The modern history of the body is marked by the coinciding pathologization of fatness AND the elevation of a new thin ideal. But one can make the argument that even after fatness was pathologized (deemed medically or psychologically abnormal), it was not necessarily stigmatized in any systematic way UNTIL its opposite quality- thinness– took on new and important meanings of its own. In this sense, it’s not fatness whose meaning changes with time so much as that of THINNESS. As was made clear in this episode’s prequel, The History of Fat: The Complex Attitudes Toward Fatness in the Pre-Modern West, fatness has always been complicated- at some times accepted, even admired, and at other times criticized and a source of revulsion. In response to gender crises, technological advancement, and anxieties about modernity, twentieth-century beauty standards came to worship thinness in ways that were completely unheard of in premodern times. Today we tackle the History of Thin.
Transcript for: History of Thin
Written and Research by Marissa Rhodes, PhD
Produced by Marissa Rhodes PhD and Elizabeth Garner Masarik PhD
Marissa: In his 1870 book Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and Preserve it in Accordance with the Laws of Health, Philadelphia surgeon and anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton remarked that a “scrawny bony figure” is “intolerable to gods and men.” According to Brinton, avoiding cannibalism was the only benefit of thinness. He wrote, “The only lady who we ever heard derived advantage from such an appearance was Madame Ida Pfeiffer. She relates that somewhere in her African travels the natives had a mind to kill and eat her, but she looked so unpalatably lean and tough that the temptation was not strong enough, and thus her life was saved.”[1]
Elizabeth: Ella Adelia Fletcher, writing in 1899, disagrees. Fletcher exhibits an attitude that in the present day we might term “fatphobia.” She writes: “Wherever the fat woman finds herself in a crowd—and where can she avoid it in the metropolis?—she is in effect an intruder. For, she occupies twice the space to which she is entitled, and inflicts upon her companions, through every one of her excessive pounds, just so much additional fatigue and discomfort. Too often, this so redundant flesh seems to serve as a. bullet-proof armor, repelling all consciousness of the rights of others. The woman who makes a god of her stomach is incorrigible, and I fear no word of mine will avail to induce her to reform. She is the innately selfish woman who makes her very existence an offense.”
Marissa: The modern history of the body is marked by the coinciding pathologization of fatness AND the elevation of a new thin ideal. But one can make the argument that even after fatness was pathologized (deemed medically or psychologically abnormal), it was not necessarily stigmatized in any systematic way UNTIL its opposite quality- thinness– took on new and important meanings of its own. In this sense, it’s not fatness whose meaning changes with time so much as that of THINNESS. As was made clear in this episode’s prequel, The History of Fat: The Complex Attitudes Toward Fatness in the Pre-Modern West, fatness has always been complicated- at some times accepted, even admired, and at other times criticized and a source of revulsion. In response to gender crises, technological advancement, and anxieties about modernity, twentieth-century beauty standards came to worship thinness in ways that were completely unheard of in premodern times. Today we tackle the History of Thin.
I’m Marissa
And I’m Elizabeth
Marissa: And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
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Marissa: This episode’s prequel, The History of Fat, leaves off at the 18th century. A quick recap: We described how fatness was neither straightforwardly praised, or stigmatized. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans generally viewed fatness negatively, associating it with laziness and lack of self-control. However, they valued moderation and balance in body composition. Since then, fatness has been perceived differently based on social status and gender. For instance, fatness in men could sometimes be seen as a sign of power and wealth, while in women it was often criticized more harshly. The early Christian church often viewed fatness as a sign of sin and moral failing, using it to criticize both pagans and their own clergy. In medieval times, fatness became more closely associated with wealth and power, as only the elite could afford to be overweight. However, excessive fatness was still seen negatively, especially if it hindered physical abilities.
Elizabeth: The Renaissance brought some changes in the perception of body types, with artists like Rubens depicting fleshier women. However, this wasn’t necessarily a celebration of fatness, but rather a way to emphasize femininity in contrast to masculinity. Throughout these pre-modern periods, attitudes toward fatness were complex and often contradictory, influenced by factors such as social status, gender, religion, and cultural ideals of beauty and health. But this mixed-bag of attitudes changed dramatically in the eighteenth century. Think of the eighteenth century as the Big Bang of the fitness industrial complex: the dawn of “modernity,” capitalism, industrialization, consumerism, mass media, the public sphere, unprecedented political strife, a populace enthralled to the caprices of the beauty and fashion industries. In this context, we witness the emergence of what is today called “fatphobia”, and the introduction and rapid monopolization of the cult of thinness.
