Fat History

Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814739822
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The modern struggle against fat cuts deeply and pervasively into American culture. Dieting, weight consciousness, and widespread hostility toward obesity form one of the fundamental themes of modern life.

Fat History explores the meaning of fat in contemporary Western society and illustrates how progressive changes, such as growth in consumer culture, increasing equality for women, and the refocusing of women's sexual and maternal roles have influenced today's obsession with fat.

Brought up-to-date with a new preface and filled with narrative anecdotes, Fat History explores fat's transformation from a symbol of health and well-being to a sign of moral, psychological, and physical disorder.

I
American Fat

1 The Turning Point

Between 1890 and 1910, middle-class America began its ongoing battle against body fat. Never previously an item of systematic public concern, dieting or guilt about not dieting became an increasing staple of private life, along with a surprisingly strong current of disgust directed against people labeled obese. In contrast to patterns in the nineteenth century, when body styles, particularly but not exclusively for women, shifted faddishly every few decades, the growing passion for slimness set a framework that would last at least a century. To be sure, the slimness ideals would be occasionally modified in the twentieth century—women’s breasts and hips were variable to a degree—but on the whole they not only persisted but intensified. The initial crusade against fat, shaping up around 1900, would seem tame by later twentieth-century standards, but it set the fundamental culture.

Historians have known about the turn away from plumpness for some time, though nonhistorical commentary often misses the point by confusing the intensification of dieting after World War II with the real origins of the phenomenon. The one good history of dieting identifies the turn-of-the-century change.¹ So do several studies of women’s fashion history.² So does the exciting historical work on the nineteenth-century origins of modern eating disorders (about which we may know more than we know about changes in normal eating patterns in the same period).³ Research of this sort not only must be acknowledged but also can be utilized to craft a fuller account of this quiet shift in American worries. For existing treatments fall short of a completely adequate account of the transition in several respects. Even Hillel Schwartz, the pioneer in exploring the American social history of dieting, oddly slights the initial turn to slimness in his haste to get into the crass commercial exploitations of the new standards in the later twentieth century. The result is, first, an incomplete grasp of the range of attacks on fat that began to emerge around 1900, not only in fashion or in specific slimming devices but in diverse public comment as well. A fuller history will admittedly confirm existing understanding of the chronology involved, but will add scope and significance to what was more than a cosmetic shift. Second and more important, existing accounts do not really explain the shift itself. Causation is lightly passed over with remarks about the triumph of the ideals of athleticism for women (which is rather a manifestation of the new trends than a full explanation) or with assumptions about commercial manipulations. Finally, because causation is not thoroughly understood, the dimensions of the change itself have been oddly downplayed. This contributes, in turn, to the general neglect of dieting by other social historians dealing with deep cultural change in the early twentieth century, a neglect that has limited the scope of otherwise exciting findings while trivializing diet history itself.

The fact is that the advent of systematic concern about dieting was an important change in middle-class life, particularly for women but across the gender divide as well. The paucity of social-historical treatment is surprising. Tracing what was to become such an abiding, daily preoccupation of millions of American people adds to our understanding of the changing experience of life in the twentieth century. There is every reason to explore this phenomenon as part of interpreting significant social change. Further, the growing attack on fat imposed decisive new constraints on American life in a period when, in many respects, increasing latitude and informality were gaining ground. Ultimately the history of dieting must be brought into conjunction with other areas where constraint was being reconsidered—emotion, sexuality, posture and dress, propriety of language, cleanliness—for a fuller picture of the dynamics of middle-class life over the past hundred years. Not surprisingly, the history of dieting reminds us of the need to go beyond simple generalizations about Victorian rigidities yielding (for better or worse) to tolerant permissiveness and individuality. In areas like the body, Americans imposed on themselves some novel and demanding strictures. A focused exploration of how this process got started is an essential first step. To be sure, an inquiry into dieting pulls away from conventional historical topics, at least initially. Dieting has little directly to do with politics, but after William Howard Taft, slimness did affect politics in the new constraints placed on the bodily desiderata of political candidates. New topics in social history often turn out to have broader implications, and amplifying the historical analysis of a widespread preoccupation, justifiable in terms of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon itself, will suggest a number of larger insights.

