The corset was a symbol of women's oppression for a long time, in a model bourgeois society that was old fashioned and decadent, one in which women were indoctrinated in the role of wife and mother.
“I want to imagine you united with a good and wealthy man. In getting to know him, you will conform to his ideas, so long as they are reasonable, and if not, you will point out his error, in the mildest and sweetest manner.”
This was a piece of advice a father of a bourgeois family gave to his young daughter, soon to marry, in 1820.