That's a letter published by The Toronto Daily Mail on May 5, 1883, quoted in the long Wikipedia article titled "Corset controversy," where I ended up following my idiosyncratic train of thought after reading the Instapundit-linked NYT article "Can Compression Clothing Enhance Your Workout?" ("The clothes also are thought to refine proprioception, which is someone’s sense of how the body is positioned in space [and are] also... believed to reduce fatigue and soreness after exercise by literally squeezing the muscles with a kind of no-hands massage and, by increasing blood flow to muscles, help to flush out unwanted exercise-related biochemicals.")
The reason I was moved to blog this — other than my delight at the sheer length of the "Corset controversy" article — was that phrase "women with hobbies and without waists."
That's a strange insult. My dictionary (the OED) tells me that the oldest meaning of "hobby," now archaic, is a horse — not a hobbyhorse, but an actual horse. A meaning that arrives in 1818 is "A kind of velocipede... on which the rider propelled himself by pushing the ground with the point of each foot alternately." That is: a bike, before the invention of pedals. Finally, there's the familiar meaning:
A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance.An 1874 quote in the OED is "Transgress the boundaries of scientific evidence, and incur the charge of riding a hobby too hard." So I think that 1883 letter-writer, was accusing the anti-corset women — in addition to lacking waists (and thus having a self-interest in talking other women into abandoning their beauty advantage) — of having an unattractive obsession with the subject. But perhaps "women with hobbies" was an expression of the time. Perhaps it was a reference to lesbians or to the mentally deranged.
I read all the hits at Google books, and found 2 things worth telling you about. First, this snippet of dialogue from an 1899 novel called "The Bondwoman," by Marah Ellis Ryan:
Now, there you see "women with hobbies" is a term with a definition: "strong-minded women who reason instead of feeling." And then there's this from an 1891 article titled "The Home End of the Temperance Question" in something called The Christian Union ("A Family Paper"):
If you go in there, you'll get the impression that "women with hobbies" was a standard insult that referred to women who become too interested in a cause and neglect their home and children (like Mrs. Jellyby in the novel "Bleak House," which is cited at the beginning of the essay).
By the way, it was important to put quotes around "women with hobbies," because without the quotes I got lots of articles on topics like "How come women tend not to have any hobbies?" and "What Are The Sexiest Hobbies For Women?" The first question is from a man in a social anxiety forum, and the second question is from a cutesy, nitwit website for women (Your Tango). One might posit that women tend not to have hobbies because hobbies don't make you look sexy.
Oh, but here's a hot new hobby, ladies: "Waist-training" — wearing corsets! — the very "figure-training" extolled in the 1883 quote that began my radically unlaced scribblings.
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18 comments:
Again, with the nether integuements.
Men sometimes regard women with hobbies as being insufficiently interested in their men. Men with hobbies are often considered engaged in a noble pursuit, even if a silly one.
That's a chauvinist explanation, but I think it rings a bit true, even today. My own wife is engaged in approximately one trillion hobbies, but people who comment on that do so mostly admiringly.
Like the old joke says "A waist is a terrible thing to mind".
Thank you for the smile, Wilbur :)
My mother wore a girdle and that was the 1950s and '60s. SOP.
I don't recall the girdle enhancing her workout, although she did jump to conclusions even without it.
We were talking about corsets last night at dinner. The subject arose because we saw this month's Vanity Fair article about Gina Lollobrigida. Several photos in that article suggest Lollobrigida may have used a corset.
Lollabrigida also had a hobby.
Then we started talking about Dita von Teese.
(All the Moms I knew in the 1950s and 1960s wore girdles. My Mom recalls her mother getting laced up in a corset every morning during the late 1920s and 1930s.)
Women don't have hobbies because they are either
A: Too busy with their home and family
or
B: Too busy minding other people's business.
"Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most—the bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again. However, as she at once proceeded with her dictation, and as I interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to stop poor Peepy as he was going out and to take him up to nurse. He looked very much astonished at it and at Ada's kissing him, but soon fell fast asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail, though I derived such a general impression from it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have thought so little about it."