Marissa: Fatness first took on widespread moral significance in the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment. This is a time when the social sciences emerged. The scientific method was applied to all aspects of human society (race, gender, class, nation, etc.) were rationalized and classified in highly stratified ways. By the late-18th-century these new hierarchies fueled political turmoil (hello American, French and Haitian Revolutions!) which witnessed the rebellion of underlings against traditional elites. But these grand movements in history also had implications for eighteenth-century peoples’ bodies. While traditional elites were challenged politically their bodies were analyzed medically and judged morally. Physician George Cheyne wrote his masterpiece, The English Malady, in 1733. This treatise argued that British elites who were in power were uniquely vulnerable to neurosis and other “fashionable diseases” that did not afflict the poor.
Elizabeth: Fashionable diseases included gout, rheumatism, ennui, biliousness, asthma, and venereal disease. They were believed to result from their elite lifestyles. This is a change because in earlier centuries, wealthy lifestyles were thought to be more salubrious than those of the poor. But in an anti-aristocratic context like the 18th century, wealthy lifestyles were recast as debauched, opulent, and indulgent to excess. Wealthy behaviors such as eating animal fats and imported delicacies, drinking fine wines, and sedentary, indoor work were no longer considered healthful and moral, but rather the exact opposite: harmful and immoral.
Marissa: This fusion of fatness and immorality became scaffolded onto Western culture, giving obesity a new, morally-charged meaning. But it would be some time before the well-fed ideal of the pre-modern world was replaced by the 20th-century obsession with thinness. Most satirical sketches criticizing elites portrayed them as grotesquely fat AND grotesquely thin. One really good example of this is Thomas Rowlandson’s 1802 print Dr. Convex and Lady Concave. The print shows a monstrous man, with a fat, round belly and hideous face. The contours of his body are echoed in the negative by an emaciated lady, also with a hideous face.
Both figures represent elites: a well-educated doctor, a respected professional who commanded considerable resources, and a wealthy Lady (big L) who was presumably married to a titled peer or gentry of some sort. The implication is that both have immoral, unhealthy habits as a result of their affluence. Therefore, extreme fatness and extreme thinness were both understood to be grotesque viewed as class-coded, morally-charged pathologies. However, a few decades later, excessive thinness came to mean something entirely different.
Elizabeth: Though we’ve already done a whole episode on this, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention an early iteration of the cult of thinness: the 19th-century trend of consumptive chic. For a deeper dive into this moment in the history of health, listen to our episode Tuberculean Chic: How the White Plague Shaped Beauty Standards in the 18th and 19th Centuries. We won’t recount the entire story here but the episode essentially describes how tuberculosis (TB also called Consumption) was romanticized before the discovery of its bacterial cause in 1882. This romanticization gave rise to the concept of “tuberculean chic,” where the physical symptoms of the disease (paleness, thinness, weakness, flushed cheeks, etc.) became associated with beauty, sensitivity, and spiritual depth. Central to this cultural shift was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists who popularized a new aesthetic that incorporated many features associated with tuberculosis. Elizabeth Siddal, a famous Pre-Raphaelite model who suffered from TB, was a prime example of this new beauty standard. Her pale skin, flushed cheeks, and thin frame became the epitome of Victorian beauty, inspiring changes in fashion and cosmetics as women sought to achieve the “consumptive look” even in perfect health.
Marissa: While this aesthetic was somewhat short-lived, based on romantic ideas about drama and tragedy, it can also be conceived as the dawn of a culture of thinness. Much in the way that thinness is gendered in the 20th century, so was consumptive chic. Sickly women were idealized, and encouraged to recline in bed, reveling in their helplessness and weakness. But men with TB were encouraged to engage in outdoor activities and pursue traditionally masculine endeavors to combat the emasculating nature of the disease. In this, we can see glimpses into 20th-century beauty standards and diet/exercise culture. Moreover, consumptive chic’s association with affluence, wealth, whiteness, and femininity will echo similar associations in the 20th century.
