Washington Monthly, January 1st, 2002
THE CORSET A Cultural History by Valerie Steele Yale University Press, $39.95
THIRD-WAVE FEMINISTS WAVing copies of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth once proclaimed that men had hatched an ominous conspiracy to trick women into pursuing an impossible beauty ideal rather than real social progress. In The Corset: A Cultural History, Valerie Steele lays waste to that doctrine by documenting the extent to which women, not men, have historically policed the ideals of femininity, often in spite of the objections of bewildered men.
No Victoria's Secret bimbo, Steele is serious about her subject. In h...
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