A Moment for Unmentionables

There's a subject I've been meaning to address which I haven't been able to jam it in anywhere so I've just left it out. But one of the commenters, RiverHeightsFangirl brought it up and I agree, the subject of prairie underwear cannot, should not, be ignored.

See, just as day turns into night and neglected fruit will go bad even in the fridge, every girl must one day become a woman. I'm not talking about the traumatic day you get your first period (which I assure you would never be discussed, or even acknowledged in the Little House universe) I'm talking about the mysterious time when you go from having one long braid down your back to putting it up in the German girl braid crown thing. You know what I mean.

Putting your hair up, and wearing a skirt down to your toes (another harbinger of womanhood) are all fine and good. You probably already know that a long braid is in constant danger of getting all tangled up in the 1,000 buttons that go down the back of your dress. But there's a dark side to long dresses and hair putting up in a braid crown. Once the hair goes up and the dress goes down, the corsets goes on.

While I'm aware that women of this time wore corsets, were in fact praised for rearranging their internal organs into the least anatomically correct shape possible, I'd hoped, perhaps, frontier teenagers might be exempt. Especially when you consider that Laura's out there baling the hay, lugging water from the well and clocking hours in an ultimately futile attempt to chase black birds away from the crops with her flapping bonnet. Among other laborious activities. Even the mile walk to school seems difficult, considering.

It goes without saying that Laura hates wearing a corset.

Her corsets were a sad affliction to her, from the time she put them on in the morning until she took them off at night.

A sad affliction people. This is from a girl who has lived through some seriously sad afflictions in her short life. Do you remember the death watch from Little House on the Prairie? The grasshopper plague? The scarlet fever that snatched poor Mary's vision? The entire last book?

Ma, who was a classic 20 inch waister when she was courting Pa, counsels sleeping in your corset at night! I guess so your selfish organs don't migrate back to their original shapes and locations while you sleep. While Laura can't "...bear at night the torment of the steels that would not let her draw a deep breath" Mary dutifully gives up breathing for the waspish figure she can't even see.

Lets all take a deep breath and enjoy the feeling of air entering our lungs!