THE CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY OF A COMMON CORSET ACCESSORY

Sew What | Enya Barbeau 

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A carved wooden busk from 1675 (Image © Victoria and Albert Museum).

I’ve been devouring the new HBO/BBC One series Gentleman Jack, based on the real and rollicking life of 19th-century landholder, adventurer, and lady-loving lady Anne Lister. (British period costumes! Explicit lesbianism! If you’re not on the bandwagon, may I invite you to hop on!) During the opening credits, as the camera pans over Miss Lister donning her gender-bending attire, one item has stood out to me: a wooden stick that our heroine slips down the front of her corset. I vaguely wondered if this stick was used by the masculine-leaning people of yore to achieve a flatter chest.

Nope. After a quick Google search, I can confirm that it is called a busk, and it was a routine part of corsetry from the Renaissance onward. Even better, it has inspired an academic back-and-forth that involves all my favourite things: subverting gender norms, changing social and sexual mores, and questions of class and labour.

Detail of an ivory busk that depicts two hearts hovering above a house, encircled by the words "love joins them" (source).

Busks emerged as a central component of women’s underclothing in western Europe in the 16th century—first among aristocrats, and later among members of the middle and lower classes. Fashioned from a long piece of wood, ivory, or metal, busks were designed to compress the stomach and produce an upright posture when they were inserted into a tubular pocket down the front of a corset. Many surviving examples feature intricate imagery and inscriptions.

Corsets, typically called "bodies" or "stays" in the early modern era, have attracted their share of criticism related to the damage they wrought on bodies in the name a culturally constructed feminine ideal (although the whole organ displacement thing wasn’t as detrimental as it’s been made out to be—the real risks were some indigestion and muscular atrophy). A handful of scholars have pointed towards the busked corset as a tool of disruption rather than oppression. In her 1994 article 'Donne's "Elegy 19": The Busk between a Pair of Bodies,' Sandy Feinstein suggests that the use of busks created a “stiff, erect, masculine visual effect” that allowed women to tap into the social and sexual authority typically assigned to men. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass pursue a similar argument in their chapter of the 2011 book Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, suggesting that the busk allowed women to control access to their bodies and conceal non-marital pregnancies. 

On the other hand, Sarah Anne Bendall characterizes the busk as reinforcing gender and sexual norms due to the role it played in rituals of courtship and marriage. In a 2014 article, she outlines how busks—lying close to the heart and, more provocatively, running from the breasts to the groin—came to be imbued with romantic and erotic connotations. It was not uncommon for men to gift their intended with a personalized busk, complete with depictions of flaming hearts, happy homes, and the couple’s initials. Women who used busks as an expression of sexuality outside the narrow context of courtship and marriage were labelled impure. 

Anne Lister lived at the tail end of the era of the one-piece busk. By the mid-19th century, the split bust had arrived on the scene. Featuring an innovative front closure, the split busk allowed the wearer to put on and remove a corset without assistance—making it much more accessible for the legions of working women who had no maids.

The busk may appear unremarkable: a simple form that carries out a simple function. But if we peek  beneath the surface, a rich array of cultural meanings and stories unfold. In museums, we have the opportunity to connect audiences not just physical objects but also with the layered significances which the item may hold.