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While looking for an old paper yesterday, I stumbled across some notes I made while researching women’s magazines in the 1950s for articles and advertisements related to women, food and body image. I thought I’d share a few snippets here from the notes I made. Many of these would be hilariously funny if they weren’t the same kinds of things we still see in magazines and the media today.

Ladies Home Journal Jan. 1957
“The Diet That Turned Me into a Model”
As told to Dawn Crowell Norman

“Every time I see a young girl who is overweight, I want to tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Let me tell you about my own life as a fatty – let me help! …Roy, my husband, would never have looked twice at the old 175-pound Linda… When I am occasionally tempted to eat more than I should, it’s Roy who puts his foot down! ‘Don’t forget,’ he teases, ‘you were once a fatty!’”

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Ladies Home Journal May, 1957
“Is College Education Wasted on Women?”
Dr.Nevitt Sanford

“Psychology and psychiatry have contributed their share to the notion that the best way for a girl to show that she is healthy, wholesome, mature, well-adjusted and the like is to get married and have children.”

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Good Housekeeping Aug., 1958
“How to Bring Up Perfect Little Ladies with the help of Wash and Wear”
Janet Livingstone

“Being a lady is a life’s work, and the sooner your daughter begins mastering the tricks of the trade, the better. Once she has discovered the sorcery of a smile and the magic of ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ she’s ready to go on to the next lesson: the gentle art of looking like a million bucks.

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Good Housekeeping Aug, 1958
“The Date Line: Facts and Fancies for the Girl in School”
Jan Landon

“’Calorie wisors’ are new defense weapons developed by some N. Carolina boys to protect their wallets at drive-in restaurants… the boys attach a mirror to the back of the car’s right-hand sun visor; put next to it a list of calorie values of typical items on the menu - hamburger with ten french fries, 450; banana split, 530; Coke, 75; etc. - and slyly suggest girls check their makeup before ordering!”

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In his Husband and Wife Diet Cookbook (1955), Dr. P.W. Punnett suggests one way for women to shed pounds is to simply stop “constantly nibbling candy and nuts and cake and cookies between meals and in addition to their regular meals.” Whereas, he continued, a woman most often gains weight simply because she eats “twice as much as she really needs” – primarily, “foods like pie, cake, ice cream, candy, nuts, mayonnaise, and sweet desserts” – overweight husbands ought not to “be ashamed if the pounds have sneaked up on you.” He attributed men’s weight gain to extra-fatty meats, gravies, alcohol and inactivity due to work-related advancements.

I don’t react well to stress, which is to say, I often freak out about and over-dramaticize those situations in which even the minute of forces are beyond my control. It’s the same kind of classic black and white thinking that helped structure and bolster my eating disorder.

Like every quarter of my undergraduate and graduate school years, I procrastinate in writing the final paper until the deadline looms ominously at which point I usually churn out fabulous stuff. It takes the threat of a deadline to spur me to action, but my work is usually much better for it. Last Monday saw me starting the final paper of my graduate seminar on nineteenth century America. The paper was to be a broad overview, based on the books and article we read throughout the quarter - no primary research - on the nineteenth century. I don’t do well with broad; I like structure, detail, focus, all of which is part of why I didn’t start on the 15-page paper until two nights before it was due.

I was making pretty good headway when my husband, who was sitting at the desk next to me playing a video game, reached for a can of soda and spilled it on the desk, splashing on my laptop keyboard. I immediately sopped up the spill, while he ran to get towels, but a few seconds later, my laptop screen went completely dead. I immediately freaked out - my paper! all my work! my research! my designs and photography! Gone, gone, gone! It also didn’t help that I haven’t backed up my work on my external hard drive in, well, ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently interviewed my childhood friend Summer, now a pastry chef at a prominent local restaurant, for a profile piece in my paper. Summer’s signature dessert is a flight of cupcakes, featuring five distinct and delectable mini treats. After sampling her vegan chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting, it occurred to me that I felt absolutely no guilt in eating it – none whatsoever – nor did five pounds magically appear on my ass.

Last week on The Morning Show with Mike & Juliet, much was made of my healthy and balanced lifestyle. And, I consider my diet to be very healthy – my husband and I are vegetarian, we avoid trans-fats, high fructose corn syrup and most processed foods, we eat local and organic. And because I am vegetarian, I probably get at least the recommended amount, if not more, of fruits and vegetables a day.

