These images are all in the public domain, so feel free to share and re-post them if they might be useful to you. When using these images, I would very much appreciate it if you would include a link either to this website or the Amazon listing of my book: Victorian Secrets. Thank you very much! -S.C.
Mrs. Elizabeth Northrop was a soprano soloist with John Philip Sousa's band. This was a woman who depended on lung power for her job, and look at her figure!
Another powerful singer shows off her corseted figure: Alice Nielsen, opera prima donna.
"...I turned a page and burst out laughing.
"Just take a look at this!" I tilted the book toward him, starting to draw my chuckles under control.
"Yeah!" I agreed, my laughter renewing itself. "And what do you notice?" I pointed.
Of course she would be.
It was true. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, nearly all Western women wore corsets. The knowledge did not diminish my amusement in the slightest.
"But it's so obvious if you know what a corseted figure looks like!" I blurted.
"I love it when men tip their hats to me. There's something wonderfully chivalrous about it, whether it's a full-on, off-with-the-hat bow, or the simple tapping of a baseball cap. Nor is it only old men who do it, although that would be easy enough to expect. It also comes from men far too young to remember the era of doffed top hats: thirty-odds, college boys, and some who seem barely out of high school; I'll never know whether their mothers taught them or perhaps their fathers, but someone out there brought them up properly. It's not something I see every day, but perhaps once every few weeks or so, and it tickles my heart every time, just as it gives me a warmly flattered glow when men open doors or give up their bus seats for me.
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