Looking Good

"Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as young women began entering college in greater numbers than ever before, physicians and social critics worried that campus life might pose great hazards to the female constitution and women's reproductive health. "A girl could study and learn," Dr. Edward Clarke warned in his widely read Sex in Education (1873), "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 windows onto the changing social and cultural meanings Americans ascribed to the female body between 1875 and 1930, when the "college girl" tested new ideas about feminine beauty, sexuality, and athleticism. In Looking Good, Lowe draws on student diaries, letters, and publications, as well as institutional records and accounts in the popular press. Examining the ways in which college women at Cornell University, Smith College, and Spelman College viewed their own bodies in this period, she contrasts white and black students, single-sex and coeducational schools, secular and religious environments, and Northern and Southern attitudes. Lowe here explores the process by which women emancipated themselves, challenging established notions and creating new models of "body image"."—Jacket.