War on men again. It's hard enough to get a woman's bra un-hooked with one hand. How many men could successfully unlace a corset while kissing its occupant.
But maybe as it could be a hobby like steer wrangling with a timer.
Hey, Althouse!
Thanks for this post! Really cool and fascinating. I love this sort of thing, and you did a great job with it. It provided me some fun reading this afternoon with your links. I really dig it when you sling stuff like this in out of left field.
A hobby is also a small falcon. There are a least four species known as hobbies, and they live everywhere from the tropics to the arctic except in the Americas.
A hobbyhorse before it was a synonym for a rocking horse was a small riding horse -- a small horse suitable for an adult and larger than a pony. There's a cognate: cob, a short-statured horse. A hob or hobby was a horse that one could ride or hitch to a trap or dogcart, suitable for a quiet ride, but not a hunter or a charger. Supposedly a hobby could be bought and kept more cheaply than a more spirited steed like a hunter, thus the connection with more leisurely activities. The connection of the word to obsessive leisure activity seems to be an 18th century usage first seen in the The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
"A hobby is also a small falcon."
Yes, I saw that. In the OED, that is a separate entry, with a different derivation:
"Etymology: < Old French hobé, hobet, medieval Latin hobētus, diminutive of hobe the same bird; other diminutives were Old French hobel , hobert , hoberet , modern French hobereau . According to Darmesteter, perhaps derived < Old French hober to move, stir, bestir oneself..."
The meanings under the horse-related heading have this:
"Etymology: Middle English hobyn, hoby, in Old French hobin, hobi, haubby, whence modern French aubin, Italian ubino. The Old French was adopted < English, where the word is apparently native. In all probability it is the by-name Hobin , Hobby , variant of Robin , Robbie : see Hob n.1 According to Bp. Kennett (1695) Gloss. to Parochial Antiq. s.v. Hobelers, ‘Our ploughmen to some one of their cart-horses generally give the name of Hobin , the very word which Phil. Comines [a1509] uses, Hist. vi. vii.’ Another by-form of the same name, dobbin n., has become a generic name for a cart-horse. Compare also dicky, donkey, neddy, cuddy, names for the ass."
During the Indian Vedic Period extreme hourglass figures were much admired in women. Consequently girls as young as four were bound around the waist with cords to encourage the development of an unnaturally tiny waist. Whether this shortened their lives is unknown, but it did lead to an erotic fascination with such figures. The classic erotic illustrations that Richard Burton used with his translation of the Kama Sutra show the result of such waist binding
Dancing yakshini.
When I played college rugby lo, these several decades ago, tight knee socks were part of the uniform. I'll always remember how good it felt to pull those socks on and have them squeeze my calves. I think I'll try to find some again. I'll look under "support hose."
My favorite tight lacing passage
A good case of this kind, I think, would be given by the Victorian matron saying "You can't take Amelia for long walks, Mr. Jones. She's delicate." The word has two senses (to be sure, the N.E.D. gives a dozen, of which only five are obsolete, but there are two groups of senses which make the contrast here) and I suppose the lady to assert a connection between them. "Refined girls are sickly" is the assertion, and this gnomic way of putting it is a way of implying "as you ought to know." I choose this case partly to point out that a stock equation may be quite temporary; this combination of meanings in the word seems to be a Victorian one only. You might think the expectation that young ladies will be unfit to walk was enough to produce it, and that the expectation merely followed from tight-lacing; but the eighteenth century young ladies also had waists, and would agree that long walks were rather vulgar, and yet this use of the word would be "out of period" if you were writing a pastiche...
Wm. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, p.44
In the late 50s and early 60s, many mothers insisted their daughters wear girdles on dates because they were very hard to get out of in the back seat of a car.
Am I the only one who found girdle pressure on the lower belly made her extra horny?
"hobbies don't make you look sexy"
When my wife and I staggered out of the cold water in Monterey Bay at the end of our Open Water ocean checkout dive, we all stood around looking at the rest of the exhausted group, with mask marks on blotchy faces, straggly hair, drippy noses, and unflattering rental wetsuits.
She said, "It's not really a glamour sport, is it?"
Grins all round.
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