I read an article recently and it really brought home to me just how far we have come from the restrictions of societal
clothing ‘rules’ and how they adversely affected our health. Here is an excerpt from the article ‘Corsets to Core Strength’ by Tannis Kobrinsky.
March 8th 1911, when women celebrated the first Women’s History Day, most women wore corsets. By 1914 the modified corselet hit the market and so did looser clothes. On May 16, 1916, the first annual swimsuit day took place at Madison Square
Garden in NYC. Women, freed from corsets, began to enjoy recreational activities. In the ’20s, rebel-rousing flappers with boyish figures danced risqué Charlestons. But the majority of ladies clung to undergarments with stays and laces. My grandmother, who was born in 1893, wore her corselet into the 1970s. She felt indecent if she didn’t wear it.
For decades she suffered from chronic indigestion,
later diagnosed as a hiatus hernia. Corselet caused? Seems likely. My mother, in her 20s during WWII, wiggled into a compressing girdle until the late 1960s. Then, suddenly, it was women’s lib time and everything changed in a flash—at least on the surface. Mom threw away her girdle, hung up her dresses and put on a pantsuit. When I came of age, bra burnings were in the news. My mom and grandmother were fine with me wearing mini-skirts to high school and tiny bikinis to the beach. They’d
accepted the changing societal attitudes toward women’s bodies. Amazing when you realize this transition happened in just 50 years, after 500 years of required corset wearing!
By the late ‘70s, everyone slithered into Spandex and fitness became an industry. I was one of the countless women pumping iron, sweating in aerobic classes, getting strong (at least on the outside). Yoga and mediation were
catching on, but Pilates work that developed those deep inner corset muscles wasn’t mainstream yet. Then, as those of us in the Pilates community know, Pilates went public in the early 1990s and it caught on like wild fire.
As of 2011, more than 40 years after Joe passed away, 12 million people worldwide practice Pilates, and approximately 30 thousand people teach Joe’s methods. The deep corset
muscle building methods Joe introduced right around 1911 are now the foundation of mind-body movement and fitness practices throughout the entire world. They’ve been embraced by both sexes, but do seem to mirror the century-long empowerment of women. Joe’s life view wasn’t just about constructing the deep muscle corset. It was about taking control of the body and empowering it and, allowing the whole being—mind, body and spirit—to flourish.
