Body Backlash

 **This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival**

This post is inspired by a project I did in the last semester of my Bachelor's degree while I was in the fantastic Leisa Clark's class, titled Issues in Feminism: Body Image. I have been thinking more and more about that class and how meaningful it was to me and my feminism a lot lately while dealing with crazy feelings about my new mom body. So I wanted to write this post as a reminder that it's not worth it to hold ourselves to unrealistic standards. The message that our (women's) bodies should remain as tiny as possible, except for tits and ass, permeates our every day lives. In this post I explore the ideal body type from the U.S. Victorian Era until our contemporary era to show how the messages to women have changed (and also remained the same) throughout history.

Victorian Era

In the Victorian Era women used corsets to maintain an hourglass figure, which was considered the ideal. Corsets were an external means of keeping the body under control.

Victorian Era

1920s: Clara Bow

In the 1920s women began using internal means of keeping their bodies under control, such as dieting, binging, purging, other forms of eating disorders, exercise, and body projects. The flapper emerged and the ideal body type was youthful, slim, and boyish.

1930s: Katharine Hepburn

During the Depression era bodies remained slim overall but we start to see more curves.

1940s: Betty Grable

In the 1940s and 50s we begin to see a "Victorian Resurgence". The hourglass figure is back and the super slim, curveless look is on pause. 

1950s: Marilyn Monroe

1960s: Twiggy

The arrival of Twiggy in the mid 60s brought back the ultra slim ideal. This ideal remains to this day.

1970s: Farrah Fawcett

1980s: Madonna

The 1970s and 80s brought us slimmer bodies with less clothing.

1990s: Pamela Anderson

Even thinner bodies (and larger boobs) with less clothing in the 90s and aughts. Cosmetic surgeries, and especially breast augmentation begin exploding in this era. Women also begin using external methods of controlling their bodies once again in the late 2000s in the form of spanx and other body shapers.

2000s: Nicole Richie

2010s: Olivia Munn

Looking back through these images we can see that the ultra slim ideal shows up in the 20s and 60s after two successful waves of the women's movement. Both waves made significant gains in the social standing/ rights of women. It seems to me that as women began to demand more space in society, cultural norms demanded that they take up less space.

In the early 90s Susan Faludi released Backlash, where she argues that backlash is a historical trend recurring when it seems as though women have made significant gains.It seems that we can see this occurring in the ideal body types of women as well.


This is not to say that men are not effected by unrealistic body ideals. In fact I imagine I could put together this sort of history for ideal masculine bodies and it would be exactly the opposite with bodies getting bigger through the decades. I would argue we would even see an effect in men's body types from the women's movements based on the observations made by Faludi. I can imagine we would see men's bodies become larger in the 20s and 60s as women's are becoming smaller.

It even more important to note that this would be a totally different post for WOC, well POC really. With the main emphasis being on exoticization, dehumanization, and sexualization. Because of the compound nature of oppression that WOC experience it's far more disgusting and disturbing than the ideals white women have been subjected to.

If you want to learn more about women and body image check out Joan Brumberg's Body Project, Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and Courtney E. Martin's Perfect Girls Starving Daughters. I could really recommend so much more but these are three books that really influenced my own perception of my body. Anybody else have any recommendations?