Elizabeth: The connection between thinness and beauty after the nineteenth century CANNOT be overstated. Remember, in the premodern world, thinness was sometimes praised as particularly holy, indicative of an ascetic lifestyle of self-denial. But no one was looking at these emaciated nuns and thinking “Wow, they’re so hot!” This was about morality, not beauty. After the era of consumptive chic, however, thinness became not only a moral imperative, but ALSO an aesthetic one. The thin imperative, though it now existed, did not dominate society until the twentieth century.
Marissa: Coinciding with this new conception of thinness, was a new understanding of fatness. Recall that in the 18th century, fatness became part of an early class war, a signal of the grotesque excesses of the aristocracy. During the nineteenth century, the dawn of modern medicine, body size became medicalized in a way that had not been possible in the pre-modern world. As historian Georges Vigarello points out, this doesn’t mean that there are no class associations about body size. Vigarello writes that among the general public, “a certain conviction holds firm, namely, that ‘there are more obese people in the upper classes than in the working class.’”[2] But, Vigarello continues, “Obesity now enters its ‘scientific period,’ becomes the subject of experiments and calculations, is explored by means of ‘chemistry’ and ‘physiology,’ and acquires the status of a specific field of study as for other pathologies.”[3]
Elizabeth: French pathologist Charles Jacques Bouchard was the first to study the possibility of hereditary factors in obesity. He found that among ninety-four patients, only nine of them did not have long histories of obesity and obesity-related illness in their families. He also found that out of 100 observed obese individuals, half of them ate normally, forty ate too much, and 10 did not eat enough. Bouchard concluded that there must be two different causes of obesity: “predisposing causes” such as heredity, and “occasional causes” like excess food and drink.
Marissa: Though 19th-century ideas about obesity were complex, there were a few pioneering fatphobes in the era. Perhaps most notably William Banting who, in 1863, published his work On Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Banting, who was not a medical professional, wrote about his personal struggles with obesity and the diet that finally helped him lose weight. The core of Banting’s approach was to avoid foods that we now recognize as high in carbohydrates, such as bread, sugar, and potatoes, while focusing on meat, fish, and vegetables. This was revolutionary at the time, as the prevailing wisdom was that fat, not carbohydrates, was the primary cause of weight gain.
Elizabeth: Banting’s work was significant not just for its content, but for its impact. It popularized the idea that individuals could take control of their weight through dietary choices, rather than seeing obesity as an inevitable condition or a moral failing. The term “banting” even became synonymous with dieting in some languages. Banting’s work, unlike that of Bouchard and Sicard, was based on personal experience rather than scientific research. On Corpulence is perhaps the first example we have of popular dieting culture.
Marissa: In some ways, the nineteenth century was the birthplace of “dieting.” Most of these diets, Banting’s excepted, were more concerned with health, longevity, and even sometimes morality more than weight loss. The Graham Diet, for example, consisted of bland, vegetarian foods and its main goal was to prevent “immoral appetites” like lust and alcoholism. It’s true that weight loss was often an express goal of 19th-century “dieters” but this was often in response to temporary illnesses or temporary lags in self-care that contributed to weight gain. They were not understood to be aimed at people who had been fat all their lives and looking to find their thinner selves hidden inside. (This is the main motif of 20th century dieting culture as we will soon see.)
Elizabeth: Part of this came from the scientific understanding of obesity at this time. Most scientists agreed that “true obesity” was permanent and that it “comes on progressively in its most severe form, is not curable.”[4] Thus, the activities we now refer to as “diet culture” were not widely prescribed or particularly trendy. Even in the 1880s with the explosion of patent medicines and newspaper advertising, weight loss was one of the least popular varieties of patent medicines. You were much more likely to see patent medicines treating aches and pains, alcoholism, anemia, backache, cancer, catarrh (congestion), colic in infants, constipation, dyspepsia, female complaints, headache, kidney disease, leukemia, malaria, neuralgia, Opium poisoning, scrofula, syphilis, Tuberculosis, or venereal disease. Most of the Western world had yet to be bitten by the dieting bug.
