Looking good: college women and body image, 1875-1930

Abstract

Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 By Margaret A. Lowe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (212 pages; $40 cloth). North American women began to enroll in institutions of higher learning in significant numbers during the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Looking Good: College Women and. Body Image, 1875-1930, Margaret Lowe examines a 55 year period of shifting medical and social discourses associated with female students in the United States. She emphasizes that by 1920, going to was no longer a controversial novelty (pp.4-5). Women's participation in higher education, however, was not unproblematic, either for the women themselves, for administrators, or for society as a whole. To examine these tensions, Lowe uses the concepts of gender, race, and class as she explores the origins of body image through the lens of academia. To a lesser extent, she uses regional differences, educational mission, and coeducation policies as analytical tools. She suggests that the college campus became a critical site where modern notions of female body image were mapped out (p. 161), and where women created new spaces between youthfulness and adulthood. Looking Good contributes important perspectives to existing historical, sociological, feminist, and literary studies on the body through the addition of women's and girls' voices in the form of letters, diaries, yearbooks, scrapbooks, class surveys, fiction, newspapers, and photographs. These personal accounts counterbalance institutional records and popular literature-such as ladies' magazines, medical tracts, and circulars-to present a more nuanced understanding of how women perceived their bodies and social identities. The addition of student voices clearly demonstrates that women exercised considerable agency during this period. They were not only shaped by prevailing discourses, but they participated in shaping those discourses for their own purposes as well. Lowe uses a comparative social history approach to study women and girls at three post-secondary institutions between 1870 and 1881: Smith College (a single-sex, secular, predominantly white women's located in Massachusetts); Spelman College (a Baptist seminary for black women and girls in Georgia that became a full-fledged by 1924); and Cornell University (a secular men's university in New York that admitted female students to its ranks after 1869). Lowe uses these distinct settings to analyze the intersection of multiple variables on women's experiences. …