ABSTRACT
Adolescent girls were, throughout the period 1920 to 1950, a focus of attempts by the government, schools, employers and youth organisations to construct and regulate their bodies in relation to their potential maternity, their assumed heterosexuality and their wage labour. 1 While interest in girls' health as future mothers was principally concerned with their insides, concerns about girls' sexual conduct and the bodies of female workers were increasingly preoccupied with the body's external dimensions. With regard to wage labour, this attention was related in part to the increased employment of girls in service work where appearance was central to the servicing of male colleagues, clients and customers. More generally, the focus on appearance was linked to the growing physical culture movement at this time, which encouraged an interest in the external as opposed to the internal ‘uterine’ aspects of the body and fostered the equation of health and fitness with appearance: comparisons of youth in Britain and on the continent during the 1920s and 1930s, which had industrial and military connotations, contributed a further dimension to this concern with the visible aspects of the body. 2 girls' magazines of the period 1920–1950 were also involved in the construction and regulation of the body, processes which, as Scott and Morgan point out, are often intertwined; ‘To construct some bodily feature or process, to describe it in a certain way or to lay emphasis on some aspect of the body is, in some measure, to exercise control or constraint.’ 3 An important aspect of this construction was the cross-cutting of the internal/external dimensions of the body by a public/private division. While magazines were clearly interested in certain external features of their readers' bodies such as their face, hair, hands, limbs and anything clothed, other elements, namely the torso and especially the breasts and genitalia were defined as private. Similarly, while the heart and mind were presented as public, the internal workings of the body and the changes associated with puberty and pregnancy, were only obliquely referred to. 4 Magazine silence on sexuality and on aspects of the body's insides and outsides was central to the tension these papers encountered between meeting their readers' need for information and at the same time constructing the female body in ways which supported the sexual division of labour and heterosexual relations.