Marissa: But this was about to change. By the 19-teens, nutrition in the Western world had improved so much that the average person was no longer malnourished and underweight. Even working people could command enough calories to stave off the extreme thinness that had been their forebears’ norm. So, the maladies that had traditionally been associated with the wealthy elites: gout, obesity, heartburn, diabetes, etc were no longer as class-dependent as they used to be.
Elizabeth: Extensive study into the causes of weight gain abounded. Actuaries working for life insurance companies developed equations to estimate mortality among the insured so as to effectively underwrite their life insurance policies. They turned to a formula devised by Adolphe Quetelet, a Victorian statistician who created a generalized height to weight ratio for his work in social physics. Quetelet meant for this ratio to be used at the population level, when dealing with data about large numbers of people, not as a ratio that should be applied to each individual body. It served his purposes well but when life insurance companies repurposed the equation, it began to be applied to individual bodies to assess their mortality risks. It was a mathematically and scientifically unsound practice, but it continued nonetheless.
Marissa: Let us give you an idea of how these actuary tables were used in a clinical setting. Jean-Athanase Sicard, a radiologist and neurologist who dabbled in obesity studies, developed his own scale to measure what could now be termed “clinical obesity” but this was based on these actuary tables. He referred to the “small obese” which were people who were 30% above the weight that was deemed average for their height, “medium obese” which included people who were 50% above their average weight for height, and “large” obese which was everyone who was 51% or more above the same. Again, the standard used to calculate these classifications was invented by insurance actuaries, not medical scientists. This involvement of the life insurance industry in the healthcare industry will have disastrous consequences which we’ll get to a little later in the episode.
Elizabeth: Coinciding with this new obesity calculus was a drastic social, cultural, and aesthetic change that privileged thinness to a new degree. This happened during the “Roaring Twenties” and was intimately connected to changing societal attitudes toward women. Alongside the trendy consumptive chic, lay a more mainstream conception of Victorian beauty. The ideal Victorian woman had not been fat by any means: indeed the smaller the waist the better. And women used restrictive stays to achieve small waistlines. But corsets were used to accentuate curvature. One of the reasons for this was that maternity and fertility had been all the rage, a major organizing principle in Victorian society. Aesthetic preferences followed suit.
Marissa: But a new generation of women was born out of the tragedy of World War I. Those who came of age during the war are dubbed the “Lost Generation” because of both the physical losses of millions of young men, but also the loss of innocence, disillusionment with Western society, and a general aimlessness borne out of trauma. In this context, the curvy Victorian silhouette became quite gauche and old fashioned. A new aesthetic, often called the “gamine” or boyish figure became all the rage: small breasts, broad shoulders, long torso, gangly legs, and very low body fat. There is some evidence that this began to change even before the war. For example, in her 1911 column in the Washington Post, Lina Cavalieri wrote: “The fear of fat is constantly before women, and I am glad that it is so, for what we fear we try to avoid. There is no dissenting voice among the nations, Turkey excepted, that fat is a burden to the body and a destroyer of grace.” It wasn’t until the 1920s, however, that this fatphobic attitude became mainstream.
Elizabeth: You can easily see this new body aesthetic in the fashion and dance styles that emerged during the 1920s. For men, double-breasted suits which were only flattering in slim silhouettes came into fashion. For women, curving silhouettes were replaced with fashionable straight lines. Vigarello writes, “The svelte athletic silhouette, the limbs fine and muscular without any lingering fat, an energetic open figure– this is today the ideal of feminine beauty.”[5] These are the flapper styles the 1920s are celebrated for. Flappers were androgynous with their short hair, long lines, spindly limbs, and athletic agility. Their signature move- the Charleston was all elbows and angles, accentuating their gangly forms. We can pinpoint the 1920s as the time in history when thinness definitively took on new meaning in the popular mind. Thinness no longer meant “tragic weakness” as it had in the 18th and 19th century (itself attractive in a very gendered way) but, rather, thinness came to denote boyish activeness.
