smooth out clothing. That’s it.
No ankles: yes ankles. Skirts were usually above the ankles for practical reasons.
Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.
Oh, one more addendum to this:
“The silhouette of the 19th century was achieved by squishing a woman’s organs to the point of death”
This was rare. Ladies were instead padding everything else. You’ll look like you have an impossibly thin waist if you’ve basically strapped a pillow to your arse and another to your tits.
There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.
Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.
It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.
Feudalism was essentially slavery without the formal ownership.
So they are just a semi prototype Spanx?