For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s--1930s (Hardcover)

by Mary Lynn Stewart (Author) "FOR HEALTH AND BEAUTY looks at physical culture for Frenchwomen in several ways..." (more)
Key Phrases: thérapeutique gynécologique, médecine des femmes, sexual advisors, New York, Third Republic, First World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"For Health and Beauty is a fascinating exploration of the construction of gender roles in fin-de-siècle France. This book is a treasure trove of advice, admonition, exhortation, skullduggery, persuasion, and rhetorical excess that writers, officials, educators, advertisers, and physicians lavished upon women for decades." -- James Smith AllenSouthern Illinois University, author of Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women

"This seminal work will inspire considerable discussion, and belongs in every advanced library collection." -- Choice

"This carefully researched work challenges historians to a different kind of dialogue on comparative studies... It is stimulating for those interested in comparative representations of gender differences and political pressures on women's self understanding." -- Marilyn S. Mavrinac, History of Education Quarterly

"Like good wine, this book exemplifies how ten years of slower maturation of research bring a more subtle and multi-layered final result... an invaluable springboard for multi-disciplinary investigation in French, social and women's history." -- Mary Orr, History: Reviews of Books

"A thoughtful and highly readable study... No other historian has so successfully integrated the discourse on women's bodies, framed by an idealized concept of the bourgeois woman, with the physical reality of the working-class woman's experience." -- Theresa M. McBride, American Historical Review

"Mary Lynn Stewart has produced an informative work based on her examination of a wide range of scientific and popular sources from the period. She succeeds in bringing to light the attitudes conveyed to French women about their bodies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." -- Alice J. Strange, French Review

"An extremely thorough and perceptive analysis of a vast corpus of largely disregarded material." -- Sian Reynolds, French History

"[A] wide-ranging history of physical culture at the turn of the century... Stewart's conclusions are thought-provoking and the range of her research impressive." -- Morag Martin, Medical History

"In sum, For Health and Beauty provides a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the shifting discourses and practices of bourgeois French women's embodiment during five momentous decades of transformations in gender norms and expectations." -- Social History of Medicine

Product Description

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France the idea of "physical culture" emerged, promising health and beauty but also seeking to promote women's fertility in a period of declining population. Going beyond the simple argument that women's bodily standards and practices were altered by such cultural disciplines as education, medicine, journalism, and advertising, Mary Lynn Stewart argues that these disciplines needed to change their own messages in their attempts to persuade women. As Stewart demonstrates, internal contradictions in the experts' advice, especially concerning issues of sexuality and reproduction, failed to convince women to follow all of their counsel -- particularly the most persistent advice, which was to have more children.

In For Health and Beauty, Stewart reviews the new scientific and medical attention to women's bodies during the Third Republic and traces the growing emphasis on women's private hygiene as the basis for public hygiene. She then examines compulsory education in hygiene and gymnastics, the flourishing genre of women's medical and sexual self-help literature, and the commercialization of health, beauty, and fitness products -- all contributing to new scientific and commercial representations of the female body. In both the scientific and popular works, including women's autobiographical writings, bodily ideals changed from rounded, plump figures to straighter, slimmer contours, and from relatively immobile to relatively active bodies.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (December 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801864836
• ISBN-13: 978-0801864834
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,055,404 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)