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?

I think the motor car and consequent lack of exercise are an enormous factor, as well as diet. A friend of mine who got a job in the US around 1990ish was very unhappy with how impossible it was to walk or cycle anywhere because everything was designed for the car.

I also noticed that about the States. Are many, if any, adult Americans non-drivers?

Recall reading a stat which said that the average British 'housewife' in the 50s walked eight miles in a day, between shopping for food, leaving/picking up children from school and getting around the town/village. No wonder they were slim!

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel

Prospering- most women could get in and out of their own corsets. You lace them to fit initially for which you might need help but then they’re front fastening, so I imagine Mary could dress herself?

Well, I hope so! Though in that scene it's Ma and Laura who are pulling the corset strings tighter and instructing Mary to 'breathe out' (which confused me as a child reader because I was used to being told to 'breathe in' in the same circumstances!) which is probably what I'm thinking of, as well as just the fact that an elaborate dress with a skin-tight buttoned bodice that only fitted once she was corseted to a certain degree like the one they've made for Mary would have been more difficult for a blind woman to get in and out of than today's clothes.

(Though also, Laura and Ma both do fairly strenuous physical work working in the garden, cleaning, drawing water, looking after animals, walking long distances etc wearing corsets the only time we see Laura successfully petitioning to leave off her corsets is when she helps Pa with the haymaking. So clearly they were flexible and not too tight-laced.)

Actually, this thread got me thinking about what Judith Flanders says in her (fascinating) The Victorian House about women's clothes that a fashionable woman by the end of the 19thc would have been wearing, on average, 37 pounds in weight of clothes, and that the Rational Dress Society was campaigning for underclothing to be reduced to 'no more than 7 pounds'! The bit I remember is that Judith Flanders interjects to say that she's just weighed what she happened to be wearing trousers, socks, tshirt, jumper, underwear -- and it came to about a pound.

She also quotes The Lancet on reminding doctors that at least some of their middle-class woman patients complaining of weakness or exhaustion were simply dwindling under the load they walked around in every day. 37 pounds is over 2 and a half stone of clothes!

It's not just fat though, people are taller with bigger bone structures eg bigger feet. Babies are bigger due to better nutrition.

"Researchers have found that the average height of an adult woman has risen faster in Britain than in much of the world, going from 153.4 centimetres (5ft) at the start of the 20th century to 164.4cm (5ft 4in) today."

I’ve seen one of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses in a museum and it looked wider than it was tall, if you know what I mean.

I often think this - when you read Jane Austen etc all they ever do is potter about and eat large meals.

Prospering - 37!!!! 😮😮😮
I’d want to know more about where that figure came from, even though Judith Flanders is very good ime. The average ‘fashionable’ lady - but how extreme and what level of society counts as fashionable? If she has the figure straight from the Rational Dress Society then is it a campaigning statistic or an objective one?
For comparison I have just weighed some of my medieval and Tudor stuff and mostly I am looking at around 6-9 lb for two layers of wool dresses with linings, interlinings etc. Could be twice that if you were wearing a third layer and winter linings but not much more unless you are above average size. It’s heavy enough that it broke my hanging rail and I had to buy a heavy duty one but not specially heavy to wear as the weight is spread out. (And I have danced La Volta in some of it!!!)
I suppose the Victorian weight would come from the extra yardage in the skirts (despite it being lighter fabric) and all the layers of petticoats - do you know the scene in Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece where young Gwen surreptitiously watches a fashionable young lady get undressed and counts the layers - there is an insane number of petticoats iirc.

@garlictwist

I often think this - when you read Jane Austen etc all they ever do is potter about and eat large meals.

And dance! The ball at Netherfield will have burned up a lot of calories!

@garlictwist

I often think this - when you read Jane Austen etc all they ever do is potter about and eat large meals.

worrying about one's marriage prospects was a great calorie burner.

Anyone watches Mrs Crocombe videos? Dd9 is obsessed, so I bought the cooking book for her , the recipes are very heavy and I will say not very appetising to our palette.
And In most books I’ve read about that period women do some sort of sport , May Welland in Age of innocence was athletic also promenading ? Was a big thing back then so I think it must be a combination of long walks , horse riding , corsets , smaller portions ?

Jane austen’s heroines are active walkers.

I always notice in wartime newsreels there are always a few older women who were really quite large. I often wonder about that - rationing would have made that impossible, you would have thought. I suspect it is true that some people stay large no matter what.

As an aside I read once that protocol dictates that the Queen is served first at any dinner* and when she has stopped eating everyone else has to stop eating too.

