Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 (review)

As many faculty and students would attest, physical appearance is a preoccupation among female undergraduates in the United States today. At institutions dedicated primarily to a life of the mind, countless young women also lead a life of the body by regulating their food, exercise, clothes, and personal relationships. Anxieties and projects related to physicality are not new; their meaning, however, has changed since women first gained access to higher education.

In Looking Good, Margaret A. Lowe examines how female undergraduates in the United States between 1875 and 1930 experienced and presented their bodies. How did they come to understand and declare their identities as women through physical appearance and behavior? Many historians have mined prescriptive literature to uncover medical and cultural standards of female embodiment; more recently, scholars have listened directly to women's own voices. Lowe joins this important endeavor by tapping private letters, diaries, school newspapers, photographs, and other firsthand documents.

Student practices command attention, Lowe argues, for several reasons. First, the controversy about women's higher education at the turn of the twentieth century focused as much on physical well-being as on intellectual aptitude. More broadly, the body became central to personal identity and social standing in America during this period, as mainstream culture mapped debates about gender, class, and race onto the physical self. Female undergraduates, Lowe concludes, were key figures in this process: "During a historical moment when gender definitions were highly contested, 'the college girl' came to exemplify much about the modern American female body" (p. 4).

Lowe focuses on three institutions: Smith College, Cornell University, and Spelman College. Between 1875 and World War I, each campus's unique environment gave rise to distinctive body practices. The single-sex, academic, predominantly white context of Smith fostered experimentation with food, dress, and athletics. At Cornell—a coeducational, but predominantly male, university for middle-class whites—female students cautiously explored how to eat, study, and interact with men. Facing entrenched white prejudice, working-class black women at Spelman sought to prove their moral worth through respectable conduct and appearance. Although each cohort observed social conventions, Lowe also portrays female students as active agents who juggled anxiety and pleasure in constructing their own physicality.

During the 1920s, national trends prevailed at all three institutions, and local context mattered less. America's sexual revolution and emerging consumer culture recast female beauty and identity in heterosexualized terms. Increasingly, "female friendships and sports offered a fading backdrop to the more socially powerful, male-defined sexual milieu" (p. 119). Using "their bodies to explore this new landscape" of external norms, students relied on modern science for practical tips and on inner will for discipline (p. 119). What began in the late 1800s as an exploration of self evolved into a performance for others. This modern, alienated sense of body image is even more pronounced today. "By the late twentieth century," Lowe observes, "girls and women were more apt to discuss not how their bodies felt but how they felt about their bodies" (p. 156).

This general (and disturbing) shift becomes clear through Lowe's rich primary sources and judicious choice of schools. One might wonder, however (as Lowe briefly does), about college women in quite different settings, such as public universities with more heterogeneous student bodies: did these environments promote alternative versions of self and physicality in the early twentieth century? Moreover, to what extent was the college girl a "trendsetter" who exerted "broad cultural influence" (p. 4)? With Lowe's appreciation for both historical context and recent secondary literature, her material speaks as much to the power of commerce, science, and mass culture in framing American norms of femininity as to the role—real or symbolic—of college students themselves.

Well-researched and well-written, Looking Good should attract a diverse audience, including scholars, students, and general readers interested in social history, medical history, and...