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11 1 The Inner Corset A Brief History of Fat in the United States Laura Fraser Once upon a time, a man with a thick gold watch swaying from a big, round paunch was the very picture of American prosperity and vigor. Accordingly, a hundred years ago, a beautiful woman had plump cheeks and arms, and she wore a corset and even a bustle to emphasize her full, substantial hips. Women were sexy if they were heavy. In those days, Americans knew that a layer of fat was a sign that you could afford to eat well and that you stood a better chance of fighting off infectious diseases than most people. If you were a woman, having that extra adipose blanket also meant that you were probably fertile, and warm to cuddle up next to on chilly nights. Between the 1880s and 1920s, that pleasant image of fat thoroughly changed in the United States. Some began early on to hint that fat was a health risk. In 1894, Woods Hutchinson, a medical professor who wrote for women’s magazines, defended fat against this new point of view. “Adipose,” he wrote, “while often pictured as a veritable Frankenstein, born of and breeding disease, sure to ride its possessor to death sooner or later, is really a most harmless, healthful, innocent tissue” (Hutchinson, 1894, p. 395). Hutchinson reassured his Cosmopolitan readers that fat was not only benign , but also attractive, and that if a poll of beautiful women were taken in any city, there would be at least three times as many plump ones as slender ones. He advised them that no amount of starving or exercise—which were just becoming popular as means of weight control—would change more than 10 percent of a person’s body size anyway. “The fat man tends to remain fat, the thin woman to stay thin—and both in perfect health—in spite of everything they can do,” he said in that article. But by 1926, Hutchinson, who was by then a past president of the American Academy of Medicine, had to defend fat against fashion, too, and he was showing signs of strain. “In this present onslaught upon one of the most peaceable, useful and lawabiding of all our tissues,” he told readers of the Saturday Evening Post, “fashion has apparently the backing of grave physicians, of food reformers and physical trainers, and even of great insurance companies, all chanting in unison the new commandment of fashion: ‘Thou shalt be thin!’” (Hutchinson, 1926, p. 60). Hutchinson mourned this trend, and was dismayed that young girls were ridding themselves of their roundness and plumpness of figure. He tried to understand the 12 Laura Fraser new view that people took toward fat: “It is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace, of laziness, of self-indulgence,” he explained in that article, but he remained unconvinced. Instead, he longed for a more cheerful period in the notso -distant past when a little fat never hurt anyone, and he darkly warned that some physicians were deliberately underfeeding girls and young women solely for the purpose of giving them a more svelte figure. “The longed-for slender and boyish figure is becoming a menace,” Hutchinson (1926, p. 60) wrote, “not only to the present, but also the future generations.” And so it would. But why did the fashion for plumpness change so dramatically during those years? What happened that caused Americans to alter their tastes, not only to admire thinner figures for a time, but for the next century, culminating in fin de siècle extremes of thinness, where women’s magazines in the 1990s would print ads featuring gaunt models side-by-side with photo essays on anorexia? Many things were happening at once, and with dizzying speed. Foremost was a changing economy: In the late 1800s, for the first time, ample amounts of food were available to more and more people who had to do less and less work to eat. The agricultural economy, based on family farms and home workshops, shifted to an industrial one. A huge influx of immigrants—many of them genetically shorter and rounder than the earlier American settlers—fueled the industrial machine. People moved to cities to do factory work and service jobs, stopped growing their own food, and relied more on store-bought goods. Large companies began to process food products , distribute them via railroads, and use refrigeration to keep perishables fresh. Food became more accessible...

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