We also heard from Dr. Jennifer Ashton, who ironically concluded a segment purportedly on fat acceptance with tips on how not to get fat - specifically, avoid “white foods” and don’t drink your calories. And of course, we also heard from publicist-turned-obesity-fanatic MeMe Roth, who, in the past, has likened cupcakes to giving kids antifreeze or loaded guns.

But a healthy diet doesn’t preclude “white food” or even worse, a cupcake every now and then.

Unlike some self-appointed food cops, I see the occasional cupcake very much a part of a healthy diet. Sure, cupcakes are loaded with evil white foods like sugar and flour. Even worse, the frosting is most likely a mix of even more sinister and pallid foods - Crisco and powdered sugar.

But it isn’t that the cupcake itself is healthy. Rather, de-personifying foods as “good” or “bad,” as well as a refusal to measure our self-worth by the foods we eat are integral steps in developing a healthy relationship with food.

One of the most difficult obstacles I had to overcome in my eating disorder recovery is the black-and-white thinking about food – the classification of foods as “good” and “bad.” There are healthy foods and unhealthy foods and there are good food-related behaviors and bad food-related behaviors, but food itself is neither inherently good nor bad.

All foods in moderation can be part of an overall healthy and balanced diet, regardless of how much you weigh. Yes, even the insidious cupcake.

Anyone who has ever attempted dieting or who has struggled with an eating disorder probably has stories of That One Food they’re not allowed to have, but endlessly obsess over and crave. For bulimics and others with binging disorders, falling off the diet wagon and indulging in “bad” foods usually triggers binging episodes of the kinds of “bad” foods sufferers have long denied themselves. I mean, who binges on carrots, right?

And as eating disorder therapist Matthew Tiemeyer reports, when parents label foods as bad and off-limits, or ban certain foods outright, the practice is usually bound to backfire. Not only does restricting food increase the desire for the food, it also encourages binging and eating in secret.

Anne Lamott writes of this concept in one of her memoirs. After revealing her favorite binging food – M&Ms – Lamott’s therapist advised her to buy a bag and keep them around the house to indulge in whenever she pleased. Lamott soon found that not only did she not devour the entire bag immediately; she learned to self-regulate herself because she knew M&Ms were no longer a “bad” food.

Kate, too, has come to realize the importance of “legalizing” foods and in eradicating the diet mentality of deprivation. Writes Kate:

But the one thing I know for sure is that the more I eat what I want and just let it go, instead of moralizing about it… the less I fear I am on the brink of devouring the WORLD. And the less I eat myself sick. And the more I eat nutrient-rich food because I crave it. And the more I can truly distinguish feelings of hunger from feelings of deprivation.

Dispelling the idea of “good” and “bad” foods is a pretty radical notion for many people and it’s not one I’ve completely mastered myself. While I rationally know that I couldn’t possibly eat my weight in Robin Eggs, every Easter I still try to avoid them nonetheless.

But in studying food culture, I have come to realize that food is so much more than sustenance – food defines celebrations, it unites and strengthens family and community bonds, it helps create and reinforce a common identity amongst groups of peoples. You don’t only break bread with people, you break barriers between class, race, and gender divisions.

A healthy relationship with food requires us to separate how we feel from what we eat. We are not “good” if we order the salad, nor are we “bad” if we order the pizza. What we eat defines who we are no more than the numbers on the scale determine our self-worth.

Go ahead and indulge in the occasional cupcake. I guarantee you that it tastes oh, so much better without a side of guilt.

Mo and I in front of the cupcake display at Dylan’s Candy Bar in New York.

During the early stages of my eating disorder, I found myself wandering the marbled halls of the Cincinnati Art Museum every Saturday afternoon. There is something so inherently calming in wandering alone amongst such treasures of antiquity. Before long, I noticed what struck me as an uncanny similarity amongst the works of great painters like Rubens and Vouet.

Most, if not all, women featured in early paintings are fat.

I found myself asking “why?” Why is fat considered today to be transgressive of acceptable beauty standards? Why was I literally and metaphorically killing myself to rid myself of perceived fatness? That simple epiphany has formed the driving force in my graduate research on the subject.

