The corset carries a documented argument rather than a vague reputation. Through the 1800s doctors and the press attacked tight lacing on health grounds, and the dispute peaked in the late 1860s, with correspondence in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine between 1867 and 1874 describing waists reduced to 13 inches. Dress reformers were blunt: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward told women in 1873 to burn up the corsets and abandon the cruel steels. What finally ended everyday corsetry was not the reform campaign but a change in silhouette between roughly 1908 and 1914, when the waist stopped mattering; Paul Poiret claimed he had proclaimed the fall of the corset in the name of liberty. Because the garment returned as outerwear rather than underwear, the modern split runs along gender lines in a way few items do. YouGov finds American men split 30% positive to 23% negative, while women split 21% to 54%, and among women over 65 it falls to 7% against 61%.