Bursting the Bodice

Concealment and Liberation of the Female Body

The 19th century witnessed a pronounced transformation of the relationship between the sexes. And the changing styles of dress during this period can be taken as an allegory of what this entailed for women. The more a woman sought to conform to society’s demands for “modesty” and “morality”, the less she could permit her natural forms to be recognised. Such covering and concealment of women was considered natural until the first cracks in the prevailing order began to appear, signalling the gradual onset of a phase of radical social change.

1. Rosa Mayreder, artist, women’s rights activist (1858–1938)

One woman who went on the offensive against society’s confinement of the female body quite early on was Rosa Mayreder. “[My] rage against the bodice as a tool of restriction eventually grew so great that, at age 18, I simply took it off,” she wrote. At that point, in 1876, she was ahead of her time by nearly a generation. And in 1902, the battle against the bodice still had yet to be won. It was then that Mayreder, by that time a board member of the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein [General Austrian Women’s Association], devoted an entire issue of her magazine Dokumente der Frauen [Documents of Women] to the topic. It contained texts by influential cultural and medical personalities, all of whom opposed the wearing of bodices as being unhealthy, and it proved to be the magazine’s single most successful issue.

Rosa Mayreder was a gifted painter whose works were exhibited from Vienna to Berlin and even in Chicago, and as an equally talented author, she penned the libretto to Hugo Wolf’s opera Der Corregidor and also published novellas and novels. But she was at her most impressive in essays on philosophical and social science topics. In these, she opposed assigned female roles and the discrimination of women, creating classics like “Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit” (1905) [English: “A Survey of the Woman Problem”, 1912], “Geschlecht und Kultur” (“Sex and Culture”) (1923), and “Der letzte Gott” [The Last God] (1933). Mayreder died in Vienna in 1938.

2. Emilie Flöge, fashion designer (1874–1952)

It was quite early on that Emilie Flöge realised how the corset symbolised a societal straightjacket into which her sex had been forced. This armour of whalebone and steel straps degraded women into fantastical figures that were unsteady, breathtaking, and breathless. Flöge responded to this untenable situation by introducing her own Reformkleider [reformed clothing] in the new “rational dress” style: the garments available at her Viennese fashion salon “Schwestern Flöge” [Flöge Sisters], which she founded together with her sisters in 1904, featured non-constricting waists. And her salon soon became a leading centre of fashion in Vienna. She employed up to 80 seamstresses and maintained contacts with Europe’s leading woman designers, including Coco Chanel. According to Flöge, women first required the right to breathe—and everything else would follow. The artists of the Vienna Secession, including the men, supported her in her mission. Architect Adolf Loos wrote articles critical of prevailing women’s fashion, and Koloman Moser, Gustav Klimt, and other Wiener Werkstätte artists designed clothing and jewellery for her. She was to remain Klimt’s most important confidante up to his death in 1918. And she would run her fashion salon until 1938, when she lost most of her customers as a consequence of Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany. Emilie Flöge passed away in Vienna on 26 May 1952.

3. Bertha von Suttner, author and peace activist (1843–1914)

The 1907 International Peace Conference in Den Haag gave rise to profound frustration among Europe’s pacifists. Austrian author and peace activist Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914), in particular, foresaw impending tragedy for humankind. But at that time, pacifists were viewed as unmanly traitors and befoulers of the national nest. So it was no wonder that Bertha von Suttner was fighting an unwinnable battle for peace, even though her novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) (1889) had been an instant bestseller upon its release. Alfred Nobel, whose invention of dynamite had made him one of the world’s richest men, generously supported the peace activism of von Suttner, who had spent several weeks as his personal secretary in 1873, and he was even a member of the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft [Austrian Society for Peace]. But Suttner’s ironclad conviction that wars were most certainly not unavoidable, which ran counter to conventional wisdom at the time, drew only derision from the press. She was hysterical and, after all, just a woman, they wrote—thus dragging her heroic struggle for peace into the depths of the battle between the sexes: men are from Mars, women from Venus, the argument went. On 1 December 1905, Bertha von Suttner was in Wiesbaden to deliver a talk on the peace movement when she was asked to pay the fee due on a telegram that had arrived for her. In the beginning she refused, but she ultimately relented and paid up. “Was worth the effort”, she would note in her diary later on—for that telegram informed her that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the situation of the pacifists was more precarious than ever, with all of Europe anticipating—or even yearning for—the war that loomed on the horizon.. So Bertha von Suttner set about planning another major world peace conference, which was to take place in the autumn of 1914 in Vienna. But on 21 June 1914, she passed away at the age of 71. And one week later, the shots were fired in Sarajevo that would lead directly to the outbreak of World War One.

4. Clara Sperlich-Tlučhoř, educator (1869–1939)

“Her posture leans forward, with her chest sunk in and the pelvis hardly tilted at all. Worried mothers attempt to correct such aesthetic deficiencies with bodices or back-straighteners—means that bear no small resemblance to the barbarism of straightjackets!” Clara Sperlich-Tlučhoř fought passionately against the dictate of the corset. As a gymnastics teacher, she categorically condemned its use and spent her entire life tirelessly advocating broad-based introduction of gymnastics for girls as a countermeasure to such torture. Around the turn of the century, she penned numerous essays on this topic that portrayed how, in addition to being healthy, gymnastics could be expected to benefit female school graduates psychologically and socially. She created concepts and sets of exercises specifically geared to this type of physical education, which indeed did see gradual adoption in school curricula during the 20th century’s initial decades. These years also saw her publish important pedagogical writings such as “Die Zahnpflege unserer Schulkinder” [The Dental Care of our Schoolchildren] and “Erhöhte Reinlichkeitspflege zur Verhütung ansteckender Krankheiten” [Improved Hygiene for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases].