"What Defines a Woman?"

This is the question that I'm posing as my core research in my final year work for my BA Hons in Textiles

The Iconic image Of Madonna wearing a Corset.

 designed by John Paul Gaultier.

The concept that has been imposed on Women to "Fit" into the prescribed body shape that society dictates as the accepted requirement.

This has been manipulated over centuries to obtain the perfect body image. Mainly due to the desires of men. This reflects the male dominance over woman.
 The exception is that the one garment that both men and women once wore to contrive to visual ideal has become the mainstay of women's under garment.

 Whether for practical reasons or titillation for sex the prize piece
 ( or Constructed Textile), is a "Corset"

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
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Femme a la toilette, 1896  Comte de Toulouse Lautrec

"Historically"

Victorian Dress Reform

The dress reform was first started in the late Victorian era. They were middle class woman that had the confidence and voice due to their position in society. they would have been active in the women's temperance movement and were already working towards furthering women's education for all and also involved in the upcoming Suffragette movement.

The dress reform movement was working for the emancipation of women to break free from the dictates imposed by fashion and the requirement to cover the limbs adequately for modesty.

Women had already started to move out of the home and its domestic dictates. The industrial revolution was bringing women to the front in the manufacturing industries and their clothing was not helping. They were required to be agile and mobile. The middle class woman also found herself having the freedom to participate in outdoor activities and even sport. But it wasn't just the opinion of men that was restricting this new articulated lifestyle it was their "undergarments", and one in particular. "The Corset".

For decades women had been torturing their bodies with Cloth, Bone and Steel, whatever it took to reshape their torso's to the extreme hour glass figure.

Men have always fixated on this ideal of a women's figure. 

Men are completely stimulate visually, sexually, so this is what they dictate as the ideal a woman should fit. Breasts should be round, full and elevated, towards them. 
Waists are only reduced to nothing to emphasize the hips! 
The hips relate to the primeval notions of reproduction, that both men and women are hot wired to do.

So the hips "offer" the best of all, shapely, wide and sway! 
It has been the dominance of men towards women that has imposed this ideal. 

The only way women can fit this idea is to manipulate the body beyond its own physicality.

This resulted in horrendous irreparable  internal damage. women couldn't breathe the corsets were laced too tight. years of wearing resulted in damage to the internal organs as well as miss placement of the skeleton.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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