President's Wife Leads Crusade Against 'Instrument of Torture' in Her Wardrobe: The Corset, 1907

“Mrs. Roosevelt Leads a Reform” from the Asheville Gazette News, reprinted in the Thursday, Aug. 1, 1907, issue of the Watauga Democrat

If memory serves us well, the actual initiative in the abolition of the vast bustles that made women look like dromedaries was taken by Mrs. Cleveland, while she was mistress of the White House. We believe also that she held in the substitution of the pompadour for the bang, a less important matter. Even men doubted whether the bustle could be discarded and women still look like women, but Mrs. Cleveland worked a transformation in contour, as it were, and men perceived that the objects of their affection were still substantially the same.

Now, we hear, although we do not pretend that it is an authoritative statement, that Mrs. Roosevelt has essayed the role of reformer. It is not the railroads, the corporations, nor the nature fakers that have fallen under the ban of the first lady of the land. According to an intimate friend, the President’s wife has decided to discard her corsets. All of the feminine instruments of torture in her wardrobe will be thrown into the garbage heap and she will hereafter wage unceasing warfare against them. If Mrs. Roosevelt is successful in her crusade the corset will be relegated to the limbo of antiquity, along with the hoop-skirt and the bustle. As a result, the wasp-like waist bids fair to go out of fashion, and the Venus from, long admired but seldom emulated, is to have its inning. The opposition of Mrs. Roosevelt to the corset is based on hygienic facts not unrelated to the subject of the race subject of race suicide. She believes that the compressing of vital organs by means of stays has become a positive menace and a crime against future generations. Such a crusade will not be without its effect in the financial world, since millions of dollars are invested in corset manufacture in this country.