Changing Ideals and Loving Your Body

My friend Sophia let me borrow this book (ok, she told me, you will like this, read it!), and although it is a bit repetitive in parts and probably could have been much shorter to make the same points, it was quite provocative to me as I try to love the body I am in rather than be at odd with it. The book, College Girls by Lynn Peril, traces the trends and discussions surrounding womens entrance into college from the early 19th century until today. It's actually a quite interesting book on many levels (i.e. why are we still having the same debates about the masculinization of women who have careers???), but the part I want to talk about today involves body image and changes in the ideal about women's bodies. A lot of this I knew just from a general sense of history, but some of it was fascinating.

We live in a world dominated by ultra-thin bodies, or at least that's the ideal that is set out for us. With 2/3 of Americans being overweight or obese, though, it is quite clear that we fall far short of the idealized mark. What struck me about College Girls was two things: first, all the pictures of college girls and women from the early 20th century and before show women with healthy curves and a normal body weight. The women aren't tiny; they aren't small. And these were the women being shown to demonstrate that girls in college are normal and beautiful just like girls who didn't go to school. It's a fascinating look at the changes in our beauty standards. The fact that so many letters home to parents quoted in the book read like the opposite of what we desire today is astounding. Rather than worry about the "freshman 15", or what turned out to be in my case "the four year 50", these girls wished to gain weight. They wanted to be pleasing and plump.

At about the same time that women in college was becoming a bit more mainstream, women were also beginning to be taught how to exercise as well - in a womanly way of course! There were even standards for what constituted the perfect athletic woman's body. Let me give you some of the measurements as proposed by Dudley A Sargent, M.D. who directed the Harvard gym and gave these as "A Fine Type of Athletic Figure":
Weight: 118 pounds
Height, standing: 61 3/4 inches
Girth of Chest, full: 33 1/2 inches
Girth of waist: 23 1/4 inches
Girth of Hips: 35 1/4 inches (in Peril, pp 253)

There's a whole bunch more there that is just silly (like who cares about how big around your wrist is???), but I was interested in the fact that the ideal athletic woman at the time was not a small person except in height. 118 pounds seems to conform to today's ideals, but that's for a woman who is 5 feet 1 and 3/4 inches tall! They say you should add 10 pounds for every inch, so that means that as a woman who is 5 feet and 9 inches tall, I should weigh 188 pounds! How's that for a difference from today's ideals! And the ideal woman had hips that were wider than her bust - child bearing hips they used to call them. Now this is an ideal I can live up to!

So it just goes to show that even though we live in a time when the ideal for women is so far removed from what is normal or even possible for most, this hasn't always been the case. I would have been a raging beauty back in the day, whereas today I struggle to love the body I have because it seems bigger than it should be.

Today, then, and every day, I want to remember this and give my body the affirmation it needs. I'm going to look my body straight in the face/eyes (yes, this seems like an odd statement) and give it a hug energetically. I'm going to stop berating it for being what was once considered the standard of beauty, and love what it can do for me. I'm going to love it, period. And yes, this is going to be hard since I have a lot of history with my body and I often feel like it betrays me. But then, my body probably thinks I'm an asshole for being mean to it all the time. That has to change.