A book from way back in 1899 when times were a-changin’ and women were realising corsets were bullshit, has been unearthed and you can buy it from the British Library shop in London for £7.99. It’s called *Advice To Single Women. *Amazing.
‘We were going back through the archives at the British Library looking for advice books and etiquette guides from a bygone age when we came across Advice to Single Women,’ said Robert Davies, managing editor of The British Library. ‘It struck us as a kind of 19th-century Bridget Jones book packed with advice for the Victorian singleton. Some of the views in the book are quite modern in their approach to marriage – there’s a lot of cynicism about the institution.’
Written by Haydn Brown, and published two years before the death of Queen Victoria, the book details how women should stop wearing corsets and stop being so bogged down with getting married – because the single life is loads better. Here are three nuggets of wisdom from the Bridget Jones’s Diary of the late 1800s:
Don’t get married
‘Single women who have been industrious, and who have boldly carved out a career for themselves, can afford to snap their fingers at lost lovers, and thank the fate that at length designed them for a life of single success rather than the possible one of married misery,’ it reads. ‘Marriage is like dipping into the “lucky bag”; all parties to the game bring out something, but only a few get hold of packets that are worth much to them.’
For anyone who has ever dipped into a lucky bag and picked out a man who isn’t a great husband, this should ring true. For anyone who understands similes, it should also ring true.
If you want to get married/date, make it a macho man
‘A woman should, whatever she do, look out for a manly man,’ Haydn writes. ‘She may admire and desire a lover before she really learns his deeper qualities, but if she gets one who in the fulness of time manifests marked effeminacy, her love will wane, her admiration will sicken and die, and there will be a shaking in their contract before long.’
Wow, pretty harsh on those sensitive types, eh? Not sure we fully agree with this. Both macho men and sensitive men can turn out to be right pricks, tbh, and they can also equally turn out to be diamonds in the rough (Aladdin reference as I watched Aladdin last night. What a great film).
Don’t wear spanx
Or, rather, corsets. ‘A shrewd woman once argued that because the lowest ribs, those that are so pressed upon when a waist is nipped, are not fixed in front, this must have been a provision of Nature designed in order that waists should be contracted; but she was wrong, however, for Nature never intended that women’s waists should be like wasps’, says Haydn.
‘It must be remembered that only the more advanced races, those most civilised, have taken to tight-lacing. Fancy this! The more we know, the bigger fools we of humanity seem to be, in some things.’
In the words of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: ‘You like pain? Try wearing a corset!’. Because corsets hurt, just like spanx makes you look like a sausage and can cut off your blood supply if you’re not careful or buy three sizes too small in a burst of optimism.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.