Because Queen Victoria loved her food so much she would start on it as soon as it was put in front of her and ate quickly that some people had hardly been served when their plates were removed because she had finished! Maybe that's why some women in the Royal circle were skinny?

Our Queen apparently deliberately eats slowly and toys with her food so that this doesn't happen.

• I actually remember newspaper articles from the time of Charles and Diana's wedding on how they could get around the conflict between 'Royal etiquette ' (as above) and 'Wedding etiquette, ' which dictates that the Bride must be served first.

They decided to serve the Queen and Diana at exactly the same time!!

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel

Prospering - 37!!!! 😮😮😮 I’d want to know more about where that figure came from, even though Judith Flanders is very good ime. The average ‘fashionable’ lady - but how extreme and what level of society counts as fashionable? If she has the figure straight from the Rational Dress Society then is it a campaigning statistic or an objective one? For comparison I have just weighed some of my medieval and Tudor stuff and mostly I am looking at around 6-9 lb for two layers of wool dresses with linings, interlinings etc. Could be twice that if you were wearing a third layer and winter linings but not much more unless you are above average size. It’s heavy enough that it broke my hanging rail and I had to buy a heavy duty one but not specially heavy to wear as the weight is spread out. (And I have danced La Volta in some of it!!!) I suppose the Victorian weight would come from the extra yardage in the skirts (despite it being lighter fabric) and all the layers of petticoats - do you know the scene in Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece where young Gwen surreptitiously watches a fashionable young lady get undressed and counts the layers - there is an insane number of petticoats iirc.

I'd look it up, but have recently moved house, and my copy of the Flanders book is full fathom five in a box somewhere. I can't remember the source at all, as it's a long while since I read it, though she's quoting The Lancet on the issue at one point.

Yes, I think JF actually quotes Gwen Raverat's fascinated and very funny description of all the layers in the same passage.

(I would have thought that skirts would have been heavier somewhat earlier in the Victorian period than towards the end, but I'm no specialist. It's the giant, elaborately-decorated hats you wore when entertaining friends to lunch even inside your own house that boggle my mind. )

Are you a re-enactor, @TheCountessofFitzdotterel? I accidentally found myself at the Battle of Tewkesbury on a random stop off while travelling back to the midlands from Wales once, which was fascinating.

Yes, one of the things that almost all Austen dramatisations get wrong is how lively and tiring many of the Regency country dances were -- I mean, I can see why, because they almost always use them to script a conversation between characters, and it wouldn't do to have Darcy and Lizzie scarlet and sweaty while giving one another daggers, so they choose more sedate dances for dramatisations, but really, many of the dances would be a good aerobic workout, everyone would have got hot, and the ballroom would have smelled like a nightclub without benefit of deodorant.

I think they did actually get it right in the Joe Wright/Kiera Knightley Pride and Prejudice, in my vague memory...?

Essentially they ate sort of SlimmingWorld style (without the modern manufactured products). Yes they had butter, cake etc but portions were probably tiny. Look at a menu for an upper class dinner and you'd only be eating a small amount of everything or being selective about what you took to be able to manage.

@boatyardblues

I’ve seen one of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses in a museum and it looked wider than it was tall, if you know what I mean.

That would have been after a woman less that five feet tall had been through nine full term pregnancies, so fair enough ! I think most of us would struggle to keep our 18 inch waists after nine pregnancies.

Prospering- yes I reenact and make costume, though not Victorian myself (latest I have done is Regency).
I used to be an academic though and that informs my approach.
I tend to think the most interesting stuff in costume history happens at the intersection of academic and reenactment, where people know enough to use both primary sources and theory effectively but also understand the practicalities of making and wearing.
For instance Sarah Bendall who has a book on early modern foundation garments coming out here - as part of her research process she reconstructed and wore some of the garments.
Amber Butchart who did the BBC4 tv series with Ninya Mikhaila on recreating clothes in paintings also values the experiential learning of actually wearing things (yay dressing up and swanning around!) and it definitely enhances what she does.
Not that people absolutely have to dress up themselves to understand the clothes but it helps when they work with people who do- like the team that costumed the Globe in its early years and figured out a lot about ruffs for example in the process.
I think dress historians who are too detached from the actual garments and how they were actually worn tend to be easy prey to myths (like people who look at Victorian corsets and conclude the wearer had an 18” waist because they don’t realise they were worn with a lacing gap, or take period invective literally).

Totally agree re Regency country dances. That stuff is energetic.