So, I tend to get a little giddy when I see a historic-based piece, as The Atlantic has published. Despite its jargon-laden title, “The War on Fat” is a fantastic, fantastic article recapping the war on fat(people) over the past century.

The author, Elizabeth Wasserman, has clearly drunk the obesity epidemic Kool-aid, for sure, but she does a wonderful job combing through previous The Atlantic articles to glean a brief, yet well-researched purview touching upon some of the primary driving forces in the evolution of fatness as something to be revered to something to be reviled.

Of course, the limited nature of Wasserman’s perspective - using only The Atlantic features - limits the scope of her work. If you’d like a more detailed history on the transformation of fat in cultural consciousness, I recommend you check out Peter Stearns’ Fat History, Don Kulick’s Fat: An Anthropology of an Obsession, or Laura Fraser’s Losing It.

One of the articles Wasserman references is a 1919 piece, with a kind of early call for fat acceptance. An anonymous, presumably male writer, opines his excitement at seeing a ladies’ dress advertisement celebrating “Stylish stouts.” It was only an ad, but the jubilant writer saw in it the dawn of a new era, “an epochal adjustment of fashion to fact.” He declared:

“The anti-fat nostrum, the recipes for rolling, the panting mountain climb, all the many-doctored advice, all the beauty-parlor pummeling—all this is obsolete, for obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness; these throng authentic fashion-sheets. She has her own clothes, not the adapted ‘line’ of the lean and lovely sylph. The fat woman is no longer done out of her inheritance by a cruel and carping world. She has become a ’stylish stout.’”

Keep in mind, this piece was written in 1919. We’ve come a long way, baby, but it appears we have yet to arrive.

We continue our look at historical visions of beauty today with the birth of the public relations movement. Long before the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, there was Edward Bernays, who associated smoking as a form of weight-control amongst American women.

In order to mobilize public opinion behind the World War I effort, American President Wilson formed the Committee of Public Information (CPI), thus marking the American government’s first foray into the illicit realms of propagandist methodology.

The CPI’s zealous use of literature, posters, films, and other material equating the American cause with that of democracy and patriotism gave rise to a movement for the homogenization of the American melting pot by eliminating “un-American” influences. The ensuing xenophobic hysteria that followed would demonize German-Americans and serve as a basis for future ethnic discrimination.

One CPI graduate would take the knowledge he gleaned while serving in the CPI and apply it to America’s newest propaganda organization: public relations. While Edward Bernays did not invent public relations, he was nonetheless one of its most capable and influential cultivators.

The key to Bernays’ success, claims historian Larry Tye, is what he has dubbed his “Big Think” theory: “…hired to sell a product or service, [Bernays] instead sold whole new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life.”*

And one of Bernays most successful tactics can be found in his post-war campaign for Lucky Strikes cigarettes. At the end of the war, George Washington Hill, head of the American Tobacco Company, hired Bernays to help him win over the huge potential female market for Lucky Strikes.

To accomplish this, Bernays went about “crystallizing public opinion” among women in favor of smoking through a covert campaign that tied cigarettes to health, beauty, and feminism. To support Hill’s slogan, “Reach for A Lucky Instead of a Sweet” he enlisted experts in the fashion and health industries to write about the benefits of slimness and the dangers of sugar.

Instead of eating between meals … instead of fattening sweets … beautiful women keep youthful slenderness these days by smoking Luckies. The smartest and loveliest women of the modern stage take this means of keeping slender … when others nibble fattening sweets, they light a Lucky!

And in proving Tye’s theory, Bernays would not only sell cigarettes, he would sell a entirely new cultural code to women in which weight is seen as the enemy, to be avoided at all costs.

*Work cited: Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. York University Press, 1997.

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.

A few months ago Hummer started airing commercials in which a vegetarian standing in a grocery store checkout line with his veggies and tofu checks out the groceries of the man behind him. He looks at his tofu and then looks at the other guy’s huge slabs of blood-red meat.

Cut to the same vegetarian, now purchasing a gas-guzzling, monstrous Hummer big enough to plow through dense forests with ease. “Restore your manhood,” flashes the screen (Hummer later changed the tagline to “Restore the balance” in response to complaints).