Marissa: This is, of course, also very gendered. During the 1920s, the Lost Generation redefined womanhood independent of marriage and independent of fertility. Think of the Great Gatsby- the female lead, Daisy, she’s a wife and mother but neither position truly defines her. She’s rail thin and delicate but drinks and parties “like a man” and carries on an extramarital affair. Jordan, another female character in the book, is the quintessential flapper- androgynous, smokes like a chimney, engages in premarital sex, and has a successful career in a male-dominated field (pro golf). These characters were quite different from one another but they both represent variations of the New Woman. The New Woman was a conceptualization of womanhood that emerged in the 1890s among bicycle-riding, bloomer-wearing feminists and became increasingly popular in the early 20th century.
Elizabeth: This new feminine ideal separated women from the roles of wife and mother that had always defined them. The New Woman was athletic, she went to parties and clubs unaccompanied, she had short hair, she didn’t wear a corset, she shaved above the knee, and had premarital sex. This was a new way of conceiving of womanhood, one that slotted into a growing sexual modernism that continues to today. Thus, we see a change in preferred aesthetics- from matronly, Victorian silhouettes, to a middle ground epitomized by the Gibson girls look, to the rail-thin (coded as infertile or not defined by her fertility), hard-drinking, aimless Flapper girl. By the 1920s, the transformation of the New Woman from Gibson girls to Flappers was complete. Thinness was an important part of this new feminine ideal and it has continued to be crucial to ideal womanhood for over 100 years.
Marissa: But there were scientific, socioeconomic, and philosophical underpinnings to this aesthetic change. In a time when technological development accelerated exponentially, folks became concerned about the impact of modernity on their bodies. One good example is the discourse surrounding the automobile. Automobiles were invented in the late nineteenth century but were not mass-produced until the 19-teens. But they took the United States by storm. By 1920, there were 8 million registered vehicles in the USA. By 1950, there were almost 50 million. This particular aspect of body history is most apparent in the USA where families were 15 times more likely to own an automobile than in Germany. Still, Europeans were equally worried.
Elizabeth: With automobiles came a more sedentary lifestyle, as well as air pollution and traffic fatalities. There was tremendous anxiety about what this dramatic change in Western life would mean for Western bodies. One London physician noted in 1910: “At the risk of making myself unpopular I have had to forbid motoring to several of my patients who have consulted me regarding their growing embonpoint. Those who have followed my advice have succeeded in regaining their figures.”[6] In addition to the decrease in walking, he suspected that the recline of automobile seats led motorists to lose muscle tone and that the acceleration and fresh air excited the body so much to increase his patients’ appetite. He continued: “motoring contains most of the elements which make for adiposity.”[7]
Marissa: Fatness had thus taken on new meaning as the wages paid for modernity and civilization. Fatness, hereafter, became associated with inactivity, laziness, and unproductivity in the popular mind. Therefore, during the 1920s and 1930s, intentional weight loss became more popular and the obese started to be cast as people who refused to (or failed to) reform themselves. Apathy, laziness, carelessness – these all began to be attributed to fat people in a more uniform way that hadn’t been the case in the past. The increased stigmatization of fat people coincided with the increased fawning over thin people. If fat people lacked the virtues of self-discipline, self-restraint, and self-motivation, then thinness must be evidence of such virtues. Rather than both body types enduring their own criticisms, as we saw in the 18th century with Dr. Convex and Lady Concave, the early 20th century attitude became “the thinner the better.”
Elizabeth: Once intentional weight loss became virtuous, thinness was elevated as the ideal body. And many, especially women, began to worship at its altar. The first of many diet pill crazes took the world by storm during the 1920s and 1930s. These pills were typically amphetamines like Benzedrine or drugs like DNP which increased energy expenditure. But physicians were also prescribing thyroid hormones to healthy adults for the purpose of weight loss. These thyroid hormones as well as DNP were taken off the market after increased incidences of cardiac problems. The banana and skim milk diet was another popular diet, proposed by the United Fruit Company (there is ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS corporate interests lurking behind wellness culture.) This consisted of using banana and skim milk as meal replacements. The fat loss industry went into a relative hibernation during the 1940s as war-time rations shaped Western diets.
