The Dark Side Of Edwardian Fashion | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

the Victorian ideal or perhaps fantasy of domesticity was that the lady of the house should be as Charles Dickens describes it to the Mystery of Edwin Drood the ministering angel of domestic bliss Victorian women were encouraged to make their home a reassuring sanctuary for their husbands away from the jealousies cares and dangers of working life the idea of the angel of the house was obviously a literary creation but they're tapped in completely to what the Victorians essentially wanted it was a movement away from the fact that in the 18th century usually father and mother had pitched in together in the business with a professionalization the growth of factories the home was away from the place of works of the home became this ideal place of perfection and taste this this bubbling closed bubble of purity as the home became an ideal it needed to be protected and nurtured and therefore buying things for the home creating things for the home came to be seen as the woman's occupation the men went out there conquering the Empire the women stayed at home and kept in his pure [Music] women were expected not only to create the perfect home the lady of the house had to measure up as well our next danger in this house is in the bedroom the pursuit of this feminine ideal wasn't entirely safe lurking in many beautifying products were harmful toxins [Music] part of being the ideal Victorian woman was looking just right whatever your physique one of these came in handy in fact this was essential corsets kept everything under control and they meant self reserve and that was vital to the Victorian woman because the opposite was just excess and freedom and flesh flying everywhere and wanted to that what the world might fall down Sarah Nicole looks after one of the biggest corset collections in the country so tell me about all the different layers we can see here what's going on first of all we've got the chimneys underneath so you would never have all your core sit next to your skin the corset predates the bra its function was to support the chest and help take the weight of up to 14 pounds of clothing this you would have had a petticoat as well that's sort of five garments before yeah you even got to outer where it is yes the Symington factory manufactured corsets that were affordable for everybody they did all of their own artwork and printing for all their box tops for their corsets it's just beautiful it may look beautiful but women were unwittingly paying a terrible price in the 1860s and 70s Corsa tree became increasingly extreme by the mid 19th century the ideal female form the corseted female form was everywhere in newspapers magazines journals aimed at women and this celebrity with the actresses had it the dancers had it but particularly zijn fashion plates had it this impossible figure I mean they were drawn simply because no woman would look like that what kind of courses and how restrictive they were depended on your age your class your occupation and her fashionable you were it was recommended that a corset was to be worn at all times and there was no escape not even in the colonies Symons made this to market directly at art stages that were going to tropical regions so they were either going with their man or to get their man it's called the ventilated corset for obvious reasons it has the center section removed they're all women wearing this in all parts of the British Empire whatever the weather yes and you were regarded as a loose woman if you didn't wear your corset it demonstrated their character and it demonstrated that they were fine and upright citizens and you know fit for the British Empire these robust cages of whale bone and steel were turned into potential killers by one surprisingly small technological advance the metal eyelet it allows people if they want to to tight lace their course it without the fabric pulling away the metal eyelet made it easier to get the look because it was possible to lace tightly without the material tearing as it previously would have done there was a fashion for wearing very very very tight bodices I mean it's fascinating you see in photographs the fabric poles in a way that we would think means it doesn't fit a tight lacing is something that a minority of people did and that is to get your waist as small as you possibly can they used to do this by lightly lacing their toilets of course it tighter and tighter some women would keep their corsets on day and night to train their bodies [Music] so what are the effects of a corset on the body in the long term well if I could just show you here the position of the normal organs so the liver for example our largest internal organ sits underneath the ribs on the right and so it's a large wedge shaped organ that sits here under the ribs and so in a corset which brings the ribs in very tightly to give the typical small waisted outline the liver gets squat upwards and it presses against the ribs and in fact there are specimens of livers taken from women who have died who've worn tight corsets actually have ridges on them where the ribs have made indentations in the surface of the liver because it's been so tight [Music] and another organ that may be affected by a tight corset is a stomach that sits here it underneath the ribcage and so if the ribcage is pulled in by the corset the stomach is pushed downwards into the abdominal cavity and that would then have an effect on the rest of the abdominal organs which would be pushed down this is a pregnancy corset from 1885 some women even wore corsets when pregnant a particular choice came for women about the course it is what when they fell pregnant because many husbands complain they didn't want their their baby's head shaped and molded but there were women who continued to wear corsets through pregnancy which you know there's never a no way in it at all that is possibly good for the baby one of the problems with corsets after pregnancy particularly women had a lot of babies was that of prolapse of the uterus the pelvic floor muscles haven't been