Costume, vol.

41, 2007

A Fashionable Confinement:
Whaleboned Stays and the Pregnant Woman
By H W

This paper was given at the Costume Society Symposium, Leicester, 26 June 2004
For around 400 years fashion and decency required a neatly boned body, yet at the same
time many women spent much of their adult lives pregnant. How women were able to dress
would affect their role in public society, yet letters and diaries show little reduction in their
daily activities. Evidence of what was actually worn is scarce, perhaps because the dilemma
was not so great as we imagine — whenever clothing is mentioned or depicted we see
women wearing normal garments adapted with the addition of one or two items. Front-
lacing stays could be adapted with stomachers, and some back-lacing ones exist with addi-
tional side-lacing; both styles would suit the pregnant and non-pregnant state alike. It is
not until the nineteenth century that specific maternity corsets and clothing begin to
appear, when general corset design and fashion styles became impossible to adapt without
structural alteration.

D  pregnant women in art before the twentieth century are very few
and very deliberate, the intention being either to celebrate, or to warn against moral
laxity. The scarcity of such visual records is intriguing, particularly if one accepts
the premise that women in the past were pregnant for the greater part of their adult
lives. Even if we disregard the fetishistic exaggeration that surrounds corsets in the
common perception of the past, there remains a clear incompatibility between the
pregnant figure and the fashionable ideal.
It is no surprise that we have a clearer understanding of childbirth in history than
of pregnancy, for while personal accounts and medical tracts speak in detail about
the physical circumstances and social rituals surrounding the lying-in, the compara-
tive evidence for the months beforehand is scarce. Pregnancy did not receive much
medical attention until the eighteenth century, with most midwives becoming
involved only at the point of labour, and before modern tests it was, strangely, quite
difficult to diagnose. The obvious physical characteristics could equally be symp-
toms of sickness, and although Mary I had probably the most well known phantom
pregnancy, there are other accounts of even quite experienced mothers being
similarly mistaken.
Private journals and letters should detail a more personal experience, but can only
speak for those who were literate, and even these are few. For the lower classes,
recorded evidence of women’s daily life tends to appear only once they are involved
with the law or on parish relief. As far as pregnancy is concerned, this often entails
illegitimate births, or suspected abortions or infanticide, and so the women’s