Marissa: But in the post-WWII period, diet culture returned with a vengeance. And it was legitimized and supported by those pesky old actuary tables we mentioned earlier. In 1959, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a massively influential piece called Build and Blood Pressure Study. At first glance, this study appears impressive. Physicians used data from 26 life insurance companies, about 4.9 million insured persons, and they used the biometric data of all these people to calculate mortality rates of folks depending on their heights, weights, and ages. But there were a lot of problems with the way this data was used. For example, they replaced the concept of “average weight” with “ideal weight.” The ideal weight was determined by the heights and weights of the folks who had the most longevity. (Still kind of makes sense right? We want people to live longer!)
Elizabeth:But this 1959 study used the same actuarial tables we mentioned earlier in the episode which were developed in the 19-teens (remember using Quetelet’s formula?). Recall that this formula was designed to deal with large populations, not to be used to evaluate specific individuals. It wasn’t until 1972 that this formula would take on the name Body Mass Index (BMI) but by this time, it had been inappropriately applied to individual bodies for decades. Not only for the purposes of underwriting insurance policies but also for the purposes of assessing and treating patients in medical and behavioral health settings.
Elizabeth: Let’s take a moment to explore the impact of this order of events. These actuarial tables were not only scientifically unsound on the individual level, they were also socially, economically, and ethnically skewed. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the populations who purchased life insurance were extremely self-selecting, almost exclusively white, middle and upper class men of northern European ancestry. People of this ancestry tend to be taller and slimmer than many other populations residing in the United States and their resources afforded them more animal proteins and other luxuries that poorer folks didn’t have access to. So, when applied to individuals or selective populations, the tables yielded drastically skewed statistics.
Marissa: When applied to Jewish women in America, 72% of them fell into the overweight category. Middle-aged, Italian men, who tended to be shorter and stockier than the northern European “ideal,” emerged from the actuarial charts with massive levels of obesity. Black women, whose BMIs matched those of white Americans as children, often fell into the overweight or obese category as adults even when they had similar lifestyles to their white counterparts. This is because the sample from which the BMI charts were derived, was completely non-representative.
So the “ideal weights” which were based on “longevity” were primarily dealing with the height, weight and mortality of white, middle and upper class men from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. This data was also measured BEFORE the introduction of effective blood pressure medications which increased the lifespan of folks of all heights and weights dramatically after the 1950s. Some of the finer points of the BMI charts also became lost in translation to the public. The tables show that 14% more obese people died younger than their slim counterparts. But that means that 86% did not. In fact, the charts show that after the age of 50, overweight people had lower mortality rates than underweight, ideal weight, and obese people. So, logically, the “overweight” category is technically the healthiest for anyone over 50 and should have been the goal those people aimed for. But that only holds up if thinness was exclusively (or even mostly) about health. Which of course, it was not.
Elizabeth: Recall in the prequel to this episode History of Fat we explained how in the pre-modern world, “ideals” were heavenly, spiritual, inviolable perfection that human beings weren’t necessarily meant to encapsulate. It was understood that ordinary human beings would always fall short of an “ideal.” But starting in the 18th century (often considered the dawn of the modern world), ideals became real, live goals that humans were meant to achieve in their lifetime. So, rather than measuring the weight people already were, this 1959 change in the actuarial charts measured regular people against an “ideal weight” (that was calculated using based on white, affluent men before the invention of blood pressure medication) and in one fell swoop, 40% of all adult females in the United States became clinically overweight. All without gaining a pound. And all without having any health concerns that were associated with obesity and overweight. This would come to have dire consequences for the psychological and physical health of women for decades to come. As the population-level actuarial charts continued to be applied to individual people (again- a scientifically unsound practice), the Western world’s obsession with achieving thinness spiraled out of control.
Marissa: By this time, the 1950s, diet culture had taken hold and the health-oriented motivations for thinness were eclipsed by a growing aesthetic preference for slimness, and a moral imperative to thinness that resulted from the systematic stigmatization of obesity starting in the 1920s. In 1958, the United States National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) published Body Measurements for the Sizing of Women’s Patterns and Apparel. It was based on the feminine ideal: an hourglass figure. So it used bust size only to calculate waist and hip sizes, rolling out women’s sizes ranging from 8 to 38. The numerical sizes were further organized into Tall (T), Regular (R), and Short (S) as well as – for slims and + for huskier girths. This became the industry standard but it was amended many times and is quite different from today’s standardized sizing.
