Historical visions of beauty: Part One

13th August 2007

Historical visions of beauty: Part One

posted in Body Image, Diets, Fat Bias, Food History, Pop Culture |

Kate mentioned in a recent blog entry how emotionally draining daily ranting is. I can entirely empathize. Part of the reason I love my job as a journalist so is because the section I cover and the stories I write are for the most part, very positive. I get to meet some of the most interesting and eclectic people who do interesting and eclectic things and then tell their stories and their passions to the public.

I’d love to report on only positive things on this blog, but unfortunately, it seems affirming stories of society NOT endorsing behaviors and values which serve to reinforce eating disordered behavior are few and far between. Meanwhile tales of discrimination against people based on their size, news of multiple and dangerous eating disordered behavior and the sad, sad stories of all the ways in which women hate and try to mold their bodies into a thinner, “better” aesthetic model are rampant.

Not to mention, reporting on eating disorders can be very triggering for anyone who’s had a disorder, regardless where they are on their recovery path.

So, I’m taking a few days off active blogging. In lieu of my comments on current events, I will delve into my handy dandy research notebook and present some historical information on all the various visions of beauty throughout American history. I start today with the Gibson Girl. Click on any image to see a larger version of it.

The Gibson Girl

Towards the latter end of the 19th century, the cultural perception of fat began to change from an indicator of wealth and health into something to be detested, slowly, and then more rapidly as the turn-of-the-century approached. The reasons for this are myriad and complex, but a short answer would involve the transformation of a previously rural, agrarian society into one of an industrial economy, marked by large cities and an influx of an immigrant labor force. For a more detailed explanation, see Peter Stearns’ Fat History.

As the economy shifted, so too did the aesthetic standard for women. The epitome of the new “American Glamour Girl” was not to be found in a flesh and blood woman, but in the ink drawings of Charles Dana Gibson. This new goal of women would etch its way across class lines, creating a single homogenous ideal of femininity by 1900. As Gibson himself predicted, the Gibson Girl was to become, “The American Girl to all the world.”

The “Barbie doll” of the early 1900’s, the Gibson Girl was tall, with long arms and legs with a distinctly thinner figure than any other publicized image of female images in the United States. Featuring both the idealized look that women coveted, she epitomized the very essence of true womanhood – wholesome, demure, active, and carefree – “A Big American Girl,” as Gibson phrased it, in dedicating his 1896 collection of drawings. She was spunky and sentimental, down-to-earth and aristocratic and she appeared in drawings which captured with deft craftsmanship the themes of love, money, self-deception and social-climbing – values which her admirers also aspired to.

The Gibson Girl would become the first mass-marketed ideal image to appear in magazines and newspapers everywhere. Women, desperate to achieve the S-curved posture of the Gibson Girl, responded to ads offering corsets promising the mythological carriage.

Advertisers sold women’s clothing, soaps and other feminine products on a mass scale with the Gibson endorsement appealing to women’s sense of inadequacy and inferiority. The Gibson Girl was so popular that women believed that by buying products with her name emblazoned on them, they could hope to emulate her in some regards.

Although no one could become the Gibson Girl (her proportions were impossibly proportioned), advertisers never ceased in their zeal to convince women of their need to try. A century later, they’re still succeeding.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Body Image, Diets, Fat Bias, Food History, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On August 13th, 2007, Kate Harding

said:

Loving the history! Enjoy your break from current events. It really does help.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

2 On August 13th, 2007, Chicken Girl

Ah, the Gibson Girl. The Barbie of her time, looks like. Makes me wonder to what extent the Gibson Girl influenced Barbie and dolls like her.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

3 On August 13th, 2007, Charles

The “weight as indicator of wealth” business is a total canard. Everyone parrots it, but it’s just not true. European peasantry was just as full-figured as the aristocracy.

Here’s the real reason. The fact is that in the early 1900s, the media started to change hands, in terms of ownership and editorial control. Up until that point, it was in the hands of an Anglo-Saxon elite, which was mostly fairly appreciative of the fuller female figure. But after 1900, WASP power faded, and different groups began to gain media control, and their ethnic background predisposed them against larger female bodies, and in favour of thin women, with oval rather than round faces, etc.

And then, when men who are not attracted to women began to become influential in the media as well, the imposition of the androgynous standard was complete.

THAT’s the real reason why it changed. It wasn’t economics (no matter how much the Marxists like to cling to that illusion). It was the essential biological predispositions of the a changing demographic in control of the media.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 4:57 pm

4 On August 13th, 2007, Rachel

Interesting theory Charles, although not one I’ve heard before in all my studies. I don’t think you can entirely discount the fatness as a sign of wealth and prosperity theory altogether, however. There is a wealth, no pun intended, of information which reinforces this conclusion.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 6:22 pm

5 On August 13th, 2007, Sarah

Charles, it’s been my personal experience that people of a white background are less likely to be accepting of bigger women. I know this because I am white and hang around with a mostly white society. There is sufficient evidence to support weight as a wealth factor too. Unlike today, those at the poverty level did not have access to cheap and unhealthy food. Plus, poor people do not work at back-breaking labor jobs anymore thanks to the advances of technology. Wealthier people had access to better food and did not have to work all day to make a living.

