1863

Publication of British undertaker William Banting’s A Letter on Corpulence, first modern diet program written by a layperson and focused on weight reduction as a goal in itself; wildly popular in England and U.S. With sales of 60-70,000 by 1878, it marked beginning of a diet discourse in U.S. that was gendered: “Banting explicitly addressed men. His repeated recommendations for rowing, smoking, and ample use of alcohol put his advice out of the reach of most women of the time. Banting suggested a high-protein diet that promoted lean meat, which then as now was associated with masculinity and virility” (Vester, 42). It was also aimed at the striving middle-class, not the rich; in U.S., dieting “now often referred to as ‘banting,’ was generally interpreted as a positive sign of healthy ambition. . . . Banting and other early diets offered the middle-class male body a specific niche: visibly affluent and physically comfortable, it was a canvas for the display of restraint through dieting” (43). In women’s magazines “There were no suggestions made that the female body itself can be altered, which stands in stark contrast to the body management expected from men. . . . Medical experts commonly stated instead that plumpness was beneficial for pregnancy and childbirth. . . . If doctors urged women to watch their weight in the second half of the 19th century, it was to put on more pounds, not to shed them” (48). . . . Not fashion and not medical experts, but early women’s rights activists were the original voices urging women to use a healthy diet and physical exercise to grow strong” (49). . . . This ‘natural’ [uncorseted] body remained a marginalized beauty ideal through the 70s and early 80s, explicitly associated with strength, health, and the drive for female independence, an ideal that gained more adherents as the suffrage movement gathered momentum in the 1890s, when middle-class women started to make fashionable dress reform and the slender female body” (50). . . . In the 1890s slenderness and mental activity were firmly associated. Overweight was increasingly thought to be a sign of laziness, passivity, and slow wits, all of which were frowned upon by women’s rights activists and increasingly by society in general” (51). . . . [By early 20th century] Female slenderness started to be induced with more conservative messages, such as that women who wish to slim down should do more domestic work (instead of sports or work outside the home). . . . middle-class women were encouraged to seek fulfillment and slenderness in homemaking as an appropriate activity for the new woman. In this context overweight was interpreted as a sign that women were lazy and ‘bad’ homemakers” (55).. . . [By the 1920s] dieting became a widely popular practice among the while middle class. By this time most of the tropes that are connected today with dieting were firmly in place and dieting a widely accepted practice for women” (56).