The early twentieth century saw an explosion of mass-market corset advertising in Britain and the United States, with companies like Gossard (founded in 1901 in Chicago) and Royal Worcester in England producing nationally distributed advertising campaigns that standardized the ideal of the corset-shaped female body across a mass readership for the first time. Gossard's advertisements, appearing in women's magazines from Good Housekeeping to The Lady, reached millions of middle-class women with a consistent visual ideal of the slender, defined-waist female figure. This mass advertising constituted a new form of bodily instruction directed at women.

The growth of mass advertising for corsets and foundation garments gave early feminist writers — including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and later Virginia Woolf — a concrete commercial landscape in which women were being sold both garments and idealized versions of their own bodies. The advertising image of the corseted woman became a target for modernist and feminist literary analysis, representing the commodification of femininity. Poets of the suffrage and New Woman era positioned their verse as an alternative to the passive bodily ideals sold in these campaigns.