Times have changed though, and “obesity” can be found in all classes.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

6 On August 13th, 2007, Rachel

True Sarah, although a disproportionate number of minorities and poor people are obese. Poor people often experience what’s called “food deserts” in that they don’t have access to healthy foods and fresh produce and it’s no coincidence that fast food restaurants are located predominantly in poorer neighborhoods.

posted on August 13th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

7 On August 14th, 2007, Shefaly

All preceding points valid, unless you are talking of Africans in their native surroundings. Wealth and the virility of the husband are both signalled in the wife’s physical stature which is enhanced by her ability to have servants and hence no need to do work.

Stearns’s book discusses further how African-Americans too were at the same time (the period of Barbie) more accepting of larger bodies than their white counterparts.

In later chapters, there is also a contrast with the British bodies, mainly visiting socialites whose bodies went from being reviled for being big to being celebrated.

On that point about poor people etc: recent British research shows that poor people are eating just as badly as the rest of the population so this correlation with poverty shall have to be re-examined sometime soon. For my thesis, I stopped the time line in end of 2005 so I am happy I do not have to chase a moving target

posted on August 14th, 2007 at 7:13 am

8 On August 14th, 2007, Shefaly

That African story particularly refers to documented materials re Nigeria.

Corrigendum: And British bodies for being too THIN to being celebrated..

posted on August 14th, 2007 at 7:14 am

9 On August 14th, 2007, Charles

Rachel, you’re not heard it because Marxist and post-Marxist theory suppresses any type of essential (biologically-based) arguments, and likes to pin everything on economics and “material conditions.” They create arguments that fit their theory, and thow out any that contradict it. But science knows that human behavior is directed first by biology, and only secondarily by conditions and surroundings.

You say there’s “a wealth of evidence,” but those arguments only work backward from the result to speculate on a cause. The same type of reasoning could be used to prop up any theory. But it just doesn’t hold up.

Sarah, you’re talking about “white society” today. This post was about history, so you have to look back at “white society” in the past, before 1900, before the media as we know it today. European art and culture — white society — historically celebrated full-figured beauty, a fact that only changed in the past century, under the influence of the modern media.

The points about the different living conditions of the peasantry in the past are irrelevant, since, as I said, the peasantry were NOT universally or even predominantly thin in the past. Many, in fact the majority, were full-figured historically. Look at Brueghel’s paintings of the German agricultural communities. Consider the longstanding Russian folk tradition of the plump bride through to the plump grandmother. Notwithstanding certain specific famines (Irish potato blight), long before “fast food,” women in Europe’s agricultural classes were full-figured as often as not.

posted on August 14th, 2007 at 10:41 am

10 On August 14th, 2007, Rachel

Charles- Much of what historians do is speculation. You examine the evidence and make logical and informed assumptions based on that evidence. While I appreciate your views, I’m having trouble swallowing the whole “Marxist conspiracy” theory. I’ve read far too much primary sources, which include other materials than commercial newspapers and magazines (books, diaries and journals, personal letters, etc…) which support the evolution of fatness as being primary a class-based one.

Plus, you say the change came about after 1900. But you can see indications of the cultural shift in the perception of fatness in the preceding two decades before 1900, which renders your theory a bit tardy in the coming.

posted on August 14th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

11 On August 14th, 2007, Charles

It’s not a conspiracy, and I did not call it such. Any ideology will advocate material that supports its fundamental tenets, and discount material which does not. Marxism is no different than any other ideology in this respect.

posted on August 14th, 2007 at 3:48 pm

12 On August 15th, 2007, Shefaly

Rachel and Charles: You are disagreeing on attribution of causality in the attitudinal shifts with respect to acceptable body shapes. Causation is one of the most complex areas of research, mainly because causation theories are still evolving, and although cross-disciplinary lessons are informative, very little work (in the big schema) in cross-disciplinary studies is actually funded well.

There is no single explanation of pretty much any social phenomenon, likewise with Marxism.

Interestingly, many Marxists believe that existence precedes consciousness. So when something is atttributed to Marx, it may well have preceded Marx, no?

Charles: Peter Stearns’s book is the only complete historic treatise on ‘fat’. To read more on body shapes, however, it would be advisable to read it in conjunction with the work of people such as Joan Jacobs Brumberg (a historian and sociologist in her turn of work), Don Kulick (an anthropologist) and social psychologists who have written less fervently about the topic.

Interestingly while male researchers have explored the effect of media, it is only female researchers who have explored in depth the effect on acceptable body shapes from time to time.

posted on August 15th, 2007 at 4:27 am