Weighty Issues

Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 . By Margaret Lowe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 212 pages. $40.00 (cloth).

Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression . Edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 391 pages. $55.00 (cloth) $22.50 (paper).

Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery . By Virginia Blum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 366 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

When she was eighteen, Virginia Blum "became surgical." It was not her choice. Convinced that a nose job would make her daughter more marriageable, Blum's mother took her to a plastic surgeon, who gave her "one of those noses surgeons display as the 'before' picture for botched surgery." "My turned up nose became Roman. It twisted to one side. It hooked." Several years later, she went in for a second rhinoplasty. "Once you have surgery," she explains, "you will either have it again or want it again" (16).

Blum's book, an exploration of the contemporary cultural politics of surgical alteration, is called Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. The title is apt. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as "natural destiny is being supplanted by technologically grounded coercion," in the words of feminist scholar Kathleen Pauly Morgan, woundedness, whether through surgery, dieting, or other forms of physical sculpting, has increasingly become the physical norm.¹ How this came to be is the subject of three new books that explore the complex relationships between appearance, identity, and power in modern America. Blum's Flesh Wounds, Margaret Lowe's Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1870-1930, and the collection of essays Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression probe the paradoxes of contemporary body politics, encourage fruitful cross-disciplinary scholarship, and pose important questions for scholars of gender, culture, and the body. How have "fatness" and "thinness" been historically and socially constructed? How can historically demonized categories of ugliness and obesity be reappropriated, retheorized, and resignified? What are the possibilities for individual agency within existing cultural systems of physical coercion and regulation? Theoretically sophisticated yet rooted in embodied experience, these works advance new methodological approaches to the study of altered, "normal," and deviant bodies, and unravel the nexus of economic, cultural, and social forces that have made physical appearance one of the primary contemporary indexes of individual identity and worth.

Though the field has been mined extensively by scholars in sociology, psychology, and gender studies, the topics of dieting and female body image have received relatively little attention from American cultural and social historians. Notable existing works focus on the history of weight loss and such eating disorders as anorexia nervosa; studies of female fashion and beauty in U.S. history have also addressed issues of weight, dress, and self-image.² Margaret Lowe's Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1870-1930, an exploration of turn-of-the-century college women's relationships to their bodies and body images, is an important addition to the field. Unlike many scholars of beauty and body image who have relied extensively on prescriptive literature to draw conclusions about subjects' attitudes and behaviors, Lowe innovatively uses young women's diaries, letters, correspondence, and other archival "student voices" to illustrate the distance between cultural ideals of beauty and the reality of women's lived experience. Contesting the traditional depiction of Victorian women as frail, passive, and ashamed of their physical appetites, Lowe depicts college women at the turn of the century as participants in a "body politics" that challenged assumptions about female physical and intellectual inferiority. Rather than be oppressed by rigid beauty standards, college women engaged vigorously in physical practices and activities—athletics, hearty eating, and self-fashioning through clothing and makeup—imbued with agency, pleasure, and desire.

With clear prose and careful detail, Lowe immerses the reader in three very different campus cultures: Smith College, a single-sex institution; Cornell University, an early coeducational institution; and Spelman College, a historically black women's college. Her starting point...