weakened during childbirth and then a very tight corset that increases the pressure in the abdomen forcing all the organs down so that would have been a very unwanted side effect of wearing tight corsets now it's my turn a little bit tighter or whether you can feel that I've got you yeah I can feel it yep I confess I felt delighted to have a smaller waist Oh result I can see why they did it now 24 inches look 24 3/4 the Victorian household guides even advised on suitable exercises for a lady I'm just exhausted after that I'm not really that unfit honestly or am i we're going to use sport science equipment with Matt Ferber to measure the effect of the corset on my body yep I'm happy you happy yeah first I have to give him a baseline of fitness without the corset I exercise for six minutes [Music] now Matt monitors my vital signs with the corset on first how it affects me at rest and I repeat the same exercise with Matt measuring my heart rate and airflow [Music] halfway through and Matt's already seeing the changes [Music] I feel close to fainting and it takes two minutes for my head to clearer and I'm not even tight laced okay okay last 10 seconds excellent you're free so what happened what can science reveal about the effects of a corset so in terms of the rate in which you're breathing so even at rest you can see so you got the red line is when you're wearing a corset no blue lines it's not wearing it when you're not when your corset so you see even at rest when you're sitting down you're breathing in the corset around about you know 23 24 breaths per minute whereas when you didn't have the corset on you were down about 14 breasts a minute so it shows that even at rest of course it's really restricting and then when it actually comes to wash right when you do any exercise and we can see what your figures you know with the corset on your tidal volume so the amount of air getting every breath is a lot lower so your breathing approximately 200 to 300 mils less every single breath with the corset on gosh yeah so that's why at the end I felt like I was really fighting to not to get in there absolutely you know really with these figures you can really see the impact the course is the restriction of course is having you're basically hyperventilating within the course it it's kind of what's happening because you'll be a breathing an awful lot faster you know 10 / 10 breaths per minute it's an extra 25% faster wearing a corset I've proved it's damaging but could it be a killer that chronic under perfusion not getting enough air down into the bottom of the lungs could cause problems it predisposes to infections like pneumonia and that was something that a very tight corset warned for many hours a day could cause problems with the woman had an underlying problem it could exacerbate it so for example if a young girl had rickets from vitamin D deficiency to have soft bones that were still developing and they could be distorted very much by wearing a tight corset there are stories of the ribs breaking and piercing the lung underneath which could be fatal as the century wore on the corset became the focus of a huge debate women's possibilities for activity became much larger over the 19th century by the end of the 19th century it was there was nothing unvirtuous in going around on your bicycle in walking freely and so this vide wasn't very practical for them to be wearing corsets Erina simply didn't work and increasingly women began to say these are pointless they're just getting in the way you know I spending hours in the morning getting myself into the corset when I could be doing something far more useful it really also coincided with the growth of the votes for women the idea that women were equal citizens so if they're equal citizens demanding the vote they shouldn't be treated as some kind of excessive ornament that are there to be looked at and they're to be admired and they're ruining the health just so they look right for men the campaign for change was spearheaded by the rationale dress Society established in 1881 Constance wild wife of Oscar edited the rational dress Gazette the rational dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure impedes the movement of the body or in any way tends to injure health by the 1890s some manufacturers had started to respond to demands for looser clothing yet one thing will probably never disappear the temptation to conform to an ideal of beauty whatever the cost why did women care and wearing corsets well for exactly the same reason as I was delighted to have a 24 inch waist it was psychologically rewarding even if physically it could take its toll the idea of that s-shaped figure we are completely in thrall to it even now so I don't think that we can really look back on the Victorians and say oh my goodness weren't they silly fainting when they sang falling all over the place because they wore corsets I don't think we can say without necessarily that far away the desire to look beautiful remains a constant through the ages but what is considered attractive in each era differs the art of beauty we always want to do the same things and what distinguishes the Victorian period from the Edwardian period is that in the Victorian period you were supposed to be perfectly beautiful with no assistance whatsoever in the Edwardian period you could use a little bit of help by now makeup was being sold over the counter in the new department stores and the products were advertised to Edwardian women by actresses famed for their beauty actresses were seen as more acceptable by Fiat audience and one particularly famous actress Lillie Langtry was actually noted very much for her beauty and she really capitalized on this by lending her name to various beauty products including face creams in this period Lillie Langtry here advertising pair soap and she was parently paid a hundred and thirty-two pounds which was exactly what she weighed Lillie Langtry --zz beauty was known to have caught the eye of the king so it became a style to be copied but Beauty came at a cost makeup was not subject to any safety testing many new products made bogus claims