© The Costume Society 2007 DOI: 10.1179/174963007182336

54 
accounts do not often acknowledge an awareness that they were pregnant, or even,
sometimes, that they had given birth.1
This apparent vacuum could be seen to back up the idea that pregnancy in the
past was an ‘indelicate’ condition to be hidden away, but what evidence there is
shows little reduction in women’s daily activities during the sixteenth, seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Several personal letters mention pregnancy
from the perspective of discomfort and their dread of the labour, but without any
apparent affect on their social movements.2 If pregnancy was ever offensive to polite
society one would expect it to have been in the Victorian era, which certainly did
exert greater strictures of propriety around sexual matters, producing a century of
brides who were ignorant of the facts of ‘married life’. This was compounded by the
increasing medicalisation of childbirth, removing the opportunity for female friends
and relatives to attend the lying-in, and what has been called the ‘morbid’ cult of
‘female invalidism’,3 encouraging women into a position of passive compliance
rather than active participation. However, there is evidence to suggest that the dis-
approval of society, and even of the queen4 did not deter heavily pregnant women
from participating in, or even hosting, dances and soirées.5
The only situation in which pregnancy incurred a negative reaction was where it
threatened the social norm. During the eighteenth century actresses frequently
appeared on stage pregnant, and a comparison of two of the most famous is
quite telling. Dora Jordan, the long-time mistress of the Duke of Clarence (later
William IV), was booed off stage while pregnant, but Sarah Siddons, known to be
respectably married, acted all through her pregnancies, and on one occasion even
went into labour on stage.6 Prudery and distain were solely directed at those who
flouted common decency.
Although the start of pregnancy sees very little change in size, the early weeks can
be racked with nausea and aching tiredness. Certainly by the fourth month most
women have started to expand visibly, and many do so much earlier, particularly if
it is not the first pregnancy, a condition exacerbated when the pregnancies begin
close on the heels of the previous birth, allowing almost no time for the figure to
recover in between. Even given the greater pliancy of a torso accustomed to
corseting, at the very least five months would be spent dressing differently. Marga-
ret Paston, at four months pregnant, wrote to her husband in 1441 requesting a new
gown, as her old one felt ‘so cumbrous’, and a new girdle ‘for I am wax so fetis
that I may not be girt in no bar of no girdle that I have but of one’.7 Even in
the relatively accommodating styles of the day, she needed to adapt her normal
clothing.
The mention of a girdle is interesting as the term ‘enceinte’ means ungirdled,
probably in reference to the wearing of looser clothing, although basic pregnancy
girdles were worn to support the increasingly heavy belly:
If the belly falls too low, as often happens; if the bladder is compressed . . . this discomfort
can be stopped by holding up the lower part of the abdomen with bandages and
draw-sheets, which any woman can make, and so increase her comfort.8
Modern support-girdles are shaped for this purpose, but normal stays and corsets,
in compressing the waist at the expense of the belly below, would have exacerbated
the problem. Corsets worn in pregnancy have always had to compromise between
support and compression. Jane Sharp’s book of midwifery, published in 1671, warns
 :    55
women against tightening their stays through vanity, particularly when suffering
from ‘looseness of the womb’:
Women that are troubled with this disease must not lace themselves too strait for that
thrusts down the womb, makes the woman gor-bellied, makes her carry her Child upon her
hips, hinders it from lying as it should in the womb, and though the womans wast may be
slender by it, her belly is as great and ill-favoured.9
Such warnings have been voiced since corseting began, and some critics saw a
moral wickedness in
The baudie busk [which] keeps down flat
The bed wherein the babe should breed.10
This suggests a potential risk of miscarriage through tight-lacing, though for
some women keen to end an unwanted pregnancy this might be an opportunity.
Women’s receipt books carried advice on how to ‘bring on the termes’, involving
herbs which are elsewhere warned against as abortifacients. The general acceptance
that periods were necessary to good health, combined with the uncertainty
surrounding pregnancy diagnosis, would have lent ample opportunity for secret
termination with apparent innocence of intent. Physician James Rueff in 1637 wrote
of how women ‘by lacing in themselves straight and hard . . . may extinguish the
feature, conceived in their womb’, acknowledging a more direct use of stays to this
end.11
How commonly tight-lacing was employed in this way is impossible to know,
though the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries any illegitimate