Men and meat-eating are as synonymous as Bert and Ernie. Watch any advertisement for meat-filled fast food and chances are, it panders to the caveman mentality. But when McDonalds advertises its new “healthy” salads, it’s almost always women who are shown chowing down on lettuce.

Even NutriSystem has a special diet plan for men, with retired football stars reassuring guys they can eat pizzas, burgers and even beer. Women, on the other hand, can enjoy chocolate every day and gush about now becoming their husband’s trophy wives.

The relationship between men and meat hearkens back to the days of hunters and gatherers. Women dug tubers and collected seeds; men brought back red meat from large kills. And although tribes usually subsisted on the foods women collected as they were more abundant and safer to collect – no one ever got gored by a Mammoth picking grubs – meat was the celebrated center of the feast.

Which is why I’m surprised that this “intrinsic” need wasn’t spelled out more so in the NY Times article, “Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye.” Thanks to Cthulhu’s Cafeteria for the link.

Instead, the article panders to the age-old caution heeded to us by our mothers to “eat something at home alone before a date, and then in company order a light dinner to portray oneself as dainty and ladylike.” The article expresses surprise that women are now eating foods which are perceived to contain substance – namely, meat.

Of course, it couldn’t be because a woman might actually crave a side of cow’s ass. No, writer Allen Salkin (as if you couldn’t tell by the perjorative of “girls” in the title) presents it not as a case of hunger, but as a new dating “strategy.” Ahh, of course, all the better to land a man. Isn’t that the goal of every sad, single woman?

Said one woman on a first date:

Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”

The article goes on to reinforce this correlation - that ordering meat on a date is much more acceptable if you’re a thin woman – not once, but twice. The only “curvy” woman mentioned in the article serves to reinforce the reference that fat woman still order lettuce, thus suggesting that unlike her flesh-eating thin counterpart, fat women do have issues with food.

The author does finally skirt around the association of meat-eating as masculine, but once again, falls flat. He recounts the story of a vegetarian, who wishes she could order meat. Instead she’s thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.

Newsflash to Ms. Crosley: Not every woman.

Sigh, it’s a good thing both the husband and I are vegetarian so we don’t have to play these reindeer games.

When I moved in with Brandon nearly two years ago, his was the quintessential bachelor’s pad. He basically had a couch, a big-screen television set and frame-less bed and well, not much more. The small front yard was utterly barren of landscaping of any kind.

Over the past two years, the front yard has transformed into pure gardening chaos, with any semblance of grass ripped out and replaced by mulch and flowers. I like to refer to my garden as the evolutionary garden in that which doesn’t survive, is simply replaced by another flower. It’s a good thing Lowe’s has a 75 percent off rack or else we’d be in the poorhouse.

(No, this isn’t our cat. Somehow our front porch and garden is a mecca for neighborhood cats)

Lots of our neighbors do front yard landscaping, but theirs is usually restricted to perfectly aligned beds of petunias, marigolds and impatiens of every hue. But if I thought my garden was a bit eclectic, it’s nothing compared to a new trend in growing front-yard food gardens.

The Associated Press reports on front-yard kitchen gardens in an article here. The gardens don’t cost much to plant - about $100 by one gardener’s estimate, who says he and his wife save about $200 - $300 a year on food costs.

But front-yard gardens are about more than just cutting costs; they’re also sprouting political statements.

Around the turn of the 20th century, about 30 percent of food was grown at home. During the WWII years, victory gardens provided about 40 percent of America’s vegetables. But with the sprawl of post-WWII suburbs sporting ranch houses on small lots, victory gardens were soon replaced by landscaping and in-ground swimming pools, and the number of home-grown produce would dwindle to less than 10 percent. Less than 3 percent of food in the U.S. is grown at home today.

Ingredients for the average meal travel between 1,000-2,500 miles from field to table, using up to 17 times more fossil fuels than a meal made with local ingredients. This distance is not only literal but figurative, says Kitchen Gardener’s International who also provided the above statistics. The organization claims that such physical distancing from our food is often accompanied by a cultural and emotional one as more people adopt a fast-food/convenience-food diet.

I was surprised to find that some municipalities have ordinances against front-yard kitchen gardens. One city even bans gardens which encompass more than 30 percent of one’s front yard. As far as I know, the city in which I live has no such ordinances, other than ones governing weeds and neglect. What are others’ experiences?

