Why weren't Victorian upper class women fat?

[waltzingparrot]

They sat around drinking tea, playing the piano, embroidering, reading. Just the odd amble round a park, occasional dance.

How did they stay slim with their tiny waists?

But I think we’re risking taking a Victorian pin-up of the body beautiful for most women’s lived reality — it’s like thinking that we all have bodies like Kim Kardashian because she’s got a fashionable figure and is on Instagram. And not all corsets were tight-laced or that constrictive — working women wore them too. Laura, Mary and Ma wore them doing strenuous physical work in all the Little House books.

I think the lack of elevators and public transport created an environment where people naturally moved more, even though they didn't directly exercise and it was also expected that high-society show mingle and go on walks, hunts etc.

Yes, walks were important.

I know of at least one Irish country house which had wide corridors in the family quarters upstairs so that the ladies could walk together indoors if the weather was inclement.

Sounds like a version of the Long Gallery in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses which was partly for that purpose.

This thread has been a fascinating read. Many thanks to the OP for starting it, and to many posters for their interesting comments, photos and links.

One of my favourite Victorians is Jane Maria Atkinson. Her extended family, or "The Mob", as they called themselves, emigrated, en masse, to New Zealand in the 1850s. She as the first woman to climb Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont), a dormant volcano more than 8,000 ft high, wearing her brother's dungarees (shock, horror!), and married a toyboy 9 years her junior. Fit and healthy, slim without corsets, a Unitarian commited to education, freedom of thought and discussion. That mountain is quite a climb, even today, with well-formed tracks most of the way, and remains the most dangerous mountain in the southern hemisphere in terms of deaths. Middle- and upper-class Victorian women did not all sit around stuffing their faces.

I know it's not a contemporary book, just set in Victorian times but in Gone With The Wind, Mammy brings Scarlett a plate of food and makes her eat it before the barbecue so that she is full up and doesn't eat a lot in public, therefore not appearing unladylike. They have quite a long conversation/argument about it.

Photo editing!!

Just watched the following Bernadette Banner video. Turns out retouching photos was common practice. Which goes some way to explaining not only the unrealistic body proportions in a lot of photos but also the lack of freckles, wrinkles, cleavage lines, etc in most Victorian and Edwardian era photos.

Really interesting points about why we expect photos to be "real" when perhaps they never really have been - Victorian studio photography as an extension of / progression from portraiture, which we don't expect to be realistic, so why would photos be?

Anyway, made me think of this thread again so I thought I'd resurrect it.