Elizabeth: However, it’s crucial that this happened at precisely at the same time as the Build and Blood Pressure study was released. So this huge study makes a splash and basically argues that many women are overweight and that this will affect their life expectancy (again- not scientifically sound we know now but it was accepted at the time.) In the same few years, women learned this and they were suddenly able to compare their bodies numerically to others’ and visualize where their clothing size sat on the rack. This new ability to compare led to an ego-driven, “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” level of diet culture that we still encounter today. But with (seemingly) health and science on their side, women’s self-loathing and cultural desire to be thinner was legitimized and magnified by the moral imperative of health and self-care.
Marissa: Mass media, experiencing one of its many heydays in the 1950s, took up this challenge with gusto. Hollywood starlets became slimmer and slimmer. High fashion models like Suzy Parker (very thin but with a bigger bust and shapely hips) gave way to slimmer and slimmer figures. Twiggy is perhaps the best example of this new 1960s aesthetic: willowy, thin, long, slim legs, and an adolescent physique. In a 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, American icon Wallis Simpson was quoted as saying “You can never be too rich or too thin.” For much of her life she maintained a 23.5” waist and was praised for her chic and elegant appearance until her death in 1986.
Elizabeth: In addition to these new, thinner aesthetics, Hollywood heroines displayed the moral imperative of thinness with their on- and off-screen behavior. Women like Sharon Tate and Aubrey Hepburn performed thinness on screen, ever diminutive, practicing admirably the principles of self-restraint and self-denial when it came to calorie consumption. Women on the small screen did something similar, cooking for her husbands and families but never eating themselves. Scholar Michelle Lelwica calls this “Spreading the Religion of Thinness.” This came along with good foods (virtuous eating), and bad foods (sinful eating), food guilt, as well as opportunities for penance (dieting, purging, starving, exercising). Lelwica points out that the before and after photos of “penitent” celebrities published in popular media give women the opportunity for rebirth as if there is (inside everyone) a slim, perfect version of themselves just waiting to be revealed beneath layers of evil fat. Adherents are encouraged to “avoid temptation” and to achieve thinness as if it was salvation.
Marissa: This religion of thinness was reflected in the growing weight loss industry. The diet pill craze came back to haunt Western societies in most decades of the 20th century. There were successive amphetamines crazes in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. These occurred alongside new and improved “rainbow pills” which attacked obesity through a combination of amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and thyroid drugs.
Elizabeth: The 1950s also witnessed the birth of bariatric surgery. During the 1930s, and 1940s, physicians documented their patients’ weight loss after various gastrointestinal surgeries. As fatphobia mounted, again based on those BMI actuary charts, surgeons worked on developing surgical interventions for weight loss. The first purposeful bariatric surgery was the jejunoileal bypass, introduced in 1954. This malabsorptive procedure involved bypassing a large portion of the small intestine to reduce nutrient absorption. While effective for weight loss, it led to severe complications and malnutrition. In 1966, Dr. Edward Mason developed the gastric bypass, which combined restriction (reducing stomach size) with malabsorption. This procedure, refined over time, became the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, long considered the gold standard in bariatric surgery.
Marissa: The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw a new diet drug trend that unfolded alongside the anti-depressant craze: anorectics. The most popular of these was Fen-Phen, which was pulled from markets in 1997 due to cardiac side effects. Surgical weight loss became even more popular. The 1970s saw the introduction of gastroplasty techniques, purely restrictive procedures that limited food intake by creating a small stomach pouch. The vertical banded gastroplasty, popularized in the 1980s, was an important step in this direction.
Elizabeth: By 1980, the diet industry was worth $10 billion and by 1991 it was worth $30 billion but obesity rates continued to rise steadily. Interestingly, the diet industry did not seem to even make a dent in rising obesity rates. It did, however, influence rates of eating disorders (I want to do an episode on eating disorders so we won’t get too into this here but I want to throw some stats your way). In the late 1980s about 30 in every 100k women were diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia nervosa. By 1991 that number had nearly doubled to 55 in every 100k. By 1996, the 1980s figures had nearly tripled, with 85 of every 100k women receiving the diagnoses. In other words, 116,526 American women were diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia in 1996.[8]
Marissa: This was reflected in popular culture. Indeed, 1990s high fashion took the thin imperative to an even further extreme, with its appeals to heroin chic: translucent skin, stringy hair, dark circles under the eyes, and extreme thinness causing an androgynous look. Gia Carangi started this trend in the 1980s but 90s supermodels like Kate Moss and Jaime King made heroin chic the signature look of the 1990s. So as feminine ideals became increasingly thin, actual American women became larger. Experts believe that this differential in expectation and reality fueled the astronomical growth of the weight loss industry AND contributed to exponential increases in disordered eating.