This section traces the advent of what would become a durable American diet craze, first by recapitulating relevant earlier developments in the nineteenth century, both those that foreshadowed dieting and those that the new attack on fat had to counter. The range of manifestations are charted next, again confirming familiar chronology but in more systematic fashion. Then causation is addressed, to repair a real analytical void. From this the analysis can be extended to assess what the change meant. The factors in the growing hostility to fat provide insight beyond explanation. More than justification for a subsequent century of anxious dieting, they entailed some necessary compensation for other developments in American life (beyond abundant food) in which the worry was perhaps as essential as the weight.

Before the Fat Focus

Thinness has long been an available ideal in Western culture. Western society produced no systematic encouragement of force-feeding, which some cultures introduced to create ideal plumpness in brides. Greek wisdom preached moderation (a notion Benjamin Franklin would reproduce in Poor Richard’s Almanac in urging reason over appetite), but Christian revulsion against appetite was even more relevant. Though the Bible largely ignores fat or equates it approvingly with prosperity—the fat of the land—there are a few disparaging references. The images of saints were typically slender. Fasting was a virtue that could be carried to extremes by aspiring religious in the Middle Ages.⁴ The Puritan version of Protestantism maintained this. The English Puritan Thomas Wright in 1630 defined the sin of gluttons, who “think, talk, and earnestly procure to have great cheer, dainty dishes; they eat more than nature requires; at the table they will have the best; and in fine, the easy rule to perceive them, is to note their care & anxiety to fare daintily, to feast often, and therein to delight much.”⁵ The few historians who have tackled the subject of dieting heretofore have properly noted that it built on long-standing beliefs and images that associated restraint in eating with holiness.

Christian-derived concern about the control of eating as a means of combating sin helps explain why food would be selected as a target of constraint in a society otherwise increasingly indulgent. Northern Christian societies, for example, had established the practice of depriving children of food as a punishment, long before systematic dieting or eating restraint emerged as goals. French peasants used this punishment into the twentieth century. Americans certainly could stress the ploy in the nineteenth century; in a famous instance, the president of Brown University (proud of his ability to avoid physical violence) deprived a stubborn young son of food for thirty-six hours until the boy bowed his will to his father. Many other cultures—including Christian Hispanics—view this use of food as a weapon against children as appalling. By the same token, the privileging of food as a method of control set a relevant framework for the culture of dieting that has emerged over the past century, though the culture by itself it did not create this framework.⁶

Concern with dieting took on new dimensions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was at this point that the word “diet” began its evolution from its initial meaning in English, of a regimen specifying certain types of food to remedy illness, to its modern usage of losing weight.⁷ Romanticism brought ideals of slender, ethereal beauty, though the same Byron who praised dieting also volubly liked voluptuousness in his women. In the 1830s, high fashion in New York briefly stressed a willowy look, with a hint of frailty, as standards of appearance began to be more important for respectable women. Harriet Beecher Stowe railed against the slenderness imagery of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the first popular woman’s magazine, bemoaning the hostility to “opulence of physical proportions.”⁸ Some women began accordingly to eat more sparingly or to corset themselves, and an ideal of a slender waist (though with greater roundness above and below) persisted for young women. Unprecedented reports and apparently a rising incidence of anorexia nervosa soon after the mid-nineteenth century suggests that thinness was gaining enough new attention to motivate a durable form of female deviance, though it was the process of eating, not body shape, that ensnared anorexics at this point.⁹ Fashion changes in the later 1850s, though short-lived, emphasized more natural clothing for women with fewer artificial restraints, which could combine with earlier hopes for thin-waist-edness to create new interest in lightness. Insistence on secluding pregnant women in the interests of respectability, though inspired not by food concerns but by Victorian sexuality, might also have promoted a quest for slenderness particularly among women. More intense etiquette standards focused heavily on eating habits in the middle and upper classes, emphasizing proper implements along with avoiding slurping and gorging, yet another set of constraints that applied to food.¹⁰

