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I had begun wearing corsets the first spring we were in De Smet, but I refused to wear them at any time except when I was dressed up and never would wear them as tight as the other girls did or as Ma thought I ought to, if I were to have a pretty waist. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl manuscript

Although clearly Laura had been wearing corsets for years, they aren't mentioned as an item of fashion torment in the "Little House" books until Little Town on the Prairie, where Laura makes sure the reader knows how she feels about them! Corsets do appear in Little House in the Big Woods, but Laura is too little in that book to give them any thought.

One thing you'll find plenty of in old magazines and newspapers is advertisements for corsets, braces, bands, supports, and belts meant to hold it all in. I counted seven different corset ads in the 1881 magazine I flipped through tonight.

Corsets were once thought of as a medical necessity. Women (the "weaker sex") were supposedly so fragile that they needed something to hold them together. Ma seems to have turned out okay, but no doubt Laura's hatred of the restricting undergarment was part of the reason she stayed strong as a little French horse from the first book to the last.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:25 PM