stillbirths were treated as murder until proven otherwise does indicate that contem-
porary society considered self-inflicted abortion to be a possible, or even a regular
occurrence. The bias against illegitimate offspring was, then as always, class-
dependent, the most pressure being naturally felt by the serving classes, who would
lose their employment and quickly become a burden on an unwilling parish.
Whether or not married women attempted to use their stays for controlling fertility
is even less easy to judge, but it was certainly understood to be a factor, deliberately
or inadvertently, in a woman’s ability to conceive. After eight years of childless
marriage, Samuel Pepys in 1664 noted the advice of a group of London women, of
which point eight was ‘Wife not to go too straight laced’.12
Although by the nineteenth century some might excuse the tight-lacing
mother-to-be as the product of a misguided modesty over her ‘condition’, in earlier
centuries the criticism was always centred on accusations of vanity, and the
predicted outcome of such behaviour varied from death and disease to ugliness or
even future moral fallibility in the child. Such hyperbolic warnings were probably
treated with some scepticism at the time, possibly accorded the same place in
common parlance as modern ‘urban myth’. Certainly they do not detract from the
humour in William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World written in 1700, in the
scene where the central characters are placing conditions on their prospective
union:
Mirabell: Item, when you shall be breeding . . . I denounce against all strait lacing, squeezing
for a shape ’till you mould my boy’s head like a sugar-loaf; and instead of a man-child, make
me father to a crooked-billet.13
56 
This ‘shape’ for which the heroine is prepared to squeeze her belly is frequently
referred to in contemporary literature. In the age when stays were a daily reality for
women of all classes, the particular styles may have varied, but the focal point of the
female waist was a constant. The familiar line ‘Now a shape in neat stays, now a
slattern in jumps’ neatly encompasses the other, very different attitude to corsets.14
Running alongside the accusations of vanity and self-inflicted ill health was the
acceptance and promotion of ‘neat stays’ as a physical embodiment of solid virtue,
decent self-control and respectability. Even the poorest strove to achieve a ‘shape’,
and women dependent on parish relief were given materials with which to make
their stays.15 How then to dress, when pregnancy took the figure in the opposite
direction?
The earliest evidence relevant to this study shows pregnant women managing
their dilemma in several ways, each appropriate to differing social circumstances,
the basic elements of which were repeated and revised through the following
three centuries: adapting normal dress; adopting looser forms of dress; and
strategic use of stays, jumps and waistcoats.
The Lisle letters of the mid-1530s detail commissions of clothing for Lady Honor
Lisle, who was at that time thought to be pregnant — wrongly, as it turned out. As
well as ermine bonnets and a cradle, she requests nightgowns and waistcoats,
and also a ‘stomacher cloth of cloth of gold’.16 Further contemporary descriptions
reinforce the image — the Imperial Ambassador described Anne Boleyn, when
she would have been about five months pregnant, as being ‘unlaced with placard,
having put in a piece to enlarge her gown, as ladies do when in the family way’.17
Her successor, Jane Seymour, is similarly mentioned in a letter to Lord Lisle: ‘Her
Grace is great with child, and shall be open-laced with stomacher by Corpus Christi
Day at the farthest . . .’18
This simple manner of adapting normal dress would have been an easy option for
poorer women, whose kirtles were necessarily front-lacing, and whose habitually
substantial aprons could cover the gap. For fashionable women, matching
stomacher and sleeve sets were already a useful part of their wardrobe, allowing
them to vary the appearance of their gowns without great financial commitment.
The addition of a larger stomacher was a simple and economical solution,
enabling them to continue wearing their most fashionable clothing, both for their
own social pride, and because otherwise, by the time they were next able to fit it,
the style could be outdated. This concern was common to all periods, and by the
nineteenth century a bride’s trousseau contained several gowns which were left
unfinished, in case adjustments to style or size were required before they came to be
worn. One late sixteenth-century embroidered stomacher at the V&A would be suit-
ably large for this purpose — measuring 13¾ in. long and 17¼ in. wide, it has a row
of tabs along the bottom edge, and follows the fashionable line by dipping down at
the centre front. The sides are scooped away at the armhole, and have plain edges
for pinning onto the stays or waistcoat beneath (see Fig. 1).
The waistcoats which Lady Lisle requests are described as of ‘white satin
or damask, edged with ermine’. Those mentioned in Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe
of Robes are also generally white, occasionally quilted or bombasted, and
 :    57