During the mid-nineteenth century also, new nutrition crusaders began to win public attention. Growing concern about the body and what went into it paralleled the growth of new forms of food processing and a new if nervous commitment to a commercial market economy. At least in England, this derived from eighteenth-century medical concern about the effects of overeating on the liver and kidneys; here too diagnoses linked diseases to the more general increase in the consumption of goods. For the nineteenth-century United States, Stephen Nissenbaum has shown how crusaders like Sylvester Graham urged pure food, including avoiding fats and commercial baked goods, in a combination of health faddism and moral revulsion against the excesses of a market society. This linkage was crucial in the later development of modern dieting standards. Graham pushed vegetarianism along with sexual restraint in a crusade against overstimulation. Warnings against gluttony accompanied this message, though they were not the central point. Graham’s message of simple foods, temperance, and chastity was widely disseminated in the 1840s, winning many converts, particularly among young, urban men. Other popular fads picked up at least part of the same message. Water cures, widely followed by wealthy women, added attention to careful and restrained nutrition, though again more in terms of the types of foods selected than through any particular focus on weight.¹¹

Clearly, a substantial precedent existed for a crusade against fat, which helps explain the new movement that developed by the 1890s. But it is crucial to remember that this precedent in no sense created modern dieting. Specific dieting efforts were not reported in the United States, a few brief flurries in the 1830s aside. The word itself continued to refer to a general nutritional regimen, only adding the weight loss interest very gradually. This is why fad terms—like the English import “bantingism” or the American “fletcherism”—remained useful until about 1910, when diet as verb and noun gained its specific modern meaning. Religiously inspired fasting seems to have declined markedly in the United States (and England) during the nineteenth century, a shift of particular significance for women. New reports of anorexia nervosa may indeed have reflected the decline of this more traditional outlet for certain personality types. For middle-class Americans generally, interest in pure nutrition vastly exceeded any specific concern about weight control.

Most important, plumpness remained quite fashionable, particularly after the 1830s. Western art had long touted full figures—the work of Rubens is the most famous case in point—and nineteenth-century art on the whole maintained this tradition of beauty. Mature women were supposed to be fat. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was praised for her rotund features—“plump as a partridge”—because they were linked to successful motherhood.¹² Weight was seen as natural after frequent pregnancies during which women were urged to eat heartily. Leanness might be a virtue in the young, but it was a positive vice in the mature. Susan B. Anthony, accordingly, was criticized for her gauntness. Women on stage were supposed to be voluptuous, and if they used corsets, it was to accent their roundness. Between the 1860s and the 1880s, rotundity gained ground for men as well as women. European dress styles emphasized the “semblance of embonpoint,” as a British observer noted among women in Boston in 1859. Portrait painters stressed buxom qualities. Doctors urged the importance of solid weight in their growing campaign against nervousness.¹³ S. Weir Mitchell demonstrated how skinny forms correlated with discontented, nervous personalities. Actresses at all levels of the stage illustrated and promoted fashionable plumpness, adding bustles to a corseting designed to stress ample bosoms and derrieres. Costume, indeed, intended rather to rearrange fat than minimize it, while newspaper advertisements featured nostrums designed to help weight gain long before their columns opened up to diet products. A decent belly on a man denoted prosperity and sensible good health. As Mitchell noted, “A fat bank account tends to make a fat man”; “[p]lumpness, roundness, size . . . are rightly believed to indicate well-balanced health.”¹⁴ When even John L. Sullivan got stout, he could still be held up as a symbol of masculine strength and implicit sexuality, in contrast to skinny, effete dandies. “A little paunch above the belt was something to be proud of.”¹⁵ Even as some interest in dieting emerged in Europe amid medical advice concerning moderation, Americans persisted in maintaining their full-figure standards through the 1880s and beyond. The British Lillie Langtry, for example, was faulted for lacking “roundness of limb” because of too much exercise. As one fashionable woman later noted of the era (using a term that only later entered the popular vocabulary), “No one counted calories.”¹⁶ Touring European actresses who had begun to control their weight through dieting were greeted with some aesthetic skepticism. Individual Americans may have dieted, but there was no publicity and no general cultural support. Interest in exercise did begin to increase for both men and women, but it was not initially associated with slenderness.¹⁷