Elizabeth: There was also a drastic increase in the popularity of weight loss surgery. The advent of laparoscopic surgery in the 1990s transformed bariatric procedures. Laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (LAGB) was introduced, offering a less invasive, reversible option. Laparoscopic versions of gastric bypass and other procedures followed, reducing surgical risks and recovery times. In 2003, there were 284,351 weight loss surgeries performed worldwide. By 2013, that number more than tripled to 903,760 surgeries. But still, obesity rates continued to rise worldwide.
By 2000, 3.4% of all people had an eating disorder. The internet accentuated this trend by offering platforms for pro-Ana websites and content creators. Pro-Ana content promotes disordered eating behaviors, offering “thinspo” images and tips and tricks to reduce calorie intake, hide disordered eating from loved ones, etc. (Again we’ll do an episode on the history of eating disorders one of these days). By 2018 the number of all humans with eating disorders more than doubled to 7.8% of all people. The 2020s are experiencing our own diet drug crazes as well. This one revolves around peptides, metabolic inhibitors, thermogenic drugs, and gastrointestinal drugs. It remains to be seen what historical impact this will have on people’s bodies.
Marissa: I tackled this topic because it bothered me that folks with a really superficial understanding of history would always say things like “back in the day men liked women with meat on their bones” and things like that. Or “Marilyn Monroe was a size 14” or whatever (She wasn’t). Because it harkens back to a time when fatphobia was not quite so vicious as it is now. But I think that mistreatment of fat people started a lot earlier than people realize. And, yes I think fatphobia ebbs and flows. But from a big picture standpoint, it’s our perception of THINNESS that has changed so drastically in the modern world. Thinness used to mean poverty, ill health, sometimes even laziness, or occasionally godliness (in the case of fasting nuns and monks) but it wasn’t until the 20th century that thinness came to be an aesthetic preference, a mark of beauty, a religion, and an end in and of itself.
Bibliography
Beller, Anne Scott. 1978. Fat & Thin : A Natural History of Obesity. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bray GA, Purnell JQ. An Historical Review of Steps and Missteps in the Discovery of Anti-Obesity Drugs. [Updated 2022 Jul 10]. In: Feingold KR, Anawalt B, Blackman MR, et al., editors. Endotext [Internet]. South Dartmouth (MA): MDText.com, Inc.; 2000-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK581942/
Lelwica, Michelle, Jenna McNallie, and Emma Hoglund. 2009. “SPREADING THE RELIGION OF THINNESS FROM CALIFORNIA TO CALCUTTA: A Critical Feminist Postcolonial Analysis.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Indiana University Press) 25 (1): 20–41. doi:10.2979/FSR.2009.25.1.19.
Engel, Jonathan. Fat Nation : A History of Obesity in America. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Kerry Seagrave Obesity in America
The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hungers Behind Women’s Obsession with Food and Weight By Michelle Mary Lelwica
The Woman Beautiful by Ella Adelia Fletcher
Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and Preserve it in Accordance with the …By Daniel Garrison Brinton,
Notes
[1] Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and Preserve it in Accordance with the …
By Daniel Garrison Brinton, George Henry Napheys, p. 48
[2] P. 154 Vigarello
[3] P. 154, Vigarello
[4] P 160, Vigarello
[5] P. 170 GEORGES VIGARELLO. The Metamorphoses of Fat : A History of Obesity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[6] Quoted in Kerry Seagrave, Obesity in America. P. 53
[7] Quoted in Kerry Seagrave, Obesity in America. p. 53
[8] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/time-trends-in-eating-disorder-incidence/13DCB26A064CB2634CA4EF8CD8367A4D
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