F. . Embroidered
stomacher, second half of
the sixteenth century
Courtesy of V&A images, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London
(museum number
2009–1899)

sometimes with sleeves. As well as providing additional warmth, these soft bodies
would have been very comfortable during illness or pregnancy, and, as most of
them are embroidered and laced, this suggests that they were at least partly
visible on occasion. Although I have found no depictions of the female waistcoat
at this period, Norah Waugh has suggested that it was related to the male
garment known variously as the cotte, or waistcoat, which had been worn from
medieval times.19 In its simplest form, it served to hold up the hose by eyelets
around the waist, and fastened by lacing either at the sides or at the front,
sometimes with a ‘placard’ or stomacher.
The more rigid formal wear of Elizabeth’s reign, with heavy structural under-
clothes requiring anchorage around the corseted waist, initially seems more
awkward to adapt, but fortunately the latter part of the century also brought a rash
of pregnancy portraits. Karen Hearn has speculated that this was partly a reaction
to the uncertainty of the succession, as the queen’s own breeding potential
dwindled, and possibly a political hint to the monarch — one of the earliest was
of Mildred, Lady Burghley. Later portraits were also of older women, and those
where the sitter can be identified with certainty are from Protestant backgrounds,
indicating a need to publicise future dynastic success and validate the current status
of families who had only recently gained their wealth and power from the dissolu-
tion of the monasteries. Certainly one can also imagine a husband wanting a visual
record of a beloved wife in case of childbed fatality, but this was not peculiar to any
point in history. If later portraits in the early seventeenth century do not appear
to depict pregnancy, certainly with the same deliberateness, then it may be because
the political and dynastic impetus was no longer there.20
58 
It is possible that the clothing depicted is not realistic, the purpose of the
portraits being self-aggrandisement rather than true representation, and that the
sitters did not in fact possess such formal maternity wear.21 Informal jackets and
waistcoats were accommodating, but unsuitable for public occasions, and if
formal pregnancy garments have survived, they are, as yet, unrecognised. The
portraits appear to show various ways of dressing the bump, but all are worn with
a loose gown. As well as being fashionable and comfortable, they would hide any
gap in the side or back lacing of the garments beneath, and frequently appear in
household accounts when a pregnancy is suspected. Mary Tudor had recently
ordered such gowns when she was described as appearing with ‘her belly laid out,
that all men might see that she was with child’.22 Several sitters appear to be wear-
ing the soft stomacher, which allows a gentle curve over the belly, and an enlarged
forepart in a different fabric.23 Others show a shortened version of the stiffened
bodice, supporting the bust in a fashionable way, but allowing the belly to swell out
beneath in the petticoats.24
One portrait shows a strikingly natural figure, with no evidence of a stiffened
fashionable shape to the torso, though the rest of her clothing is sumptuously stylish
and smothered in pearls.25 As the symbol of St Margaret of Antioch, the patron
saint of childbirth, pearls were worn as a talisman to invoke her protection. It is
possible that the sitter is wearing a loose kirtle, like the Nurnberg kirtle26 drawn in
under the bust with a girdle, or even an ingenious reworking of the large petticoat
made to sit over a farthingale at this period — two other contemporary portraits
depict such petticoats with the ruffled flounce pinned up.27 Jenny Tiramani, dress-
ing a pregnancy on stage at the Globe, used the character’s normal skirt, unpinned
the ruffled flounce for greater length, and allowed the opening to gape at the back,
covered by a loose gown. These loose garments, invaluable for pregnancy, were
sometimes cause for suspicion — in The Duchess of Malfi, her loose gown is funda-
mental to the plot, betraying her pregnancy and triggering her downfall, though it is
noteworthy that both it, and the farthingale, successfully disguise her condition
almost to term.28 Unsurprisingly, other loose styles, such as the robe battante and
saque, were both ridiculed and glamorised by supposed connections to scandal.
The common terminology used to describe pregnancy can be very informative, as
were the descriptions of Henry VIII’s queens being ‘open-laced with stomacher’.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pregnancies seem to have been referred to as
the ‘rising of the apron’:29 the image appears as a device for pregnancy in traditional
songs of seduction and desertion30 and contemporary pictures show women dressed
this way. Pepys in addition mentions visiting the queen ‘she being in a white pinner
and apern [apron], like a woman with child’31 — presumably aprons and pinners
(worn around the shoulders and over the bosom) served a similar purpose to the
earlier enlarged stomacher cloths in disguising the gap when a normal gown
was worn. Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough remembered that when she
. . . was within three months of my reckoning I could never endure to wear any bodice at all,
but wore a warm waistcoat wrapped about me like a man’s and tied my petticoats on top of
it. And from that time never went abroad but with a long black scarf to hide me, I was so
prodigeous big.32
Intriguingly the waistcoat is ‘wrapped about’ her, rather than tied or buttoned —
some extant examples do lack any evidence of fastenings, and are cut rather more
 :    59

F. . Corps pour les femmes enceintes, or stays for

pregnant women, ‘Tailleur de Corps’, from
Encyclopédie, by Denis Diderot (France, 1771)
Courtesy of John D. Rockefeller Jr Library, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation

F. . Maternity stays c. 1800–35

Courtesy of Buckinghamshire County Museum Collections
(museum number AYBCM 1932.314.1)

