Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930

Gender Relations in the American Experience

by Margaret A. Lowe

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism

222 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2003

Reviews

[Hubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent survey of attitudes of and towards women in higher education from an earlier period. Convincingly describes how differing attitudes reflected - and lay grounds for - the anxieties surrounding gender, race, and class in America.

Most effective was Prof. Lowe's use of detailed historical evidence from letters, notices, yearbooks, photographs, and popular media in formulating the central thesis.

[Olivia Duax · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Learning about women's history in higher education was enriching and made me feel lucky to have access to higher education without indignation from others. Although it also did help me realize patterns that have occurred in women's history and how the culture around women in the 1870's has carried over into 2021.