ABSTRACT
Dialogue surrounding ideal body types appeared in a variety of print sources, popular culture, and medical journals, such as concerns about the size of specific body parts. Fat historian Sander Gilman notes that, already by the end of the eighteenth century, the medical community and popular culture attributed fat to a “weakness of will.” Although accounts of women starving themselves can be found as far back as the Middle Ages with the holy ascetics, a new kind of “fasting girl” emerged in the nineteenth century. By the early 1930s, the basic beauty institutions of American culture had been established—fashion, cosmetics, modeling, beauty contests, and Hollywood. It is tempting to attribute the already entrenched influence of beauty culture on the slenderizing of American women in the early decades of the twentieth century. Members of a growing middle class increasingly looked to these cultural tools to guide them through their newly acquired social mobility.
