{"id":44396,"date":"2012-03-07T12:49:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T17:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=44396"},"modified":"2013-07-29T15:45:32","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T20:45:32","slug":"exotic-dancers-in-1890-and-the-plump-body-ideal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/03\/07\/exotic-dancers-in-1890-and-the-plump-body-ideal\/","title":{"rendered":"Exotic Dancers in 1890 and the Plump Body Ideal"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently had the pleasure of reading Peter Stearns’ Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West<\/a><\/em>. \u00a0The book chronicles the shift in American history from a plump to a thin ideal. \u00a0The beauty of Stearns’ book is his resistance to reducing the shift in norms to a simple cause. Instead, he traces the changes to conflicts between capitalism and religion, the backlash against women’s equality, industrialization and the devaluation of maternal roles, fashion trends, the professionalization of medicine, our cultural relationship to food, and more.<\/p>\n

Stearns is quite specific in timing the change, however, pointing to the years between 1890 and 1910. \u00a0In these 20 years, he writes:<\/p>\n

\u2026middle-class America began its ongoing battle aginst body fat.\u00a0 Never previously an item of systemic 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought of Stearns’ book when I came across a delightful collection of photographs of exotic dancers taken in 1890<\/a>, the year he pinpoints as the beginning of the shift to thinness. \u00a0From a contemporary perspective, they would likely be judged as “too fat,” but their plumpness was exactly what made these dancers so desirable at the time.
\n\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

More at Retronaut<\/a>.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently had the pleasure of reading Peter Stearns’ Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. \u00a0The book chronicles the shift in American history from a plump to a thin ideal. \u00a0The beauty of Stearns’ book is his resistance to reducing the shift in norms to a simple cause. Instead, he traces the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,244,16039,55,2103,253],"class_list":["post-44396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-fat","tag-dance","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44396"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56527,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44396\/revisions\/56527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}