[quote junipertree2]@Goatinthegarden, I agree. Think the most striking thing about watching footage from the 80s and beyond is how our shape has changed (men and women). Any crowd scene shows that most people were far more slender than they are now. Footage of any British high street nowadays would show that most people are slightly or very overweight. I also remember how Americans were remarkable for being fat, and now the UK is exactly the same. What is causing this? Fast food? Snacking? People quitting smoking? Because few adults when I was young formally 'exercised', as we now understand the term.[/quote]
Snacking is huge now. I work with 11/12 year olds and they literally never stop eating. Lots of children bring several snacks for a 15min break - in those fifteen minutes, I literally have enough time to run to the toilet and make a coffee to drink when I’m back in class. Instead of running around at break, they stand and eat.

They focus a lot on treats like ‘movie nights’ where they tell me they watch a family film and ‘eat lots of snacks’. They also are obsessed with going to the local supermarket after school and buying more snacks. Most of them seem to be a healthy weight, but their eating pattern is far different to that of my friends and I at the same age.

I don’t remember ever being so bothered about food as a child. We used to get to choose a packet of sweets in the newsagents on a Saturday when my dad took us to buy his weekly magazine. Dessert was a rare treat and if I was hungry between meals, I’d usually be told to wait or be offered something really boring like an apple.

I noticed that dessert shops are becoming more frequent in my city - I do like a wee dessert, but going out just for a massively huge and calorific dessert seems a bit much. Same with having a huge ice cream milkshake in a burger restaurant when you’re already having a burger and chips. We’ve become used to gorging.

Totally agree re Regency country dances. That stuff is energetic.

But you probably needed it, says one who grew up in an old farmhouse with no central heating...

I noticed that dessert shops are becoming more frequent in my city - I do like a wee dessert, but going out just for a massively huge and calorific dessert seems a bit much.

Dessert places were a massive growth area in the city I used to work in, and my sense was that they were mostly patronised by young people from ethnic backgrounds for whom avoiding alcohol with a norm, and for whom going to a pub to socialise, even to have a soft drink, would have been a cultural no-no. So those dessert restaurants were kind of fulfilling the brief of the pub as a casual place where you could socialise with your friends without being around alcohol.

Agree the desserts look off-puttingly over-the-top, though.

You’re right @Goatinthegarden. It appears from MN that most people can barely move out of their houses without “snacks”.

I was brought up in the dark ages on three meals a day with nothing in between. On the very rare occasion there was a Mars bar in the house, my mum used to slice it up and it was shared.

Also no processed food, at all.

I’m pretty sure that bread, cheese, bacon, ham, sausages and pate etc were available in Victorian times.

I agree, snacks and processed food have always been around. I think upper class people probably ate more little meals, not fewer, than we do. And definitely processed food - there's a big Victorian tradition of labour-intensive food because it showed how very posh you were.

I'm also thinking that, depending how you make it, a cup of coffee could easily be more calorific than an apple or other healthy snack.

When we were 11/12 we all had snacks for the 15 minute break; it was totally normal. And I'm not that old.

Women on average were so short,. When I see photos of Victorian and Edwardian ‘beauties’, they look less than 5 feet tall with very short, thick legs, chunky thighs, not actually slim. Tiny waists, but obviously everything is held in with corsetry for that hourglass shape. Incredibly different body shape to today’s tall, slender aesthetic.

Queen Victoria apparently had awful eating habits - overeating and a tendency to wolf her food down.

@Prospering

I noticed that dessert shops are becoming more frequent in my city - I do like a wee dessert, but going out just for a massively huge and calorific dessert seems a bit much.

Dessert places were a massive growth area in the city I used to work in, and my sense was that they were mostly patronised by young people from ethnic backgrounds for whom avoiding alcohol with a norm, and for whom going to a pub to socialise, even to have a soft drink, would have been a cultural no-no. So those dessert restaurants were kind of fulfilling the brief of the pub as a casual place where you could socialise with your friends without being around alcohol.

Agree the desserts look off-puttingly over-the-top, though.

I’ve been abroad to predominantly Muslim countries where ice cream parlours are popular with young people as a place to socialise and they were serving reasonable sized portions of ice cream, teas and coffee, etc.

The dessert places that are on the rise here are so over the top. ‘Freakshakes’ became trendy with the kids in my class (I’ll try and add a picture). Milkshakes made with ice cream with brownies or cake or doughnuts, etc. added on top. And the number of sweetie boxes I’ve seen advertised on social media which basically seems to be a massive selection of biscuits, chocolate and sweets crammed into a pizza box designed to be grazed on.

It’s all about quantity and convenience. It’s cheap and easy to just mindlessly shovel food in sideways whilst watching Netflix or trawling the internet and it has become a habit. Victorians didn’t have such a luxury.