For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for French Women, 1880s-1930s (review)

Historians of the French Third Republic have long noted the social and cultural instability that accompanied what proved to be the nation’s most long-lived regime since the Revolution. Rapid urbanization and industrialization sparked sometimes violent labor unrest and gave rise to an alarming array of real and potential public health threats. The Republic itself was born of the country’s devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, a blow that exacerbated existing concerns about depopulation and hereditary degeneration. The health and well-being of the physical human body thus became a source of concern for politicians, public health officials, medical professionals, public hygienists, and legions of others. And it was the female body, potential bearer of future generations of Frenchmen, that drew the most attention.

In her study of what she terms “physical culture for women,” historian Mary Lynn Stewart examines the popular and professional discourses about the female body that proliferated during this crucial period. Drawing on such diverse sources as beauty magazines, advertisements, hygiene and beauty manuals, anatomy and physiology texts, as well as the feminist and medical presses, health educational materials, and a smattering of personal memoirs, Stewart seeks to understand the “expert” advice that French women were getting about their bodies and how they incorporated that advice into their lives. The book focuses on three main areas: sexuality and reproduction, beauty and personal hygiene, and physical education. Not surprisingly, Stewart finds that women did not accept official and popular advice uncritically and, in fact, frequently ignored prescription altogether. Many middle-class girls and women, for example, flouted advice to avoid strenuous exercise and masculine-identified sports. Most famously, women ignored the incessant and ubiquitous call to have more babies as experts watched the French birthrate continue its disheartening decline.

Stewart attributes the experts’ failure in this latter campaign in part to “internal contradictions in expert advice and women’s sense of self-preservation” (p. 1). Girls and women, she shows, had few opportunities to learn about sex and reproduction. While books and classes included illustrations and descriptions of women’s internal reproductive organs and their functions, none depicted external genitalia or discussed the sex act itself. Thus, Stewart suggests, women were deprived of the very knowledge that might have made sexual relations less frightening and, by extension, maternity more likely. To make matters worse, the French medical profession cast the onset of female puberty both as girls’ induction into “their 'real’ life as women” and as the dawn of a period of increased “vulnerability to morbidity and mortality” (p. 83). The “new” diseases of anorexia and hysteria that disproportionately affected girls and young women, Stewart maintains, were only the most dramatic manifestations of a quite understandable fear of sexual maturity.

Many historians of the nineteenth century have pointed out girls’ and women’s general ignorance of matters relating to sexuality and reproduction in France and elsewhere. Accounts of baffled or petrified brides can be found in any number of autobiographies, memoirs, and novels. The failure of French “experts” to address female sexuality apart from its reproductive function is hardly surprising. Apart from a few so-called sex radicals, official voices rarely broached this topic until the second half of the twentieth century. Even today, most public health officials advocate sex education not as a way to increase fertility, but as a way to curtail it. As Stewart points out, politicians, hygienists, biologists, and doctors alike in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century France viewed the sexualized female body solely in maternal terms. Far from being internally contradictory, their rhetoric was perfectly consistent. Sexuality was simply a means to an end. To suggest in any way that a woman’s sexuality could be separated from her reproductive role would have undermined...