like the male waistcoat than a female bodice. Most of the surviving garments, how-
ever, are shaped into the waist and fasten at the front with either buttons or ribbon
ties. This style is not in itself accommodating to a large belly, and I have found only
one with additional back lacing.33 Other styles could be used with the addition of a
large stomacher and longer ties, but a better fit would be achieved with adjustment
at the back or sides. An Edinburgh staymaker’s accounts from 1753 mention an
intriguingly specific commission:
. . . I have mead your Bodys opon in the Side as your Letter Derects I have mead a Dubell
stamenger which you will find keeps the Shap Beast . . .
which in his account is listed as ‘A pair of jumps’ and ‘A Sett of strops’ — alas
it is impossible to know whether the customer required them for pregnancy.34
Certainly jumps appear to have been worn around the time of the birth itself, ‘A
short pair of jumps, half an ell from your chin, To make you appear just like one
lying-in’, but were not limited to such occasions.35 Diderot’s Encyclopaedie (1771)
has two patterns relating to waistcoats and jumps, one with four large basques, and
a relatively loose-fitting body, which is called a camisole; the other with ten tabs, and
60 
eyelets front and back for lacing, and detachable sleeves, called a corset blanc. This
‘white corset’ is differentiated from the heavily boned stays, which are called corps
— the ‘bodies’ or ‘bodice’ that the Duchess of Marlborough discarded.
Experimenting with normal seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stays, I
applied the same large stomacher theory that was so successful for sixteenth-
century clothing, and found that, though it worked well on a front-opening pair, it
was far more comfortable if the stays also had adjustment at the back. The soft
stomacher, however, creates a more natural rounded line than is apparent in some
depictions, where it seems that the stiff front of the stays has simply swung forward
over the belly. A back-lacing pair could not open so much without the armholes
being displaced forward, suggesting that the adjustment was at the sides. Diderot
has a pattern for corps pour les femmes enceintes, as fully boned as normal stays, but
with additional side-lacing and a slightly more convex front, allowing the long point
to curve downwards, rather than disrupting the petticoat, and the Kyoto Institute
has a similar pair, though here the sides are completely open. I have not yet been
able to examine them in person, and although photos appear to suggest that
the side-lacing was a later alteration, the curators assure me that the methods of
construction are consistent throughout, and that the side and back openings are
contemporary. Though there is no provenance for use in pregnancy, the style would
be suitable, and the proportional bust to waist ratio indicates a normal level of tight
lacing on a slender figure, so they could certainly be worn in normal life as well.
From the decorative front, it is likely that this pair would have been worn with a
mantua to hide the side expansion, but display the stomacher.36
A different solution is found in a pair of stays dated by Janet Arnold as 1670, in
the Verney collection at Claydon House. Fully boned, they lace at the front over a
remarkable stomacher, normal at bust level, but flaring out into a circle from the
underbust to the belly (see Fig. 7 and Appendix). Apart from these, the few pairs of
early stays which could have been worn in pregnancy all employ the same methods
for adjusting the size — side-lacing as a daily fastening is obviously slower and more
awkward than a single back-lace, and offers more variation than would be necessary
for normal wear, but is ideal for pregnancy. Specific corsets were being advertised
long before any other maternity clothing — the ‘pregnant stay’ of 1811 encased the
body from shoulder to hip,
. . . so as to compress and reduce to the shape desired the natural prominence of the female
figure in a state of fruitfulness . . .37
Later advertising was more subtle, using terms such as ‘healthy’; stressing the
improved and patented designs, and featuring images of smiling cherubs, though
the shape of the corset pictured differed very little from the fashionable line.38
The nineteenth century did, however, see great developments in corsetry design,
and there are quite a few surviving garments, most in the Symington collection at
Leicester, which, backed up with evidence from adverts, gives us a fair indication of
the range available. Most differ little in basic cut from the fashionable line; usually
a higher waist and a longer front, with the normal back-lacing and front busk, and
all are boned. As with the earlier stays, most also have side-lacing, either half or all
the way up, but others, either instead or in addition, have an abdominal support
belt of coutil or webbing, often boned, which sits under the belly. These appear
 :    61

F. . Maternity stays c. 1800–35 (see Fig. 3)

from adverts to have been available separately to boost a normal corset or for use
alone, and would have been able to support the prolapsed uterus that is, even today,
a consequence of excessive tight lacing. Several corsets also feature opening bust
flaps for nursing, most of them sized for the recovering figure in the days after the
birth, and some, as small as a normal corset, presumably for use thereafter. One
particularly complicated style, the ‘Erris’, had sliding expansion pieces behind the
adjustable lacing, probably for maintaining the smooth line as much as for comfort
(see Figs 5 and 6). While tight-lacing during pregnancy was generally abhorred, a
certain level of support was recommended
. . . corsets worn during pregnancy should have lacings over each bosom so that they may be
loosened, or otherwise, at pleasure . . . They should also have lacings on each side for the
same purpose: and as gestation advances, the unyielding steel blades so commonly used,
should be removed, and thin whale-bone substituted.39
Queen Victoria, while critical of tight-lacing, concurred with the need for support,
and had a series of larger corsets, each with the date and duration of wear noted, so
that the sequence could be followed in subsequent pregnancies.40
62 
F. . Reproduction of
maternity corset ‘Erris’
patented repeatedly 1875–85
Original A40.45, Symington
Collection, Leicester

