This is a complicated issue, made a bit more complicated by some misconceptions in your post. So, to note first:

- The criticisms stem from misogyny, but not from men looking down on women's financial independence. By and large, historical men didn't sublimate their dislike of women's independence into complicated twists. Early modern dudes would come out and say, "this working-class woman is living alone with no apparent plans to marry, she must be a prostitute because she has no man to control her."

- "Fashion houses" didn't exist until the early-to-mid nineteenth century, and when they were set up they were dominated by men. Women were historically relegated to the professional aspects of sewing that were seen as requiring less skill and that brought in less money (shifts and shirts) unless they were part of a tailor's household, in which case they could assist in the family business; it's not until the end of the seventeenth century that women started to become legally capable of striking out on their own as mantua-makers; in Scotland having gowns made by women didn't become the norm until the middle of the eighteenth. Staymaking continued to be a generally male pursuit until about 1800, when the fashionable shape and methods to achieve it drastically changed and women could be more frequently found making their own corsets or selling them in shops and warehouses. In all of this, the ideology around professional sewing changed to make it more acceptable and appropriate for women, rather than men coming up with reasons why it was actually bad.

- Doctors were saying that women's bodies were especially problematic long before the first wave of feminism in the nineteenth century, but the idea that they were specifically fragile and so should "stay at home" was never really part of it. People knew that women's bodies were capable of strength and endurance because they saw female servants and laborers every day (and let's not even get into childbirth, which was of course known to be a dangerous and difficult event), and when female fragility began to be part of the question at the end of the eighteenth century, the issue was specifically about refined elite women. This would make the basis of a great question for our historians of medicine, but from my perspective I can sum the main issue up as some (but certainly not all) doctors worrying that corsets, bicycles, etc. were specifically bad for the uterus, either squishing it or jouncing it around too much, which would then be theorized to cause various health or reproductive issues.

- First-wave feminists didn't uniformly defend the corset - far from it. By and large, they simply didn't talk about it. Dress reform was a combined effort of parts of the feminist, medical, and artistic communities, and most feminists of the time didn't bother with it, whether because they recognized that corsetry wasn't that bad or because they wanted to appear "normal" and safe to the average non-feminist.

Okay, so let's get to the question itself. (Sorry.)

The idea of boned undergarments being torture goes back to the sixteenth century, which is really the same century that boned undergarments go back to as well, so it would be fair to say that it's been around since the beginning. It's impossible to divide corset-wearing in general from tight-lacing in terms of polemic, because the two things went hand-in-hand - or at least, those who wrote polemics against the corset wrote from the angle that women only wore them in order to tight-lace.

Ambroise Paré, a French surgeon, claimed that he had seen a case of a woman dying after taking communion at her wedding from "suffocation", "being too bound and compressed in her wedding dress" (but given that her mother and momentary husband married each other a few days later, there's certainly room for a critical reader to question the result of the autopsy); Michel de Montaigne used it as a case against the corset in a 1588 essay where he claimed that it was a torture women endured, "so tightly tied and bound, until they suffer gashes in their sides, right to the living flesh." In 1653, John Bulwer wrote The Artificial Changeling, in which he claimed that

... young Virgins ... are led blindfold by Custome to a fashion pernicious beyond imagination; who ... reduce their Breasts into such streights, that they soon purchase a stinking breath; and while they ignorantly affect an August or narrow Breast, and to that end by strong compulsion shut up their Wasts in a Whale-bone prison, or little-ease, they open a door to Consumptions, and a withering rottennesse.

In addition, he thought the practice of putting little girls into stays made them grow "crooked", with their veins and nerves pushed out of place, preventing the proper flow of "alimentary juyces", and that women who wore corsetry "bring forth Children awry."

Some women in the eighteenth century did complain about their stays being uncomfortable, but they did not write polemics against them as moralists and physicians did, and they were more likely to complain about the practice of tight-lacing specifically, rather than the custom of wearing stays at all, and usually about other women being vain or impressionable and tight-lacing. It's not until women who grew up in the late nineteenth century were writing their memoirs that we start to get those firsthand accounts of young women absolutely loathing the restriction of any corset at all, by which time the actual or apparent rejection of corsetry was becoming fashionable.

The idea that corsetry was about male domination is more the kind of one that has come up since the corset became a historic artifact, as second-wave feminist thought began to affect the academy. (During the nineteenth century, it was too clear that women were making a deliberate choice to keep wearing them and even sometimes prided themselves on the beautiful shape they created.) Hélène Roberts would argue in her 1977 paper, "The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman" that "the clothing of the Victorian woman clearly perfected the message of a willingness to conform to the submissive masochistic pattern" - that the corset was as much about its symbolic value as it was its physical function. By this time, even the elasticated girdle was seen as something only worn by the repressed older or conservative woman, making theoretical interpretations of the corset much more plausible.