but were dangerous and in extreme cases a killer the death of a young girl who had managed to acquire perforation of the stomach through eating raw rice with a view to improving her complexion the Edwardian woman was told to make herself beautiful to catch her husband and to keep her husband by doing so she covered her face in poison the dangers began before any makeup had been applied with face cream an Edwardian lady had to have a pure lily-white skin to distinguish herself from the Sun tanned working classes and some of the most dangerous products are things like this this is Harriet Hubbard air moth and freckle lotion moths were sort of liver spots it was a 19th century term for liver spots and discolorations on the skin and a lot of them are except that well pretty much camphor bleach ammonia anything you could choose to sort of blanch your skin because you had to have a pure lily-white skin this later sort of 1909 vogue was advertising arsenic wafers which she would take to get rid of you know any poor skin issues and arsenic safe for that offending pimple on top of these layers of poison they put a dusting of toxic powder poisonous chemicals have very bright and distinctive colors and so there were LED compounds for example that were very white and so women liked to use it on their skin as part of her face powder and that would be absorbed through the skin and could cause chronic lead poisoning different things we use faroush kosher nil which has made out of crushed insects that's fine but Vermillion came from mercury mercury is a heavy metal and it's very bad for the body it can affect several different organs particularly the brain the lungs and the kidneys it can cause problems with sensation unable to feel things maybe unable to see and can cause you to go mad eventually even the eyes weren't safe there was a product for darkening your eyelashes and your eyebrows which actually made your cornea fall off and several people weren't blind one of the things that women like to use in the early 20th century was belladonna this is obtained from a plant and when drops are put in the eyes it makes the pupils dilate which is meant to signify desire and arousal and so made women look more attractive one of the problems with this of course is it's a drug and when it's absorbed it can hasn't have an effect on the rest of the body at best it would probably have caught blurred vision and a dry mouth and at worst a very irregular heartbeat and even blindness you didn't know what was in these things there's no description of content or anything like that because it would there was no legal obligation to do so a lot of new treatments are encouraged at this time all in the name of beauty the crowning glory of an Edwardian woman was her hair and to be truly fashionable it had to be curly croft and big a process had often destroyed what it was meant to enhance these elaborate hairstyles took a lot of effort effort that's never to be led to unsafe practices with horrible consequences at the inquest dr. Charcot stated that the dry shampoo was exceedingly dangerous owing to the impracticability of keeping the fumes away from the customer [Music] there was a big problem in the Edwardian period female baldness why were women going bored people were using very dangerous hair dyes which was one of the causes but the other big course I mean you'd have been fine with your fabulous curls but everybody curls their hair and so if you're doing that allow me to demonstrate this would give you a sort of a crimp yes for travelling you might have a little one like that so you were curling your hair the whole time and the dangers of burning with this were absolutely extreme tongs like these were heated in the fire and applied straight onto the hair often burning it off but worse was to follow Karl Nesler came up with the first permanent waving machine in 1906 but not before he'd burned his wife's hair off twice goodness was oh definitely there's a reason for baldness if ever I saw one mess lers wonder machine involved wrapping the hair around rods and covering it with alkaline paste and most dangerously of all asbestos gas was then used to steam the curls tight it would take six hours it was extremely popular once your hair was right you had the challenge of adding a hat and so introduced another danger look at that whacking great huh you couldn't put your hat on your head without huge hat pins these were up to 14 inches long and that was another very dangerous thing because you've got all that incredibly sort of sharp pointed end ladies were banned from wearing unprotected hat pins on omnibuses in case they scratched people suffragettes had their hat pins removed when they went into court in case they stabbed people and Edwardian novelists did do lovely little sort of vignettes of ladies preserving their virtue by stabbing an aggressor in a dirty old man with a hat pin ironically while she was killing herself to look beautiful the Edwardian middle class woman was herself a killer of wildlife the biggest killer in the Edwardian home was undoubtedly the award e'en lady herself with her taste for hats decorated with the most exotic feathers and sometimes even hold dead birds thousands of songbirds egrets birds-of-paradise slaughtered in the name of millinery a public outcry led to the end of the fashioned for dead birds on hats and to the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to birds in 1904 women however continued to be the willing victims of the beauty industry bored blind burnt scarred Edwardian makeup was a dangerous business in fact the early 20th century was poised on the verge of the mass production of cosmetics and the explosion of a whole new industry one that would test their products first before releasing them on consumers my final hidden killer can be found all over the house but I'm going in search of the kitchen variety into the heart of the woman's domain we have seen how men and their power tools came a cropper now we see how the newly untap electricity brought considerable danger into the shiny world of appliances the magazines are full of adverts showing