F. . The ‘Erris’ corset

(see Fig. 5)
 :    63

F. 7. Silk stays with stomacher, c. 1670, Claydon House, Buckinghamshire

(inventory number LV/CLA/T/9)

C
Experiments on modern women with reproduction stays and corsets, intended
for a figure habitually suited to them, can be unsatisfying, but while the ‘normal’
figure may have changed, in pregnancy the shape is dictated by something greater
than habit. The proportions and shape of the bump do vary between women,
but there is likely to be little difference in a slender pregnant figure now and one
300 years ago. What my limited experiments have shown me is that in the earlier
centuries, clothing styles, and even some fully boned stays, were surprisingly easy
to adapt to a pregnant shape. In the nineteenth century, the changing cut and
construction of corsets, with the uncompromising hooked busk at the front,
necessitated the development of specific pregnancy styles followed, rather later, by
maternity dresses. The enormous number of patents for these corsets is testimony
both of Victorian inventiveness and of the continuing needs of women who did not
have the garments to cope with pregnancy within their normal wardrobe.

APPENDIX
N  A  C H S
The stays comprise at least two layers of white (now off-white) linen with the boning
between the two, and a top layer of pink silk, woven in varying width stripes of cream and
64 
pink, with a slightly darker pink tiny meandering floral pattern over all. The colours are now
faded to peachy flesh tones.
The channels are stitched through all three layers in backstitch, and on the inside,
unfaded, the silk thread is a strong pink. The edges are bound with pink silk ribbon
(unfaded in some areas) and on the stomacher this binding appears to cover another binding
of pink leather. Similar leather is used to cushion the centre back point, again used under
the ribbon binding.
The stays are fully boned, with most channel widths being ¼ in., though some are
as little as ⅛ in., and on the tabs the boning is thinner and more flexible. A rigid metal
reinforcement can be felt at centre back, stopping three inches short of the top edge, and
although there is a linen tape stitched on the inside to this length, the ‘rod’ itself cannot be
felt through it. The whalebone channels continue to the centre back, and the back pieces are
there joined with dense overcasting. A tiny hole on the outside offers a glimpse possibly of
the metal, but further investigation is needed.

Acknowledgement
I am indebted to Caroline Livingstone at Claydon House for locating the seventeenth-
century stays and arranging access in time for inclusion in this article.


