Looking Good College Women And Body Image 1875 1930

Winner of the Bridgewater State College Class of 1950 Distinguished Faculty Research Award Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as young women began entering college in greater numbers than ever before, physicians and social critics charged that campus life posed grave hazards to the female constitution and women's reproductive health. "A girl could study and learn," Dr. Edward Clarke warned in his widely read 1873 book Sex in Education, "but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system." For half a century, ideas such as Dr. Clarke's framed the debate over a woman's place in higher education almost exclusively in terms of her body and her health. For historian Margaret A. Lowe, this obsession offers one of the clearest expressions of the social and cultural meanings given to the female body between 1875 and 1930. At the same time, the "college girl" was a novelty that tested new ideas about feminine beauty, sexuality, and athleticism. In Looking Good, Lowe examines the ways in which college women at three quite different institutions—Cornell University, Smith College, and Spelman College—regarded their own bodies in this period. Contrasting white and black students, single-sex and coeducational schools, secular and religious environments, and Northern and Southern attitudes, Lowe draws on student diaries, letters, and publications; institutional records; and accounts in the popular press to examine the process by which new, twentieth-century ideals of the female body took hold in America.

Nursing History Review, an annual peer-reviewed publication of the American Association for the History of Nursing, is a showcase for the most significant current research on nursing history. Regular sections include scholarly articles, over a dozen book reviews of the best publications on nursing and health care history that have appeared in the past year, and a section abstracting new doctoral dissertations on nursing history. Historians, researchers, and individuals fascinated with the rich field of nursing will find this an important resource. Highlights from Volume 13: Revisiting the Johns Report (1925) on African American Nurses, Judith Young Nursing Education Moves into the University: The Story of the Hadassah School of Nursing in Jerusalem, 1918-1985, Nina Bartal and Judith Steiner-Freud American Nurse-Midwifery: A Hyphenated Profession with a Conflicted Identity, Katy Dawley Critical Issues in the Use of Biographic Methods in Nursing History, Sonya J Grypma Dead or Alive: HIPAAís Impact on Nursing Historical Research, Brigid Lusk and Susan Sacharski

From its very inception the Soviet state valued the merits and benefits of physical culture, which included not only sport but also health, hygiene, education, labour and defence. Physical culture propaganda was directed at the Soviet population, and even more particularly at young people, women and peasants, with the aim of transforming them into ideal citizens. By using physical culture and sport to assess social, cultural and political developments within the Soviet Union, this book provides a new addition to the historiography of the 1920s and 1930s as well as to general sports history studies.

In the wake of World War II, anatomist and anthropologist Mildred Trotter left the Midwest for a temporary post as the forensic anthropology expert for the Army in the Territory of Hawaii. Her formidable task was to identify the remains of war dead in order to return them to their families, in a national effort that continues to this day. Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology is the first, long overdue biography on this woman of immense stature in her field. She was the first woman to serve as President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the first woman to be full professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. While primarily a biography of Trotter, this book also examines aspects that are so often left out of retrospectives of science and scientific figures. This includes scientific error, the historical experiences of the few women and individuals from other marginalized groups active in the discipline, sexism, and scientific and social racism. This book also provides novel historical context regarding her major and now well-known tibia mismeasurement. Mildred Trotter and the Invisible Histories of Physical and Forensic Anthropology is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of science and women in science, and for all practicing and aspiring biological and forensic anthropologists.

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s—the era of the so-called “feminine mystique”—were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.

During the twentieth century, opportunities for exercise and sports grew significantly for girls and women in the United States. Among the key figures who influenced this revolution were female physical educators. Drawing on extensive archival research, Active Bodies examines the ideas, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white and historically black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do in comparison to boys and men. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers' interpretations were conditioned by the places where they worked, as well as developments in education, feminism, and the law, society's changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over the nature and significance of sex differences. While deliberating fairness for their students, women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the century; while some teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of "difference," and devising innovative curricula. Exploring physical education within and beyond the gym, Active Bodies sheds new light on the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.

Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America explores the ways in which women in the years following World War II refashioned their bodies—through reducing diets, exercise, and plastic surgery—and asks what insights these changing beauty standards can offer into gender dynamics in postwar America. Drawing on novel and untapped sources, including insurance industry records, this engaging study considers questions of gender, health, and race and provides historical context for the emergence of fat studies and contemporary conversations of the "obesity epidemic."

This book contributes to our collective understanding of the significance of representations of women and gender in magazines in both their print and online forms. The essays are authored by scholars, writers and cultural producers in fields such as art, film and visual studies, literature, critical race studies, communications, broadcast and print journalism, history, and women and gender studies. Taken as a whole, the volume offers historical breadth and perspectives that are transnational and cross-racial on women in magazines and digital media in a variety of ways. It examines how women are represented, how women have created and produced magazines and how women make meaning of themselves and their world using magazines as key sources of information.