women breezily vacuuming their houses in high heels one article is even entitled Cinderella would have stayed at home if her fairy godmother had first conjured up all this kitchen equipment after the Second World War the main technology and that people have in their kitchens is the gas cooker but we start to get the fridge we get the vacuum cleaner coming in also washing machines and also eventually freezers and these technologies really do make quite a difference to women's everyday lives electrical gadgets had previously been expensive luxuries now there was an explosion of new affordable brands all marketed as taking the drudgery out of housework this is an article by James story titled what electric living means to learn and she says for people like myself who have a full-time job plus a home and family to look after such neighbor saving automatic service is a tremendous boon if you think about the domestic labor involved for example in the weekly washing day if you've got say a family with a large number of children and you have to wash all of their clothes and drive them by hand you can imagine just how much different something like a washing machine really would have made to women's lives so this book that talks about what your Monday to Friday routine of cleaning should be oh gosh that's quite a heavy workload so here we've got vacuum all carpets I thought I wants a week team with your Heba will clear away any embedded grips yes that's one Wednesday after you've cleaned all the floors and polish where necessary so actually it is a four week schedule isn't it for the housewife who's also going out to work of course yes but these labor-saving devices welcomed with open arms by the housewife sometimes resulted in undesirable consequences unscrupulous manufacturers produce goods that were shoddily made badly designed even downright dangerous things like kettles somebody came up with a wonderful idea of making a kettle and plug the lead in when it got to a certain temperature it sparked the electric lead out well I know they'd given you to be a scientist or without there's not that many kettle points in the kitchen there's obviously one sweep right by the side of the sink you're doing your dishes your kettles plugged in it shoots the power supply straight out runs in the sink people often didn't really understand electricity or their appliances which led to some horrendous accidents the Carillo newspaper in Dundee consulted a local electrician as to the safest way of handling appliances he told them electrical appliances used in the home nowadays are safe if respected and treated with care the danger of ignorance of these appliances or wear and tear on them has been emphasized recently by a number of burning accidents another solution came from the Electrical Association for women who urged that girls should be educated for heaven's sake teach them how to look after the beautiful electrical apparatus they are now getting so that girls who will be future housewives will at least know the rudiments of how to look after the apparatus education would surely help but some products were overused and poorly maintained they would have dodgy connections they might spark a bit when you use them but you know it'll be all right I'll get one next week or when payday comes and but obviously you really did need to keep them maintained and changed and make sure that you only buy them from a proper electrical retailer there could be a higher price to pay if you didn't mrs. Montgomery died from an electric shock sustained when using an electric iron mr. Montgomery stated that his wife had told him about the electric iron failing and braking she had tied the handle with string it is a deplorable instance of the dangers of using electric equipment which is not in proper order commented sheriff Hamilton the electrical trade union reported that some of these accidents could have been prevented had there been some control over the manufacture of appliances an enforcement of the regulations in October 1954 in a debate in the House of Lords on safety in the home Lord crook complained of the constant sale of very cheap electrical goods the use of which is not always understood by the purchaser Lord man Croft though felt the government had done what it could and that the final responsibility rests with the individual the person in the home consumers though had had enough they decided that they needed more information in order to look after their own interests which magazine was set up in 1957 to provide an independent review of products for consumers by the time this one was published in 1959 the consumers association which produced it had a hundred and fifty thousand members and this represents a sense that nowadays it wasn't enough to trust manufacturers claims not everything could be taken at face value and consumers needed someone on their side consumer power had its roots in the post-war era and continues today [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 1,637,836

Rating: 4.7899637 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, hidden killers, suzannah lipscomb, hidden killers of the victorian home, absolute history, hidden killers of the tudor home, hidden killers of the georgian home, hidden killers of the edwardian home, hidden killers of the post war home, post war britain documentary, edwardian documentary, edwardian documentary bbc, edwardian history documentary, victorian documentary, victorian documentary bbc

Id: 6MNLgv0M25E

Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TIRFnotTERF]

For example, waist trainers were coming into fashion for a bit and some people were making them incredibly tight. Not the same as tight lacing corsets but still can be unhealthy. The expectation to have a small waist is still here.

Another slightly similar thing would be the belladonna in the eyes vs. people using cheap circle lenses to make their eyes look bigger. Their have been times where people use circle lenses wrongly and end up with horrible infections or injuries to their eyes.

What are some other comparable things to past dangers that mainly affected women?