1 Laura Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth Century England’, in Past and Present, vol. 156
(1997), pp. 101–08.
2 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale University Press,
1998).
3 See Anna Groden, ‘From Here To Maternity: A Study of Pregnancy Wear in Nineteenth Century Britain
in Relation to Contemporary Attitudes, Etiquette and Health’, Courtauld Institute of Art dissertation, 2000.
4 ‘. . . one of the new fashions of our very elegant society is to go in perfectly light-coloured dresses — quite
tight — without a particle of shawl or scarf . . . and to dance within a month of their confinement and even
valse at seven months!! Where is delicacy of feeling going to?’; Queen Victoria to the Princess Royal, March
1870. Quoted in J. Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England (London: Routledge, 1989),
p. 97.
5 Judith S. Lewis, In The Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1760–1860 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 124–25.
6 Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan’s Profession (Penguin Books, 1995).
7 Margaret Paston to John Paston I, thought to be during her first pregnancy (fetis, meaning neat or
elegant, is used ironically), 14 December 1441, in Norman Davis (ed.), The Paston Letters (Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), letter 3, pp. 3–4.
8 Nicolas, Le Cri de la Nature, p. 37, n. 1, cited in Jacques Gelis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and
Birth in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1991), p. 80.
9 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (1671) (reprinted Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 181–82.
10 Stephen Gosson, Pleasant Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen (1595), cited in W. C. Hazlitt (ed.),
Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, vol.  (London, 1864–66), p. 255.
11 Quoted in Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760 A Social History (Phoenix Press, 1994), p. 65.
12 Robert Latham (ed.), The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary (London: Penguin Books, 1979), entry
for 26 July 1664, p. 100.
13 William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700), Act IV, scene V.
14 From the verse ‘Beauty and Fashion’, London Magazine (1762), quoted in Norah Waugh, Corsets and
Crinolines (London: Batsford, 1954), p. 65.
15 Peter and Anne Mactaggart, ‘Some Aspects of the Use of Non-Fashionable Stays’, in Strata of Society (The
Costume Society, 1974), p. 20.
16 William Lok to Lord Lisle, London, 14 December 1536, from Muriel St Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters,
vol. 3 (Chicago and London, 1986), letter 799.
17 Eustace Chapuys, Imperial Ambassador, May 1533, from J. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. Brodie (eds),
(1862–1932) Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol.  (London:
HMSO), item 556, p. 243.
18 John Husse to Lord Lisle, 23 May 1537, from Muriel St Clare Byrne, op. cit., vol. 4, letter 879.
19 Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines, op. cit., pp. 17–19.
20 Karen Hearn, Marcus Gheeraerts II, Elizabethan Artist (London: Tate, 2002), p. 41.
 :    65
21 Karen Hearn, ‘A Fatal Fertility? Elizabethan and Jacobean Pregnancy Portraits’, Costume, vol. 34 (2000),
p. 42.
22 Alison J. Carter, ‘Mary Tudor’s Wardrobe’, Costume, vol. 18 (1984), p. 18.
23 See Hearn, op. cit., fig. 33, Mildred Cooke, Lady Burghley, c. 1563; and the Weiss Gallery Illustrious
Company, Early Portraits 1545–1720 (1998), painting 7, An Unknown Elizabethan Lady, c. 1585–90.
24 See Hearn, op. cit., fig. 38, Portrait of a Lady in Red, c. 1620; fig. 39, Anne Hale, Lady Hoskins, 1629; and
fig. 40, Anne, Lady Pope with her Children, 1596.
25 See Hearn, op. cit., fig. 37, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, c. 1595.
26 Janet Arnold, Patterns of Fashion, The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women c. 1560–1620
(London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 109.
27 See Hearn, op. cit., fig. 40, Anne, Lady Pope with her Children, 1596; and fig. 41, Barbara Gamage with
Six Children, 1590s. Interestingly these women have chosen to emphasise different fashionable elements in
their dress — Lady Pope wears a stiff bodice but with a softly draped skirt, while Barbara Gamage appears to
have a soft bodice, with a more pronounced farthingale.
28 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614).
29 Jinner, Almanack, 1659, preface to reader, cited by Patricia Crawford, ‘The construction and experience of
maternity in seventeenth century England’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England, ed. Valerie A. Fildes
(Routledge, 1990), p. 16.
30 For instance, ‘A Brisk Young Sailor’
. . . when I wore my apron low,
my love he’d follow through mist and snow,
but when I wore it right up to my chin,
my love walked past and never came in.
An arrangement of this can be found on Bill Jones, Turn To Me, 2000.
31 The Illustrated Pepys, op. cit., entry for 19 May 1669, p. 312.
32 Quoted in Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Costume for Births, Marriages & Deaths (New York:
Barnes & Noble Books, 1972), p. 15.
33 Kyoto Costume Institute, acc. no. 1982-19-0002-AB.
34 Quoted in Stuart Maxwell, ‘Two Eighteenth-Century Tailors’, Hawick Archaeological Society Transactions
(1972), pp. 23–24.
35 Frederick W. Fairholt, Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume (London, 1849), p. 230.
36 Kyoto Costume Institute, acc. no. 1977-05-0002-AC.
37 From The Mirror of the Graces, cited in Norah Waugh, op. cit., p. 100.
38 Valerie Steele, The Corset, A Cultural History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 56.
39 Thomas Bull M.D., Hints to Mothers, 4th edn (1844).
40 Queen Victoria to the Princess Royal, 7 September 1858, from B. Stoney and H. Weltzien (eds), My
Mistress the Queen. The Letters of Freida Arnold, Dresser to Queen Victoria, 1854–59 (London: Weiderfeld &
Nicolson, 1994), p. 19.

H W gained a first class degree in English Literature before study-
ing costume design, and worked for many years in theatre and television. Since
1998 she has concentrated on research and creating reproduction garments for
museums and professional costumed interpreters. Having a particular interest in
foundation garments, she was inspired to write this paper whilst pregnant with her
first child.