When a Wetnurse Is Not an Option (late 17th Century)

Even at times when the waist was accentuated, there were plenty of larger women.

A subtle point is that when the waist is pinched in, it is pinched in from the front view only. Before the mid-nineteenth century corsets worked by pinching in the sides only, usually pushing the excess out to the front (By the late nineteenth century they had perfected squeezing the internal organs up and down to make frighteningly small waists. These are the corsets assailed by clothing reformers of a century ago.).

If you look at the corset on the left on this page, you can see that seen from the side the waistline is actually pretty normal, or even thickish front-to-back (This is a corset, or more properly "pair of stays" from the 1780s, smack in the middle of itty-bitty waist time. The corset on the right is Victorian, and you will notice that the mannequin it is on has the right size waist, but its bust and hips are rather smaller than the corset's -- Victorian proportions were ridiculous.).

While very little clothing older than the 18th century has survived, there is some evidence that 17th century corsets are not that different from 18th century ones, which is why I'm citing them here.

Of the surviving clothing, very little is of large, or even what we today would consider wearable sizes. This seems to be partly a function of people back then being smaller because of poor nutrition, partly that good, large clothing could be worn until it fell apart or was cut down into smaller garments for children, and partly that anything that did manage to survive which was big enough to be normally wearable seems to have been scavenged for fancy-dress balls and theatrical productions between the 1870s and 1930s, which destroyed quite a lot of garments at times when they were not considered historically important.

Surviving portraits and the very rare larger-sized clothing suggest that, yes, there were plenty of stout people around back then.

This is a fairly typical, plain, ordinary corset of the 18th century, and its waist is 28 inches, only a touch smaller than my own, and I'm not particularly small.

One last subtle point is that corsets were not necessarily laced edge-to-edge. In the nineteenth century there was typically a four-inch gap at the back, which allowed for more flexibility and also allowed a woman to claim a waist size four inches smaller than her actual measurement. I don't know about the actual practice of earlier centuries, but it is true when wearing earlier-style corsets that some kind of gap increases comfort and flexibility.

However, most of the photographs of surviving corsets I have seen online are laced edge-to-edge, with no gap. This makes them look a lot smaller than they probably were when worn and skews the images towards the appearance of the brutal waist-cinchers of feverish Victorian imagination.

I also suspect that a great many of them were intended for young girls. Children are larger in reality than in our imaginations, and given the measurements, I suspect a lot of the surviving clothing is actually for children (a 20-inch waist is not unusual for an average-sized eight-year-old).

I'm digressing a lot here, but my main point is yes, pregnancy can be concealed by 17th-century clothing.