I don’t think I will plant a front-yard kitchen garden anytime soon - my vegetable garden is planted in a perfect plot on the side of the house - but I like the idea of it. Maybe some herbs or chard will find their way into my front-yard garden next season.

With the widespread fear of fat today, most of us, especially women, have grown to see food as the enemy instead of the energy source it actually is. We discuss food in bipolar terms: “good” foods and “bad” foods. We reward ourselves when we resist the temptation of decadent chocolate and feel ashamed if we “cheat” on our diets. Some women strive to abstain from food while others down the feast only to toss it back up later.

So, it’s oh, so refreshing to see an exhibit which glorifies and celebrates the history of food in America.

In August, the traveling Smithsonian exhibit Key Ingredients: America by Food will come to a library in one of the communities I cover. The exhibit:

…explores the connections between Americans and the foods they produce, prepare, preserve, and present at the table – a provocative and thoughtful look at the historical, regional, and social traditions that merge in everyday meals and celebrations.”

Through a selection of artifacts, photographs, and illustrations, Key Ingredients examines the evolution of the American kitchen and how food industries have responded to the technological innovations that have enabled Americans to choose an ever-wider variety of frozen, prepared, and fresh foods. Key Ingredients also looks beyond the home to restaurants, diners, and celebrations that help build a sense of community through food.

The exhibit’s website lists destination venues through 2010, but if your area isn’t listed, check out the site’s online journey of 500 years of American food.

I’m particularly excited about the exhibit because it’s perfectly aligned with my graduate research into the social history and psychology of food in 20th century America. But I think everyone can find a piece of themselves and their own family history within the exhibit.

Bon appetit.

And the latest buzz item to circle body-acceptance blogs are a series of adverts for Brazilian-brand yogurt Itambé. The ads, created by Brazilian advertising agency Salles Chemistri, re-imagine iconic film images of stars Mena Suvari, Sharon Stone and Marilyn Monroe, but with images of larger, and supposedly less desirable women.

The ad copy on each reads: “Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.”

Ahh, yes, nothing like overly blatant consumerism to encourage women to alter, transform, whittle, sculpt and starve their bodies for the purposes of pleasing and attracting a man. Isn’t that the supreme reason for women’s existence, after all? To be objects of male sexual desire?

I don’t know about you, but I think photoshopped Mena Suvari, in all her bountiful beauty, is so much sexier than the real Mena Suvari, who somehow resembles a skeleton in a Christ-like pose.

I’m not familiar with Brazilian sociological history (read AdiosBarbie’s summary here), but as with American culture, I would expect men’s preferences (as if there is one collective taste among all men) to be fluid with the passing of time and culture. A brief historical rundown on the “ideal” American woman:

1837-1901, Victorian Era: Plump, fleshy and full-figured is in, thin is out. Slender women were openly mocked and jeered for their skinny bodies, while actress Lillian Russell, who weighed in at over 200 pounds, was considered a “voluptuous beauty.” Bottoms were broadened with bustles and women used padding. They ate and weighed themselves frequently. Doctors encouraged a plump shape as a sign of health. The male’s potbelly was worn proudly.

1900s, Gibson Girl: Charles Dana Gibson creates the Gibson Girl, tall, whose long arms and legs with a distinctly thinner figure reflected impossible proportions. Desperate to distinguish themselves from shorter, rounder immigrants, wealthy Americans begin to look to the European aristocracy who displayed a snobbery towards thinness, disregarding the fact that the delicate figures of Europe’s gentry were due to tuberculosis.

Early 1900s – 1920s: Beauty was curveless and the ideal body was boy-like, as epitomized by the Flapper Girl. Women abandoned the corset and began binding their breasts to flatten their silhouette. The bra was invented, not as means of support, but to hide breasts.

Post WWI: Active lifestyles promoted energy and vitality. After severe food rationing during the war, body fat was perceived to contribute to inefficiency and seen as a sign of self-indulgence.

1950s: Waist size declines, bust size booms. Thin women with large bustlines were considered to be most attractive, although the ideal woman would still be considered heavy by today’s standards. Marilyn Monroe, a reigning sex symbol at size 14, would be considered plus-sized today.

1960s: One word: Twiggy. 97lbs Measurements, 31-22-32

Here are the other Light & Fit Yogurt ads of women who are supposed to disgust you.