Dominant American food habits certainly supported the aesthetic and medical approval of corpulence. We return to American food traditions more fully later as part of a more elaborate analysis, but certain nineteenth-century patterns can be quickly established. Everyone who commented on American eating during the century noted its abundance. American foods, from strawberries to salmon, were bigger than their European counterparts, and the sheer quantity of offerings followed suit. This was a land of plenty, and meals demonstrated this directly, while Americans may have gained some cultural stake in using food to prove their national, as well as personal, material success. Upper-class meals (like those in Britain, but unlike the French) featured an amazing array of heavy courses, a pattern that extended into the twentieth century. Cookbooks and women’s magazines emphasized baked goods with vast quantities of dough. Even the fastidious Ralph Waldo Emerson corresponded on the issue of eating pie, ultimately concluding that the pastry was fine if consumed for breakfast, as a preparation for the exertions of the day. Godey’s began a regular cakes feature in the 1870s that seems in retrospect absolutely overwhelming. Apparently, women best demonstrated cooking prowess through this sweet, high-caloric offering. A single issue of this popular magazine might contain recipes for rice cake, sponge cake, Dundee cake, and Scotch marmalade cake, or butter pudding, Alderley pudding, ginger pudding, German fritters, Sally Lunn, soda scones, caramel custards, apple soufflé, and Italian rice pudding. The list seemed endless. Americans were also known for their rapid eating, as if maximal stuffing, not savoring quality, were the principal goal. Actual eating habits and recommended standards amply supported the approval of a certain girth in both male and female bodies; it would have been difficult to maintain a really ethereal ideal.¹⁸

In sum, important changes had to occur to generate the kind of concern with weight control and reduction that started to appear only in the 1890s. The concern not only reversed a generation-long plumpness fad. It did so with extraordinary durability and with a crusading zeal that would ultimately mark it as far more than surface fashion.

Signs of change began to emerge from several directions in the 1890s as the United States, after having clung to its customs of plenty and the corporal results, turned to a concern about fat a decade or so after a new sense of style had emerged in France and other parts of Western Europe. John L. Sullivan’s unexpected boxing defeat in 1892, at the hands of a much trimmer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, triggered widespread comments about the importance of slim efficiency over the kind of ill-discipline that a paunch suggested—an important reminder that the emergence of a new hostility to fat was not directly solely at women.

Overall, the revision of body imagery and the growing disgust directed against corpulence were concentrated in three sites where the modern American interest in dieting first developed consistent expression: shifts in fashion for women and men alike, a host of new fat-control devices, and the rise of public comment on fat. There was no carefully orchestrated general strategy and, as we will see, no dominant hortatory expertise; rather, these followed the new public passion, though they would later sustain and more fully shape this passion.

Fashion

Conflicting signals emerged from the world of fashion as the concern about fat began to emerge in the 1890s, which is not surprising given its previous delight in plumpness. Upper-class women were still trying to pad their clothes in 1895 to look more substantial than they were. Lillian Russell, a leading stage figure, maintained the association between heft and beauty well past 1900; as Clarence Day noted, “There was nothing wraithlike about Lillian Russell.” But a British diet book initially written in 1863 began to acquire new popularity, going through twelve editions by 1902. William Banting described his battle against obesity, in which limiting starches and sugars allowed him to drop thirty-five pounds. It was the popularity of his emphasis on nutrition along with exercise that caused dieting to be called “bantering” or “bantingism” for a short time. British influence also emerged through the popularity of fashionably slender aristocrats and theater stars. On the east coast, portraits of women by Sargent stressed “pliant, willowy grace” as early as the 1870s.¹⁹

By 1900, with some recurrent exceptions for vol...